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Provenance: Léopold Zborowski, Paris.
Jonas Netter, Paris, by whom acquired from the above circa 1925, and thence by descent to the present owner.

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Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Beaux-Arts, Les expositions de 'Beaux-Arts' et de 'La Gazette des Beaux-Arts'. Peintres instinctifs. Naissance de l'expressionnisme, December 1935 - January 1936, no. 147.
Iwate, Modigliani et ses amis chez Zborowski, December 1993 - June 1994, no. 59; this exhibition later travelled to Nigata, Mitsukoshi Museum; Gumma, Ota Museum; Osaka, Navio Museum; Kashiwa, Takashimaya Museum and Hiroshima, Fukuyama Museum.
Lausanne, Fondation de l'Hermitage, Les peintres de Zborowski: Modigliani, Utrillo, Soutine et leurs amis, June - October 1994, no. 40 (illustrated); this exhibition later travelled to Florence, Palazzo Vecchio, November 1994 - March 1995, no. 25.
Chiba, Kawamura Memorial Museum, Modigliani et son époque, Paris 1910-20, April - May 1997, no. 12 (illustrated p. 47); this exhibition later travelled to Osaka, Kintetsu Museum of Art, June 1997; Yamagata, Museum of Art, July - August 1997; Niigata, Municipal Museum of Art, September - October 1997; Miyazaki, Prefectural Museum of Art, November - December 1997; Kitakyushu, Municipal Museum of Art, December 1997 - January 1998 and Tokyo, Daimaru Museum of Art, January - February 1998.

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Literature: P. Courthion, Soutine, peintre du déchirant, Lausanne, 1972, p. 259 (illustrated fig. H, dated '1926-1927').
M. Tuchman, 'What is a Catalogue Raisonné', in Art International, vol. 18, Zurich, 20 January 1974, p. 12.
M. Tuchman, E. Dunow & K. Perls, Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943), catalogue raisonné, vol. II, Cologne, 1993, no. 13, p. 540 (illustrated p. 541).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A EUROPEAN PRIVATE COLLECTOR
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Gaunt and staring from the canvas, we are confronted with the intense visage of Chaïm Soutine. Painted circa 1917, Autoportrait à la barbe is one of only three self-portraits by Chaïm Soutine listed in Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls' catalogue raisonné. A fourth, which they did not include, entitled Grotesque, is in the collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. While Courthion ascribed a date of 1926-27 to Autoportrait à la barbe, Soutine's own abandonment of the self-portrait genre and his thinness in this picture both point to Tuchman and Dunow being correct.

Soutine had a fear of exposure; he would often take pleasure in tracking down and destroying his own paintings. He hated exhibitions, making the inclusion of this self-portrait in one of his lifetime shows all the more impressive. And this dislike of exposure extended to the artist himself. His own likeness was captured in a small number of pictures by the artists around him primarily during his years living in La Ruche and the Cité Falguière, such as Michel Kikoïne, Maria Marevna, Kostia Terechkovich and of course Amedeo Modigliani, who painted him several times. Autoportrait à la barbe is thus a rarity both in terms of Soutine's self-portraiture and, indeed, his portraiture, all the more so as many of the other pictures are in museum collections.

All three of Soutine's searing self-portraits date from early in his career; in each, he has adopted a different manner of presenting himself. In one, he shows himself in three-quarters, standing defiantly; in the second, owned by the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation and on loan to Princeton University's Art Museum, he is captured in the act of painting. In Autoportrait à la barbe, he appears as though in a tondo or even a convex mirror, perhaps recalling the self-portrait roundel in the Louvre by Jean Fouquet, an artist Soutine greatly admired. It was during the early years in Paris, up to and including the First World War, that Soutine spent a great amount of his time in the Louvre, revering his artistic predecessors. The paintings of the Old Masters fascinated him, be it in the sombre tones that he adopted for the background of his earlier works or in the painterly quality that some of his favourite artists such as Rembrandt brought to their works. In Autoportrait à la barbe, Soutine appears to have paid respects to the Old Masters in terms of its unusual composition, and yet the ferocious paintwork is very much his own. The picture, and especially the face, proudly bares the traces of the artist's own movements; the thick paint, prefiguring the swirling oils of his Céret and Cagnes landscapes, brings to life a sense of the organic, pulsing flesh of the head.