Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine — painter with roots in the Russian Empire

Chaim Soutine was born Chaim-Itzke Solomonovich Sutin in Smilavichy, a small, mostly religious Jewish town about twenty kilometres from Minsk, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Belarus. The date is usually given as 13 January 1893, though it is uncertain and some catalogues give 1894. He was the tenth of eleven children of Zalman Sutin and Sarah Sutina; the family was poor and Orthodox.

He took drawing lessons in Minsk from about 1907, where he befriended Michel Kikoine, and from 1910 to 1913 studied at the art school in Vilna, having failed its entrance examination at the first attempt. In 1913, aged about twenty, he left for Paris with Kikoine and Pinchus Kremegne, enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Fernand Cormon, and took a room at La Ruche, the artists' residence in Montparnasse whose crowd, mostly Jewish émigrés, later came to be called the School of Paris.

Through Jacques Lipchitz he met Amedeo Modigliani in 1915, and the two became close; Modigliani painted his portrait several times, once on a door in the flat of their dealer, Léopold Zborowski. Zborowski paid for Soutine's stays in the south of France, at Céret, Cagnes and Vence, where between 1918 and 1922 he painted some two hundred canvases. He learned of Modigliani's death in 1920 while at Céret.

In 1923 the American collector Albert C. Barnes, having seen The Little Pastry Cook at Paul Guillaume's gallery, visited his studio and bought some sixty paintings at once, which secured his first success. In the mid-1920s he painted his series of beef carcasses, keeping a carcass in his studio until neighbours complained.

During the German occupation, as a Jew, he left Paris and lived in hiding, moving from place to place. In August 1943, suffering from a perforated stomach ulcer, he left a safe hiding place to be operated on in Paris, and died there on 9 August, aged fifty. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery. In 2015 one of his carcass paintings, Le Boeuf, sold at Christie's in New York for just over 28 million dollars.

Tracing the roots — Smilavichy, Minsk Governorate (now Belarus)

Born in 1893 in Smilavichy, a shtetl about twenty kilometres from Minsk in the Russian Empire, the tenth of eleven children of Zalman Sutin; he studied in Minsk and Vilna and left for Paris in 1913.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Smilavichy, Minsk Governorate (now Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition