Chaïm Soutine

Chaïm Soutine (1894-1943), Russian-born French Expressionist painter, born in Smilovichi near Minsk, Belarus. He emigrated to Paris in 1913 and soon developed his highly personal vision and technique. Most of his work, done between 1920 and 1929, is characterized by violent distortions that reflect his struggle to reveal the inner nature of his subjects. He sacrificed careful composition and good drawing to feverish intensity, employing thick pigment in vivid, often deliberately ugly colours. His works include pitiless psychological portraits of bakers, valets, and choirboys (e.g. Pastry Cook, 1922, Louvre, Paris); still lifes of sides of meat in various stages of putrefaction (e.g. Carcass of Beef, c. 1925, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York State); and tormented landscapes with scudding clouds and bending trees (e.g. Sinister Street, c. 1921, Kunstmuseum, Lucerne). He often reworked or destroyed his earlier paintings, and he produced little new work after 1930.