Russian-born French artist Chaim Soutine was known for his highly. His work is closely related to early 20th-century Expressionism. Biographies Russian Artists 20th Century Modern . Chaim Soutine is a contradictory. TOP ARTISTS / ARTIST A-Z / Chaim Soutine. Russian-born Jews of the early 20th century were treated with. Portrait of Madeleine Castaing by Chaim. Portrait of Madeleine Castaing (1928). Soutine - 20th Century Expressionist. Chaim Soutine's expressionist landscapes Chaim Soutine was born in 1893 and. Chaim Soutine, (January 13, 1893. Artist - Chaim Soutine. THE PRODIGIOUS CENTURY: Soutine, Chaim - Expressionism. Chaim Soutine Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works. Chaim Soutine is an Expressionist artist that lived and worked in Paris at the height of the modern era. In the artistic style known as expressionism, the artist. 20th Century Expressionist Artist. Despite dominant trends toward abstraction, Soutine maintained a firm connection to recognizable subject matter. His innovation was in the way he chose to represent his subjects: with a thick impasto of paint covering the surface of the canvas, the palette, visible brushwork, and forms translated the artist's inner torment. As an expatriate Russian Jew living within Paris, with few friends beyond fellow artist Amedeo Modigliani, Soutine interpreted common themes with the eye of an outsider, further enhancing his unique perspective regarding his human subjects, landscapes, and still lifes and lending them a particular vanitas and poignancy. A prototypical wild artist, Soutine's temper and depression are both well documented and were poured into the paint he layered on the canvas. Soutine's body of work transcends the movements that dominated the avant- garde during his lifetime, expressing a clear personal and artistic vision that both looks back at historic themes as well as toward future modernist styles. Soutine looked to established masters like Rembrandt van Rijn and Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin for inspiration, often referencing subject matter from their paintings in his own work. However, although many of his paintings contain clear references to historic works, Soutine reinterpreted each theme, imbuing it with a drama and tension derived from his own complex emotions not present in the older work. A preoccupation with food dominates Soutine's vivid still lifes, with the focus placed on the bodies of animals used for food. The artist's complex relationship to food, with its prominent place in Jewish ritual as well as its scarcity in his youth and early career, lends the common vanitas theme a deeper, more personal meaning. Although labeled within art history as an Expressionist, Soutine's subjects and paintings are far from the typical urban angst commonly portrayed by German Expressionists. Instead, his unique mode of conveying his inner psyche through the manipulation of paint set a precedent that would reappear with the mid- twentieth century Abstract Expressionists. Soutine's early experience of religious persecution had a large influence throughout his life, on both his personality and his art. His personal experience of discrimination provided the fuel for his expressive rendering of common objects and themes. He filtered his angst into his brushstrokes and, practicing painting as an act of devotion, he provided many later Jewish artists with an early twentieth- century role model. Chaim Soutine was born and raised in the small Jewish settlement of Smilavichy, near Minsk, in what is present- day Belarus. The tenth of 1. 1 children, his father was a tailor and Soutine was raised under extremely modest means. His upbringing was fairly typical of Russian- born Jews during this era, who were forced to endure persecution and discrimination from a hostile government. Soutine's interest in drawing incurred opposition within his Orthodox family and the small community because of Talmudic proscriptions regarding images. According to an oft- recounted story, young Soutine was beaten in punishment after presenting a portrait to a rabbi. The suffering he experienced within the Jewish ghetto of his youth is believed to have worked its way into his later canvases. At age 1. 6, Soutine traveled to Minsk and, from 1. Vilna Academy of Fine Arts (in what is now the town of Vilnius), one of the few academies of its kind that accepted Jews. While enrolled, Soutine was exposed to artists from the Russian avant- garde as well as older Russian masters like renowned seascape painter Ivan Aivazovsky and landscape artist Fyodor Alekseev. Soutine excelled at drawing and painting during his early tutelage, yet instructors noted the young artist's penchant for tragedy and visually dark subject matter.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Early Training. Following his training at Vilna, at age 1. Soutine traveled to Paris with fellow students Pinchus Kremegne and Marcel Kikoine and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, working for two years in the studio of Fernand Cormon, a highly respected historical painter. He also began making frequent visits to the Louvre and conducted close studies of works by the likes of Francisco Goya, El Greco, Jacopo Tintoretto, Jean- Auguste Dominique Ingres, and Gustave Courbet. The paintings of Rembrandt van Rijn, however, made a distinct impact on the young Soutine, who came to adore the master's portraiture, still lifes, and dramatic use of light. Later in life, Soutine reportedly made several trips by train to Amsterdam and slept on a park bench outside of the Rijksmuseum, just for the chance to spend more time with the museum's Rembrandt collection. In 1. 91. 5, while living in La Ruche - literally . Soutine was quite shy, both with women and in general, and had an intense and temperamental manner that further complicated socializing and establishing a career. His newfound friendship with Modigliani, however, helped assuage these difficulties, as Soutine stated, . Modigliani and Soutine's friendship was also commemorated by a series of portraits the artists made of one another in 1. Mature Period. Soutine chose to eschew the dominant early twentieth- century avant- garde trends of Cubism, Dada, and Futurism in favor of a more traditional approach, honing his skills as a portraitist and painter of still lifes. Food in particular was a constant obsession in his work, which likely stemmed from its central role in Jewish ritual. Early examples of this interest include Still Life with Tureen (1. Still Life with Herrings (1. Flayed Rabbit (1. In his repeated use of beef, poultry, fish, and other animal carcasses as subject matter over the course of several decades, one can surmise that Soutine also held an obsessive interest in death. As World War I drew to a close, Soutine returned to Paris with the financial support of Zborowski, following three years of living in the provinces. He began to create a great number of portraits of local townspeople and service laborers like cooks, maids, and boot polishers, most of whom he met randomly. While in Ceret in the French Pyrenees and in Cagnes during the early 1. Soutine devoted himself to the creation of dramatically expressionist landscapes and natural scenes of the French peasantry, infusing the typically Impressionist and Post- Impressionist subject matter with his darkly pseudo- abstract approach that reflected his continued angst and sorrow regardless of his surroudings. The 1. 92. 0s were Soutine's most productive years and, consequently, the most lucrative time of his career. In 1. 92. 3, while Soutine's works were exhibited at the gallery of art dealer Paul Guillame, American collector Albert C. Barnes was quite taken with one of Soutine's portraits of a pastry cook. Guillame privately showed him more of Soutine's work, the bulk of which the collector promptly purchased. Barnes' patronage raised the price for all of Soutine's work and allowed him to live in financial stability for the rest of his career. His first dealer and patron, Zborowski, died in 1. Soutine received generous support from the wealthy French collectors Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, who welcomed Soutine to stay at their summer home in Leves from 1. During the 1. 93. Soutine participated in a number of well- received exhibitions, including a solo show in Chicago and group exhibition entitled The Origins and Development of International Independent Art in Paris. Late Period and Death. On the eve of World War II, Soutine had been living with his companion and nurse- maid Gerda, a Jewish- German woman who fled to Paris in 1. Gerda was forcibly removed to a camp for German nationals in 1. Nazis neared France. At the loss of their stable relationship, Soutine was distraught. However, later that year Soutine became romantically involved with Max Ernst's former wife, Marie- Berthe Aurenche, who remained his muse and mistress until his death. With the Nazi invasion of Paris in the summer of 1. Soutine was eventually forced to flee his apartment in Paris for fear of being captured by the Gestapo. The years that followed were Soutine's darkest, as he was forced from a safe house in Paris to villages in the Loire valley, moving from place to place with forged passports. The stress of living like a hunted man aggravated Soutine's ulcers. He was rushed to a hospital in Chinon due to anemia and pain, but his condition required an emergency surgery in Paris. The travel and operation took over 2. Soutine died of a perforated ulcer on August 9, 1. Legacy. Despite being the lone Expressionist in Paris amidst the Cubists and Dadaists, Soutine secured a stable career for himself and paved the way for later avant- gardes. His work represents an important precursor to action painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially his animal carcass paintings, which he painted with great rapidity, and his landscapes, which reflect the all- over compositions and gestural brushwork adopted by later artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Recent exhibitions have demonstrated the direct influence Soutine's meat still lifes had on Francis Bacon, evidenced by the presence of sides of beef in several works by the British artist. Similarly, the thick impasto of Soutine's canvases and his dramatically simplified rendering of human subjects show a clear link to the Art Brut work of Jean Dubuffet.
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