Soutine, Chaim

born 1893/94?, Smilovichi, near Minsk, Russian Empire

died Aug. 9, 1943, Paris, Fr.

Russian-born French painter.

After studying art in Vilnius, he went to Paris in 1913 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. An art dealer enabled him to paint for three years in southern France, where his mature style emerged. His highly individualistic style, stimulated by Expressionism, is characterized by thick impasto, agitated brushwork, convulsive compositional rhythms, and disturbing psychological content. Best known are his studies of choirboys and cooks, his series of page boys, and his paintings of hung poultry and beef carcasses, which vividly convey the colour and luminosity of putrescence.

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▪ French artist

born 1893/94?, Smilovichi, near Minsk, Russian Empire [now in Belarus]

died Aug. 9, 1943, Paris, Fr.

      Russian-born French painter whose highly individualistic style, characterized by the use of thick impasto, agitated brushwork, convulsive compositional rhythms, and the presence of disturbing psychological content, is closely related to early 20th-century Expressionism.

      Soutine was born the 10th child of a poor Jewish tailor in Belorussia. At age 16 he went to Vilna (now Vilnius) in Lithuania, where a friendly doctor helped him attend the school of fine arts for three years. In 1913 he emigrated to Paris, where he met Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, and Jacques Lipchitz, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts. Modigliani introduced Soutine to the art dealer Leopold Zborowski, who enabled him to spend three years (1919–22) painting at Céret in the south of France. The feverish, visionary landscapes Soutine painted there marked the emergence of his mature style. Soutine spent most of the remainder of his life in Paris. He exhibited little during his lifetime and relentlessly reworked or destroyed old canvases, but his paintings nevertheless found their way into French and American private collections and museums. Soutine died in France in 1943 during the wartime German occupation.

      Soutine is most popularly associated with his studies of choirboys and cooks and his series of pageboys (e.g., “Page Boy at Maxim's,” 1927; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). Also well known are his paintings of hung poultry and carcasses of beef, which convey the colour and luminosity of putrescence. He obtained these effects by painting in as many as 40 different hues with as many brushes.

      Soutine's portraits from the 1920s, distinguished by their subjects' twisted faces and distorted limbs and by the emphasis in each canvas on one brilliant colour, frequently red, are among his most expressive works.

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