Down and out with Chaïm Soutine

By Joe Lloyd

Few artists shaped paint like Chaïm Soutine. His canvases – full of smears and splotches, lines and lacerations – seem to boil with motion. Pictures that appear to be uniformly coloured from a distance reveal themselves to be kaleidoscopic close up. And yet, though he is highly valued in France, Soutine has never been well-known in Britain. A new exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in London, of his remarkable portraits of cooks, butchers, waiters and bellboys, should change all that.

Soutine may have been interested in humble figures because he recognised himself in them. A Lithuanian Jew born in 1893 in what is now Belarus, he left for Paris in 1913 without a penny in his pocket and moved to Montparnasse, where he lived in penury for years. It was in the early 1920s that he became fascinated by the staff of Parisian hotels and restaurants. He painted his subjects over many gruelling sessions, giving most of them distorted features: elongated limbs, mismatched eyes and elephantine ears. At first glance these deformities might appear cruel or parodic but they were just Soutine’s way of drawing out his impressions of particular features that caught his eye.