.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming third volume of the Chaïm Soutine catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow.
The present painting dates to the latter part of the 1920s, a decade of tremendous professional growth for Soutine. In 1922, the wealthy American industrialist Albert Barnes, who had already amassed an important collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, was struck by a portrait by Soutine that was hanging in the Paris gallery of Paul Guillaume. Guillaume took Barnes to visit Soutine's dealer Leopold Zborowski, who sold him all the paintings by the artist that he had on hand--a total of fifty-two canvases. Barnes's discovery of Soutine brought the previously impoverished artist both financial security and international recognition.
Over the course of this period, Soutine developed a singular approach to portraiture that remained consistent throughout his career. With few exceptions, he depicted single figures, usually seated, either half- or three-quarter-length; they are presented close-up against a bare background, centered within the pictorial field. Their poses are self-contained, their hands usually resting in the lap or placed on the hips, and they face front, commanding the viewer's attention but seemingly indifferent to the presence of the artist. Within this more or less identical format, it is the distortions and exaggerations of facial features and the shiftings and dislocations of body parts that communicate the particularity of the sitter. Due to the intensity of the relationship that Soutine felt in the presence of his portrait subjects, he rarely painted his friends, or indeed himself, opting instead for models whom he did not know. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, and Klaus Perls have written, "Soutine generally chose anonymous figures as models. But as much as his characters may become types, they never give up their identities as particular people. Soutine's insistence on the physical particularity of his subject, together with this move towards more anonymous sitters, demonstrates his resistance to completely losing himself in the subjective aspects of the portrait experience. The resistance to a complete union between painter and model is also felt in the way Soutine's figures ‘pose' before him and us, open to our penetrating scrutiny, but somehow indifferent to the artist's presence. With the live model staring back at him throughout the painting session... Soutine may have felt it necessary to defuse their scrutiny of him, or what he felt to be such, by painting them as indifferent to him. It is the tension between their seeming detachment, on the one hand, and an awareness of Soutine's personal involvement with them, on the other, that heightens the expressive charge of these figures" (Chaïm Soutine, Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1993, vol. II, pp. 509-510).
The present painting dates to the latter part of the 1920s, a decade of tremendous professional growth for Soutine. In 1922, the wealthy American industrialist Albert Barnes, who had already amassed an important collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, was struck by a portrait by Soutine that was hanging in the Paris gallery of Paul Guillaume. Guillaume took Barnes to visit Soutine's dealer Leopold Zborowski, who sold him all the paintings by the artist that he had on hand--a total of fifty-two canvases. Barnes's discovery of Soutine brought the previously impoverished artist both financial security and international recognition.
Over the course of this period, Soutine developed a singular approach to portraiture that remained consistent throughout his career. With few exceptions, he depicted single figures, usually seated, either half- or three-quarter-length; they are presented close-up against a bare background, centered within the pictorial field. Their poses are self-contained, their hands usually resting in the lap or placed on the hips, and they face front, commanding the viewer's attention but seemingly indifferent to the presence of the artist. Within this more or less identical format, it is the distortions and exaggerations of facial features and the shiftings and dislocations of body parts that communicate the particularity of the sitter. Due to the intensity of the relationship that Soutine felt in the presence of his portrait subjects, he rarely painted his friends, or indeed himself, opting instead for models whom he did not know. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, and Klaus Perls have written, "Soutine generally chose anonymous figures as models. But as much as his characters may become types, they never give up their identities as particular people. Soutine's insistence on the physical particularity of his subject, together with this move towards more anonymous sitters, demonstrates his resistance to completely losing himself in the subjective aspects of the portrait experience. The resistance to a complete union between painter and model is also felt in the way Soutine's figures ‘pose' before him and us, open to our penetrating scrutiny, but somehow indifferent to the artist's presence. With the live model staring back at him throughout the painting session... Soutine may have felt it necessary to defuse their scrutiny of him, or what he felt to be such, by painting them as indifferent to him. It is the tension between their seeming detachment, on the one hand, and an awareness of Soutine's personal involvement with them, on the other, that heightens the expressive charge of these figures" (Chaïm Soutine, Catalogue raisonné, Cologne, 1993, vol. II, pp. 509-510).