Chaim Soutine was born in Smilavichy, Russian Empire in the year 1893. Soutine painted landscapes but is better known for his very expressive style of painting portraits. This area is now Minsk, Belarus.
A great montage of works by Chaim Soutine shown here:
Soutine attended the Academy of Fine Arts located in Vilnius, which is now part of Lithuania. After his studies there he moved abroad to Paris, France where he would attend the Ecole Des Beaux Arts.
In this clip we visit a show featuring the works of Chaim Soutine with our dear art loving amigo James Kalm!:
The painter Modigliani was a close friend and painted Chaim Soutine often.
Soutine also loved to paint animal carcasses. On many occasions neighbors complained of the smell of decaying animals and would call upon the police to remove the smell of their neighbor the artist! Soutine was inspired to paint these works based on the famous work Rembrandt completed of decaying meat.
Soutine found support from an American collector, and did rather well for himself before the onset of World War 2. He was in France and it was invaded by the Germans. As he was Jewish, he fled and spent time sleeping outside and always on the run. He developed an ulcer and tried to seek emergency surgery to fix it, but the surgery didn’t help and he passed away in 1943 at the age of 50 years old.
Price range information: Chaim Soutine is heavily collected and prices for a small oil painting start in the mid six figure range up to $20 million for a larger original oil.
I love the expressiveness of his sitters in the portraits. I enjoy looking at portraits of people who are living and breathing in the painting such as those by the Dutch master Frans Hals.
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