+ Expand

Artist or Maker: Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943)

+ Expand

Provenance: Knoedler Galleries, Inc., New York.
Paul Wertheimer, New York, the great-grandfather of the present owner, by whom acquired from the above in the 1950s, and thence by descent.

+ Expand

Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE FRENCH COLLECTOR


The landscapes of the late 1930s and 1940s represent a return for Soutine to the complex compositions of the Céret and Cagnes paintings of the 1920s. Since this earlier period, Soutine's art had undergone a process of simplification, relying on depictions of a single object and its relationship to its surroundings. A natural progression of the order that crept into Soutine's landscapes as he moved from Céret to Cagnes at the suggestion of his dealer Léopold Zborowski, the simplification and structuring of the 1930s landscapes were perhaps a response to the stability Soutine had finally managed to achieve in life. Supported by his American patron, the wealthy Pennsylvanian pharmaceutical manufacturer Dr Albert C. Barnes, as well as by Madeleine Castaing, Soutine was no longer the impoverished artist who had created pictures of such turmoil and tempest as he had in the early 1920s.

However, with the Auxerre landscapes from 1939 and those from Champigny a few years later, Soutine reintroduces varied compositional structures and multiplicity of forms. Again, perhaps this return is, in some way, linked to Soutine's personal circumstances; with the outbreak of war, as a Jew in Paris, Soutine's situation was becoming ever more dangerous. Inexplicably turning down the opportunity to leave for America in 1940, Soutine became increasingly worried about being denounced to the police. It is this atmosphere of constant tension and fear that his landscapes of the early 1940s recall some of the nervous energy and controlled vigour of his earlier work. The landscapes of this final phase of his career can be seen as a more ordered and lucid articulation of his vision, where movement is tempered by stability.

'In some ways, Soutine travels full circle in these landscapes, reinvesting the energies that had animated the Céret pictures into an image that is now anchored with a more structured and "traditional" armature. The energy is no longer equated with chaos and anarchy and compression but is directed and contained by readable forms in a definable space. There is the same rhythm that animates forms, the same dynamism permeating the whole, but the growing stress on clarity and recognizability, developing throughout his landscape oeuvre , now effects reorganization and rechanneling of these sensations. Before, the paint and brushstroke abstractly generated metaphors of wind, atmosphere and storm; now Soutine is painting the wind actually hitting and passing through the tree' (M. Tuchman, E. Dunow & K. Perls, Chaim Soutine 1893-1943, Catalogue raisonné , Cologne, 1993, p. 99).