Soutine, Chaim

(1894–1943)

   French painter. Soutine was a compulsive painter, driven to express his inner tensions in thick impasto paint and tormented forms. This urge seized him from earliest childhood, and in the most unlikely surroundings. He was the second last of eleven children born to a poor tailor in a little Lithuanian town. At the age of seven he was beaten and locked up for stealing a few coins in order to buy crayons. A few years later the rabbi’s son flogged him for daring to try and paint his father. His mother obtained twenty- five roubles as damages and used it to send Chaim to Minsk for art lessons. He eventually found his way to Paris with the help of a doctor who befriended him. It is not surprising that his eastern European childhood found no sentimental echo in his art as was the case with his contemporary, CHAGALL.

   In Paris, Soutine lived in desperate want, while feverishly painting the ordinary people and objects around him. For some while, he shared a garret with MODIGLIANI and they took turns to sleep in the single bed. A change in his fortune came when the American collector Barnes heard about him, visited his studio, and bought fifty paintings, now in the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pa. With the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, Soutine rejected a chance to go to America. Instead, he fled to a small French village and went on painting. The privation and insecurity brought on stomach ulcers and in 1943 he died after an operation in Paris. Soutine left over six hundred vivid and disturbing canvases now in all the world’s major museums.