Soutine, Chaim (1893-1943) - The Bellboy c.1928

Artwork by Belarusian-French artist, Chaïm Soutine.

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Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) was a French painter of Belarusian-Jewish origin of the School of Paris, who made a major contribution to the Expressionist movement while living and working in Paris.

Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Soutine developed an individual style more concerned with shape, colour and texture than representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism.

For a time, he and his friends lived at La Ruche, a residence for struggling artists in Montparnasse in Paris. Since 1900, the Montparnasse district, popularised by Apollinaire, had supplanted Montmartre as the epicentre of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. It was the meeting place of writers, painters, sculptors, and actors, often struggling financially, who exchanged and created art and literature whilst sitting and chatting in cafes.

It was here that Soutine met Modigliani, who painted Soutine's portrait several times, most famously in 1917, on a door of an apartment belonging to Léopold Zborowski, who was their art dealer. Until he acquired his own studio, he slept and worked at various places, his poverty was such that he even slept in stairways and on benches.

Zborowski supported Soutine through World War I, taking the struggling artist with him to Nice to escape the possible German invasion of Paris.

After the war, Paul Guillaume, a highly influential art dealer, began to champion Soutine's work. In 1923, in a showing arranged by Guillaume, the prominent American collector Albert C. Barnes, bought 60 of Soutine's paintings on the spot. Soutine, who had been virtually penniless in his years in Paris, immediately took the money, ran into the street, hailed a Paris taxi, and ordered the driver to take him to Nice, on the French Riviera, more than 400 miles away.

Soutine lived for several years in Le Midi, initially between Vence and Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he was nicknamed by the locals "el pintre brut" ("the dirty painter"), due to his miserable living conditions on allowances from Zborowski.

Soutine once horrified his neighbours by keeping an animal carcass in his studio so that he could paint it (Carcass of Beef). The stench drove them to send for the police, whom Soutine promptly lectured on the relative importance of art over hygiene. There is a story that Marc Chagall saw the blood from the carcass leak out onto the corridor outside Soutine's room, and rushed out screaming, "Someone has killed Soutine." Soutine painted 10 works in this series, which have since become his most well-known. His carcass paintings such as The Flayed Ox were inspired by Rembrandt's still life of the same subject, Slaughtered Ox, which he discovered while studying the Old Masters in the Louvre.

He seldom showed his works, but he did take part in the important exhibition The Origins and Development of International Independent Art held at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1937 in Paris, where he was at last hailed as a great painter.

Soon afterwards France was invaded by German troops. As a Jew, Soutine had to escape from the French capital and hide to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. From the beginning of 1941, he moved from one place to another and was sometimes forced to seek shelter in forests, sleeping outdoors. Leaving his companion Marie-Berthe Aurenche's home on Littré Street, he sought refuge on Rue des Plants, where she had friends, the painter Marcel Laloë and his wife. Fearing denunciation by their caretaker, they later assisted in the couple's escape, with fake documents, to a village in Indre-et-Loire, Champigny-sur-Veude. Expelled from several inns where their untidiness or Marie-Berthe's outbursts were criticised, the couple eventually found a house for rent on the way to Chinon, where friends discreetly visited them.

There, despite intense stomach pains that soon forced him to subsist solely on porridge, the painter resumed his work, supplied with canvases and colours by the painter Marcel Laloë. The landscapes from the years 1941-1942 seem to have abandoned warm tones, such as the Landscape of Champigny. The Big Tree painted in Richelieu strained Soutine's relationship with the Castaings as he reduced the canvas size before delivering it to them. However, he also tackled new and lighter subjects like The Pigs or The Return from School after the Storm. He also created portraits of children and more serene maternity scenes.

Suffering from a stomach ulcer and bleeding badly, Soutine left a safe hiding place for Paris for emergency surgery, which failed to save his life. On 9 August 1943, he died of a perforated ulcer. He was interred in Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.