Described by the great American art critic Clement Greenberg as “one of the most painterly of painters,”[1] Chaïm Soutine remains a towering but enigmatic figure of modern European art. Soutine moved to Paris in 1913, and although his beginnings as an artist were marked by loneliness and hardship, he also spent many hours at the Louvre studying the great masters, particularly Rembrandt.

At the outbreak of World War I, Soutine befriended the painter Amadeo Modigliani, who introduced him to his dealer, Léopold Zborowski. The latter supported Soutine with money and advice, and in 1918 he took Soutine, Modigliani and Tsuguharu Foujita to the South of France to escape the German bombing of Paris. This was Soutine’s first sojourn outside Paris, and it was here that he began painting landscapes. In the South and during the ensuing years at Céret, in the French Pyrenees, Soutine made great breakthroughs—the Céret landscapes of 1919 to 1922 are often considered the most advanced of his entire career.

Soutine remained a little-known artist until 1922, when his work was “discovered” by the great American collector Albert C. Barnes, who was seeking acquisitions for his art collection (now the world-renowned Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia). Barnes spotted a single portrait by Soutine hanging in dealer Paul Guillaume’s gallery and demanded to see more works by the artist. He was taken to Zborowski’s apartment, where he purchased the dealer’s entire inventory of Soutines, 52 works in total. Word of Barnes’s “discovery” spread across Paris and then internationally. Within a few years, Soutine’s reputation had skyrocketed.

Soutine’s work is most often associated with Expressionism, but unlike German Expressionism, as Esti Dunow said: “Soutine’s art is rooted in his individual response to a particular piece of nature; it has no overt or intended social, political, or psychological overtones. While German Expressionists’ art is cerebral, concerned with ideas and states of mind, Soutine’s is physical and tangible.”[2] Soutine’s early landscapes are prized for their intense emotionalism: free of formal or structural constraints, they offer a pure, unvarnished reflection of the artist’s turbulent inner world. Soutine often worked in a frenzy, using 40 colours and as many brushes at the same time. Today the deeply expressive brush-strokes of his Céret period are seen as a precursor to American Abstract Expressionism.

Paysage du midi demonstrates many of the tendencies Soutine developed further at Céret, revealing the influence of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh. The undulating rhythms of the billowing trees create the effect of a landscape in perpetual motion, while the Provençal houses stacked on the hillside are compressed into luminous planes of colour that push into the foreground, flattening the composition but at the same time creating a sense of upheaval. In the words of David Sylvester:

There is the uptilting of foreground horizontal planes and the pulling-forward of the middle and far distance towards the picture-plane so that the contents of the scene are closely, densely, unnaturally packed together.… There is the counterpoint between movement into the picture, which is almost immediately checked and curtailed, and the sustained movement across the surface of the canvas.

The scene appears to shift before our eyes, “and we realize, with a sort of transport, how intuitively true this is of landscape. It is not still. It has its own weird anima, and to our wide-eyed perception it changes like a living animal under our gaze.”[3]

This painting will be included in the forthcoming volume 3 of the Chaïm Soutine catalogue raisonné, now in preparation by Esti Dunow.

1. Quoted in “Introduction: Reading Soutine, Retrospectively,” in An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth Silver (New York: Jewish Museum, 1998), exhibition catalogue, 13.

2. Quoted in Kenneth E. Silver, “Where Soutine Belongs: His Art and Critical Reception Between the Wars,” in ibid., 27.

3. David Sylvester, “The Mysteries of Nature within the Mysteries of Paint,” in C. Soutine, 1893–1943, ed. Ernst-Gerhard Güse (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1982), exhibition catalogue, 37–38.