Chaim Soutine: The Complete Story
Chaim Soutine was the School of Paris painter who hung a side of beef in his studio and painted it as it rotted. Born near Minsk in 1893, he slept rough in Paris until one American collector bought around fifty of his paintings in a single visit.
His surfaces churn like weather. Here is the life that put the fury in the paint.
Chaim Soutine at a glance
1893. Born in Smilavichy, near Minsk, tenth of eleven children of a poor tailor.
1913. Arrived in Paris and moved into La Ruche, sharing bug ridden studios with Chagall and Modigliani.
1923. Albert Barnes bought around fifty of his canvases in one visit. Poverty ended overnight.
1930. Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing became his patrons and sheltered him at their house near Chartres.
1943. Died in occupied Paris after an emergency ulcer operation. Picasso walked in his small funeral procession.
Beaten for drawing
Soutine was the tenth of eleven children in a poor Jewish family in Smilavichy, a village near Minsk, where making images was forbidden at home.
As a teenager he was beaten so badly for sketching a portrait that the compensation money paid his way to art school in Vilnius in 1910.
By 1913 he was in Paris, in the beehive of studios called La Ruche, where Modigliani became his closest friend and painted his portrait more than once.
The day poverty ended
In the winter of 1922 to 1923 the American collector Albert Barnes saw his work, asked to see everything, and bought around fifty canvases at once. Soutine, who had gone hungry for a decade, reportedly flagged a taxi in Paris and had it drive him the 700 kilometres to the Riviera. Barnes hung him beside Cezanne and Matisse, and dealers who had ignored him began buying back what they could find.
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The carcass in the studio
Around 1925, with Rembrandt and his Flayed Ox of 1655 in mind, Soutine had a whole side of beef delivered to his Paris studio and painted it day after day as it decayed, sending for fresh blood to revive the colour when it dulled.
The neighbours called the authorities about the smell. The paintings that came out of that room are among the most intense in modern art.
Céret, and the paintings he destroyed
Between 1919 and 1922 Soutine painted around two hundred landscapes in Céret, in the French Pyrenees. Hills twist, houses lean, the ground seems to move.
He later turned on them. For years he hunted down Céret canvases, buying them back when he could, to slash or burn them.
The survivors are now among his most wanted works. He would have hated that.
Pastry cooks and page boys
In the 1920s Soutine painted the invisible staff of hotels and restaurants: pastry cooks, valets, bellboys, a whole series in uniform.
The Little Pastry Cook, with his huge red ear and crumpled whites, was one of the first paintings Barnes grabbed in 1923.
Nobody had given these workers full length portraits before. Soutine, who had been poor his whole life, did.
The house near Chartres
From 1930 the decorator Madeleine Castaing and her husband Marcellin gave Soutine what he never had: a room, meals, and steady buyers.
Summers at their house in Lèves produced some of his calmest work.
Madeleine kept buying until the end. Her Soutines later anchored the great retrospectives.
The myth: a wild man who could not help it
The legend paints Soutine as an instinctive primitive, painting in fits.
The record shows the opposite: he worked only from the thing in front of him, revered Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, and was his own harshest judge, hunting down and destroying the early canvases from Ceret he thought weak, sometimes buying them back just to slash them.
The wildness was a style. The discipline behind it was total.
Hunted
When the Nazis occupied France, Soutine, a Jew, fled Paris and hid in the countryside of the Loire, moving from village to village. A stomach ulcer, untreated for years, perforated.
Smuggled back to Paris for emergency surgery, he was operated on too late and died on 9 August 1943, aged 50. Among the few mourners who followed his coffin at Montparnasse was Picasso.
Where to see Soutine
The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia holds the largest group of his paintings anywhere, the harvest of that 1923 visit. In Paris, the Musee de l'Orangerie keeps some twenty Soutines from the Paul Guillaume collection, carcasses, choirboys and pastry cooks among them.
The Chaim Soutine questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Thick, convulsive paint, above all the beef carcass series of the mid 1920s.
Who discovered him? Albert Barnes, who bought around fifty canvases in one visit in the winter of 1922 to 1923.
How did he die? Of a perforated ulcer in 1943, after surgery delayed by his years in hiding.
What are his paintings worth? His carcass painting Le Boeuf sold for about 28 million dollars at Christie's in 2015.
Why did Soutine destroy his own paintings? He came to hate his Céret period and spent years buying back those canvases to slash or burn them. Dealers learned to hide them when he visited.
Did Soutine and Modigliani really share a studio? Yes, at La Ruche and later the Cité Falguière. Modigliani painted his portrait several times and talked Zborowski into representing him.
More secrets to unlock
Inside half of modern figure painting
The painters who came after claimed him loudest. Willem de Kooning named Soutine his favourite painter, and Francis Bacon built on his slaughterhouse reds. The man beaten for sketching a face in Smilavichy ended up inside half the figurative painting of the twentieth century.
