Chaim Soutine
Painted carcasses, bellboys and landscapes that appear to be sliding off the canvas.
Chaim Soutine was born near Minsk in 1893, the tenth of eleven children in a poor Jewish family, and reached Paris in 1913, where he lived in the artists' colony at La Ruche alongside Modigliani, who became his closest friend and champion. The paintings are violently handled and thickly loaded: the landscapes at Ceret that lean and buckle, the portraits of pastry cooks and bellboys and choirboys, and the hanging carcasses of beef painted from an actual carcass he kept in the studio and refreshed with blood, to his neighbours' fury. A single American collector bought dozens of his works in 1923 and made his reputation overnight. He died in occupied France in 1943.
The paint is exceptionally thick and was often applied over insufficiently dry layers, so cracking, cupping and past consolidation are common and condition history matters more than usual. He also destroyed and reworked a great deal of his own work. Provenance for the 1933 to 1945 period requires proper examination, given his own circumstances and those of many early collectors. The catalogue raisonne is the reference. Few drawings survive, which is itself a useful fact when one is offered.
If you own a work by Chaim Soutine
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