Portrait of an artist

Chaim Soutine was, by all accounts, dishevelled, sociophobic and a bit mad. Mark Hudson looks at the life of an artist who, for all his faults, made an indelible mark on 20th century art

It’s hard to imagine two more divergent artistic personalities. Amedeo Modigliani, born into a cultured Sephardic Jewish family in Livorno, Italy, was tall, urbane and something of a dandy. Chaim Soutine, who hailed from an obscure Ashkenazi background in what is today Belarus, was short, scruffy – or as most accounts have it “dirty” – and so socio-phobic he often didn’t turn up to his own exhibition openings, when he was lucky enough to have them.

Yet the two artists formed an intense bond, working side by side, often from the same model, and by all accounts, sharing the same room in La Ruche, a crowded studio complex in Montparnasse, the area of southern Paris that was then – the mid-1910s – the destination for forward-looking artists from all over the world. And this odd couple of art had more in common than first meets the eye. Both were, as close observers noted, highly anxious and “excessively proud”, and they were both already afflicted with the ailments that would contribute to their premature deaths.

“Modigliani and Soutine formed an intense bond, working side by side, often from the same model, and by all accounts, sharing the same room in La Ruche”

Modigliani and Soutine were key figures in the so-called School of Paris, that loose agglomeration of mostly émigré artists that played such a pivotal role in the development of Modernist painting. And both were clear contenders for the notional title of most tragic artist of the 20th century.

Yet while Soutine, ten years younger than Modigliani, might be taken for the junior partner in their relationship, Soutine's reputation has only increased in recent years.

Soutine’s turbulent landscapes with their delirious, undulating rhythms, and his starkly revealing portraits of hotel workers, are regarded as key works in the development of Expressionism. And they feel all the more significant for showing no obvious connection or debt to any other artist or movement.

Yet Soutine left no written statements about his art. Everything we know of his aims and intentions, and indeed his personality, is from third-hand sources, which are often contradictory. And he was such a perfectionist – or so neurotic – that he went to great lengths to destroy large amounts of his own work, making the chronological understanding of his art extremely difficult. From the period of his involvement with Modigliani, for example, there are numerous works by the Italian artist – including two portraits of Soutine himself – but barely a handful by Soutine.

“Soutine was such a perfectionist...that he went to great lengths to destroy large amounts of his own work”

In October, Bonhams is offering an extremely rare early Soutine portrait in its 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale in London. It is one of the few in which he depicted a named individual, indeed a friend, rather than a type, as in his hotel worker portraits. It’s a work that inevitably plays a significant role in understanding the early development of this vitally important artist. It was painted only three years after Soutine’s arrival in Paris, right in the middle of his relationship with Modigliani.

Born in 1893, in the small town of Smilavichy, then in the Russian Empire, a place he later described as a filthy, cultureless “hole”, Soutine left to study at an academy of art in the regional cultural hub, the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, before decamping to the global art capital Paris, aged 19. Arriving at Gare de l’Est penniless and speaking barely a word of French, Soutine slept in stairwells and on benches, yet managed to gain a place at the prestigious École des Beaux Arts, where he was soon at loggerheads with his hidebound professors.

Soutine preferred to spend his days in the Louvre, developing a lifelong obsession with Rembrandt, before whose works he was beset by a mixture of ecstasy and “respectful fear”. After living effectively down and out, Soutine got a studio in La Ruche, dubbed “the beehive” because of its cylindrical structure and atmosphere of intense, buzzing industry. With other inhabitants, including fellow Russian Empire émigrés Marc Chagall, Alexander Archipenko and Ossip Zadkine, the great Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and even a few stray Brits – Jacob Epstein and Nina Hamnet – Soutine couldn’t have been closer to the cutting-edge spirit of the time, though like all these artists he was often freezing and hungry.

It isn’t known how the shy Soutine became so closely involved with Modigliani, the most commanding and charismatic figure in this hothouse milieu, but the artist Pinchus Kremegne described finding the pair lying on the floor of their shared living space, with Modigliani, significantly, immersed in Dante, while Soutine perused Le Petit Parisien, France’s equivalent of the Daily Mail.

“Soutine couldn’t have been closer to the cutting-edge spirit of the time”

It’s quite hard to get the measure of Soutine from contemporary accounts, to know whether he was the tongue-tied wallflower, who “kept himself hidden in a corner like a frightened animal”, but was “consistently kind and gentle”, as some remember him, or the belligerent, borderline sociopath, he clearly appeared to others. Yet it’s significant that it was Modigliani, the more worldly and apparently assured of the two, who sought to transform his own self-image, from the conventional portrait painter of his early career into the romantic revolutionary of popular legend, with the assistance of hashish and absinthe. Soutine, on the other hand, was remarkably consistent, certainly in his eccentricity.

When Soutine managed to accumulate a few francs, he’d blow them on classical concerts, with Bach being a particular favourite. And he naturally saw not the slightest contradiction in a taste for the exquisite order of baroque music and the impulsive rawness his own painting. Embarking on a series of paintings inspired by Rembrandt’s majestic canvas The Flayed Ox in the Louvre, he didn’t ‘interpret’ Rembrandt's work, as an artist might do today, but procured an actual flayed ox from the local abattoir and hung it in his tiny studio. Seeing the blood seeping under Soutine’s door, Chagall ran through the corridors of La Ruche shouting, “Someone has killed Soutine!” Significantly, it didn’t seem to have occurred to him that Soutine might have killed himself. He clearly understood that the diminutive Belarusian was made of sterner stuff.

“Embarking on a painting inspired by Rembrandt’s The Flayed Ox, Soutine procured an actual flayed ox from the local abattoir and hung it in his tiny studio” 

Among the very few paintings attesting to Soutine’s creative processes in this pivotal period are two extraordinary portraits of the painter Achille Richard. A prominent figure in the “joys, balls, friendships, laughter and songs” that filled the studios and cafés of early 20th century Montparnasse (as his first wife later recalled), Richard was later driven to alcoholism and insanity by disappointment in the classic Bohemian manner. While Modigliani and Soutine both died ignominious deaths, posterity has elevated them to titanic status. Achille Richard barely registers as a footnote in the history of artistic Paris. Yet he has achieved a degree of immortality in these two portraits, painted only a few months apart in 1916, whose radically different approaches demonstrate the speed of Soutine’s development in this critical period.

The Portrait of Painter Richard X in the McMaster Museum of Art in Ontario, generally assumed to be the earlier of the two, combines a degree of elongated stylisation redolent of classic Modigliani – very evident in the serene oval of the head – with a richness of colour and texture that bring to mind the even more potent figure of Vincent Van Gogh. Richard’s watchful blue eyes are set in warm flesh hues framed by rich gradations of russet and orange with freely sketched wallpaper patterns that make this one of the best of the many van Goghesque portraits produced by early 20th century expressionist painters.

The foxily pointed features and receding chin link this work immediately to the painting in Bonhams forthcoming 20th/21st Century Art sale. The Portrait d'homme, is a more sombre, and more mature work that appears clearly indebted to Cézanne: an influence that has been filtered through the presence of Modigliani and come out the other side. Where Modigliani drew on the more classical aspects of Cézanne to often decorative effect, Soutine’s painting brings to mind the late portraits that were such a vital prompting for Cubism. Strong angles create a sense of severe verticality, with the jutting form of the table of offsetting the foreshortened triangle of the subject’s head in which the narrow eyes – little more than black slits, form the principal focus of the painting.

“The Portrait d'homme, is a more sombre, and more mature work that appears clearly indebted to Cézanne”

If the work appears at a glance monochrome with its large areas of grey and black, it actually pulsates with colour; not just the orange-red of the table, but the touches of pink, yellow and deep green that suffuse the warm, puttylike greys of the face and background. As with those Cézanne portraits there’s a textural continuity between subject and background, as though painted space has as much presence and volume as the objects it surrounds. Yet this broadly cubistic idea emerges from intense Cézanne-inspired looking rather than a nod towards a then fashionable style. The subject/object himself, meanwhile, sits with his upturned pipe poised in mid-air, held by the artist’s gaze, as though uncertain of his next move, already established in our minds as a tragic figure. 

In 1918 as the First World War approached its climax, Modigliani’s dealer Leopold Zborowski, who had also been persuaded to take on Soutine, ordered the pair to accompany him to the south of France, to avoid a possible German bombardment of Paris. Modigliani settled temporarily in Nice, while Soutine spent periods in Cagnes and Vence, two communities closely linked to art, before moving to Céret, a small Catalan Town in the eastern Pyrenees, that has become closely associated with the most powerful phases of his art. Those wild landscapes and his monumental series of hotel portraits both began there. Modigliani returned to Paris in 1919, and Soutine was devastated to learn of his friend's death the following year, from tuberculosis, exacerbated by drug and alcohol abuse, aged only 35. Having experimented with hashish and absinthe in imitation of Modigliani, Soutine immediately cut out all artificial stimulants – for the time being at least.

Yet his life was no more stable as he shifted continuously between addresses in Paris and the Midi. On receiving his first significant payment, when the American collector Albert C. Barnes bought 60 of his works in one go in 1923, Soutine went straight out into the Paris street and hailed a taxi to Nice, 400 miles away.

Céret, where the locals refer to Soutine as “el pintor brut” – the dirty painter – remained a place of inspiration, until he took a sudden dislike to the town and everything he had created there.

“On receiving his first significant payment...he went straight out into the Paris street and hailed a taxi to Nice, 400 miles away”

Soutine died as he had lived, on the run, aged 50 in 1943, seeking treatment for stomach ulcers that had plagued him for decades, while trying to evade the Gestapo.

That innate restlessness didn’t make life easy for him or those who cared him. Yet it’s that near-pathological aversion to stability, on which many of his contemporaries remarked, that we’re seeing flashes of his internal reality seized in the unrepeatable moment, with no concessions to anyone else’s tastes or standards, that makes Soutine’s art unarguably great.

Mark Hudson is Art Critic of The Independent.

20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale | 10 October, London, New Bond Street

For enquiries, contact Ruth Woodbridge on ruth.woodbridge@bonhams.com or +44 (0) 20 7468 5816.