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Dimensions: 65 by 54.5cm., 25 1/2 by 21 1/2 in.

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Provenance: Musée de Lucerne, Lucerne
Galerie de l'Élysée (Alex Maguy), Paris (by 1971)
Sale: Christie's, New York, 7th November 2002, lot 314
Private Collection, United States (purchased at the above sale; sale: Christie's, New York, 4th November 2004, lot 250)

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Exhibited: Tel Aviv, Museum of Art, Exposition inaugurale: Maîtres français du XXe siècle, 1971, no. 78, illustrated in the catalogue (titled Route montante)
Paris, Galerie Yoshii, Soutine, 1974, no. 10, illustrated in the catalogue (titled Route montante and incorrectly dated 1935-37)

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Literature: Pierre Courthion, Soutine, Peintre du déchirant, Lausanne, 1972, illustrated p. 189 (fig. D) & illustrated in colour p. 36

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Notes: To be included in the revised and supplemented edition of the Chaim Soutine Catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman & Esti Dunow.
Painted in 1918-19, the present work is a wonderful example of Soutine's dynamic landscapes painted during his time spent in the South of France. After working for many years in Paris, Soutine was sent to the Midi by his dealer Léopold Zborowski in 1918 where he produced a series of landscapes infused with fervent brushstrokes and uneasy jarring perspectives. Trees also held a particular importance within his work. Seeming deracinated, they dance about wildly as though alive, and are rendered on the same scale as houses or figures.

The subject of La Route peu rassurante, a steep mountainous path, provides Soutine with a plunging perspective which he depicts winding alongside wild swaying trees. The freedom nature provides is evident in the open landscape he portrays here but through the unsettling perspective and intense brushwork, the artist manages to demonstrate the uneasy and claustrophobic effect of nature and in doing so, bestows upon it his own sentiment and mood. As Maurice Tuchman wrote: 'Soutine would always make spatial compression uniquely meaningful to his own expression, thereby transforming what could have been merely a pictorial device into a supremely personal metaphor. This became Soutine's means of expressing the ineluctable fusion of all form and matter, the identification of form and flesh and pigment that is so basic to his still lifes, landscapes, and portraits throughout the 1920s' (M. Tuchman, 'Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Life and Work', in Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow & Klaus Perls, Chaim Soutine. Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1993, vol I, p. 18).