Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine built his pictures from heavy, agitated paint: beef and ox carcasses inspired by Rembrandt, hanging fowl and rayfish, portraits of pastry cooks, bellboys and choirboys in vivid uniforms, and turbulent landscapes of Ceret and Cagnes. The work is intensely physical, and it placed him at the center of the expressionist current within the School of Paris.

He was born in 1893 in Smilavichy, near Minsk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, into a large and poor Jewish family (the exact day of his birth is uncertain). He studied drawing in Vilna before emigrating to Paris in 1913, where he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Fernand Cormon and settled at La Ruche, the artists' residence in Montparnasse. There he formed a close friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait and promoted his work, and found early support from the dealer Leopold Zborowski.

His fortunes changed in 1923, when the American collector Albert C. Barnes bought a large group of his paintings, more than fifty works, in a single stroke. The dealer Paul Guillaume also championed him in the same period. Soutine, who was Jewish, spent the Second World War moving in hiding in occupied France. He died in Paris on 9 August 1943 of a perforated ulcer, following emergency surgery, and is buried in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse.

Critical opinion treats Soutine as a major and uncompromising expressionist whose paint handling reshaped later art. He is repeatedly cited as a decisive precursor for the New York School, most directly Willem de Kooning, and as an influence on Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon. That lineage was the explicit thesis of the 2021 to 2022 Soutine / de Kooning exhibition organized jointly by the Barnes Foundation and the Musee de l'Orangerie. The standard scholarship comes from Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls, the authors of the catalogue raisonne, who also served as consulting curators on the 2018 Jewish Museum survey Flesh. The early critic Elie Faure was among his most prominent champions. The recurring theme in the literature is materiality and the body: the carcasses and the writhing portraits are read as paint pushed to the edge of dissolution rather than as conventional likeness, which is precisely why his pictures spoke so directly to the postwar generation.

Soutine's market is led by his carcass paintings and his strongest portraits. His auction high is Le Boeuf (about 1923), a beef-carcass painting that sold for USD 28,165,000 (with premium) at Christie's New York on 11 May 2015, in the curated evening sale Looking Forward to the Past. Earlier landmark results include Le petit patissier (1927), which sold for about USD 18 million at Christie's in 2013. The supply is finite and fully documented in the catalogue raisonne, so results turn heavily on subject and quality, and the headline figures concentrate in a small number of celebrated works.

Soutine is a closed, fully catalogued oeuvre, which gives the market a clarity that living-artist markets lack: there will be no new supply, and the catalogue raisonne by Tuchman, Dunow and Perls is the reference for attribution. Two institutions, the Musee de l'Orangerie and the Barnes Foundation, hold the deepest concentrations of his work, which thins the pool of museum-grade pictures that can ever come to market. Because so much value is concentrated in the carcasses and the finest single portraits, individual results can swing sharply on subject and condition rather than tracing a smooth line, and provenance research matters: Soutine was a Jewish artist whose lifetime overlapped the Nazi occupation, so wartime ownership history should be examined carefully on any work of the period.