Chaim Soutine Has a Terrible Stomachache
Chaim Soutine arrived in Paris paperless and penniless, with a not-yet-known genius burning a hole in his pocket. Quite possibly, it is the best way for any artist to come on to a scene. And for Soutine, the glittery cataclysm of that moment, galloping toward the first World War as quickly as it could escape the previous pull of the old century, couldn’t have been timed better with his arrival, far from his large Jewish family and small Russian village—both of which he would never see again.
To be an artist in Europe’s cultural epicenter in the early twentieth century was to win the epoch jackpot, a kinetic conversation that stretched wide from Montmartre to Montparnasse. Soutine found himself in Montmartre by the summer of 1913. Unfriendly, and apparently uncleanly, the young painter moved into the bottom floor of La Ruche—a residence for starving artists—and was admitted into the École des Beaux-Arts. His greatest education, however, came from his frequent visits to the Louvre, where he studied, time and again, works from the Old Masters: Bonnard, Courbet, and Rembrandt, most of all.
A new biography of the artist—the only English-language biography written about Soutine—sheds light on those early days in Paris, and the tumult of his next thirty years in France, before it all came crashing down in the Second World War. Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art (PublicAffairs, 2025), written by Celeste Marcus, offers an analytical and lyrical account of the painter’s life and work. The reader is taken through Soutine’s various painting periods, most significantly, the pivotal years he spent in Céret, in southwestern France, after World War I. Marcus has dedicated an entire chapter to Céret, where the artist went on to produce 300 portraits and landscapes, an alchemical turning point described in the book as an unleashing of his pent-up creative spirit. “He wrestled this ferocity into a new delicacy over the next two decades,” writes Marcus, adding matter-of-factly that the artist grew to detest the works that came out of this period. What Soutine didn’t burn (because his art dealer saved them) he tracked down later to destroy—a stubborn defiance that, after reading Marcus’ biography, one safely assumes marked him everywhere.
It is said Soutine painted directly from life. Whether he was painting landscapes in mountainous Céret or portraits in Mediterranean Cagnes—or back in Paris, propping dead animals on plates for his still lifes—the artist, Marcus argues, had only one subject throughout all his works: “They are articulations of energy.” And indeed that energy is visceral—quite literally, intestinal. Much of Soutine’s work reflects a palette akin to a heavily used butcher’s block. Take, for instance, the eviscerated ventral subject in Still Life with Rayfish (1923), on view at The Cleveland Museum of Art—or the version in the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Still Life with Rayfish (ca. 1924), with its overly-ripe tomatoes seeming to spill from the creature’s raw belly while possessing the unbridled charm of polyps. Both depictions recall Jean Siméon Chardin’s The Ray (ca. 1725-26), featuring a gutted fish hanging from a hook and looking decidedly more cheery than Soutine’s variations. But then, even the trees in Les Platanes à Céret (ca. 1920), recently on view at Piano Nobile Gallery in London, resemble entrails both in color and texture; a brownish pink mucosa that appears wave-like in their contraction. Any gastroenterologist would attest: Soutine, the painter who painted from life, seemed to be suffering from a terrible stomachache.
More often than not, these compositions appear shaken and distorted—a stylistic quality aligned with the Modernist era the artwork came out of, and perhaps in line with the artist himself. Gnarled townscapes, ulcerative still lifes, tension-filled portraits of friends and strangers—the drama runs deep. But what exactly is Soutine the Expressionist trying to express? Fellow artists and onlookers admire the violence and vigor of his brushwork while scholars and historians turn to the bleak circumstances of his life; an unhappy childhood in a Belarusian shtetl, the extensive affliction of both World Wars; having to lay low, then live in hiding, during the German occupation of France. For Marcus, the biographer, however, trauma is less of an impetus behind Soutine’s work than his relentless, obsessive pursuit of energy.
Energy also pursued Soutine: a raucous friendship with Modigliani, love-hate ties to agents and collectors, feast-famine financial states, immolation of his own artwork—and patrons who tried to put out those f lames. Soutine had a way of drawing people in before ending things abruptly, often badly. His closest friend, a physician by the name of Élie Faure, shared a fierce intellectual connection with Soutine, though an embarrassing romantic rejection from Faure’s daughter resulted in a swift and irreparable falling-out between the two men. Nonetheless, the friendship’s most indelible qualities underscored the artist’s unwavering task. “Both men were naturally fascinated by vitality, by the luscious living beauty of things,” writes Marcus. “Soutine’s lifelong goal was in some ways the same as Faure’s—to understand energy, to capture it.”
Soutine saw red—it is rife in his paintings. Still lifes of beef carcasses, plucked fowl, incarnadine rayfish, all celebrate and necessitate the usage of the color. Even his portraits and landscapes bleed red; a distant rooftop or a small handkerchief (or a figure dressed entirely in crimson) center on a certain feeling of provocation with a continual return to “le sang.” Marcus observes in the Céret chapter: “They seem sometimes like the innards of a living creature, pulsing as one.” Depictions of slaughtered animals are one thing, but to convey those “innards” in a painting of a pastry chef—clutching an incarnadine napkin to his abdomen—or an abraded portrait of the artist himself, titled Grotesque (ca. 1922-23), strikes me as eerily prescient. As Soutine’s career soared, his worsening stomach problems persisted—an untimely demise that would soon glisten red.
Fifteen reproduced images are nestled in a grouping halfway though Marcus’ biography, a pit stop for the reader to visually refuel—and a quick introduction to his corpus. Arranged (mostly) chronologically, the images correspond to his evolution of motion, starting with a self portrait from around 1918, and the previously mentioned painting The Pastry Chef (ca. 1919), a portrait circa 1929 of his friend Madeleine Castaing (wearing a striking red dress), a bellboy painted a year or so prior (clad in blaring red), as well as a few dead animals for good measure (red and more red). The two final images—windswept landscapes completed around 1939, a few years before his death—withhold that color altogether, but not its intensity. There is an urgency throughout these works, as if the artist was increasingly preoccupied with his own internal bleeding.
In the biography’s lengthy epilogue, aptly titled “Afterlives,” Marcus mentions that she lives a mere 10 minutes on foot from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., so that she may visit the museum’s four Soutines “on demand.” These four paintings, she notes, have a tendency to move around the museum, a little something to keep her on her toes. The Pheasant, for instance, a 1920s still life of the dead bird, at one point appeared along a main staircase, causing a potential traffic jam whenever Marcus stood before it. But if clogging up the stairs is what it takes to stand before a Soutine, she writes, so be it: “I am met every time with the arresting and exacting awareness that the man before me is granting witness to the spectacle of him wrestling with himself—straining to communicate in all its fullness the rush of the atmosphere he was looking at and living in.”
Chaim-Iche Solomonovich Sutin was born in 1893 in Smilavichy, present-day Belarus, the tenth of eleven children. He was raised in a shtetl, the son of a tailor who spoke only Yiddish. Marcus notes the exact cause for his departure from Smilavichy is difficult to pinpoint: perhaps due to a stick-beating father who refused to acknowledge his son’s artistic promise, or simply because of an art school opportunity, first in Minsk, then at the Vilna Fine Arts Academy. Whatever the reason, Chaim-Iche left his provincial origins behind in one century and stepped into the dazzling allure of another.
Soutine adapted quickly to his life in Paris at La Ruche—“The Beehive”—a repurposed octagonal wine rotunda designed by the architect Gustave Eiffel for the 1900 Paris Exposition, where fellow starving artist Amedeo Modigliani took an immediate shine to him. Modigliani opened doors for the young Soutine, introducing him to his own art dealer, Léopold Zborowski, who represented the artist—reluctantly at first—for the following 20 years until his passing. Soutine re-payed Modigliani for the life-changing introduction to Zborowski by speaking ill of the artist upon his death, accusing him of trying to destroy his own budding potential with drunken debauchery. And he re-payed Zborowski by continually burning or losing his own paintings, which often meant frenzied attempts in the middle of the night to come salvage them from further destruction.
Many of the artists at La Ruche were Jewish émigrés who remained tight knit within the École de Paris—a community that would be decimated during World War II. But for the already aloof Soutine, identifying as an Eastern European Jew was perhaps less important than being regarded as a serious painter in Paris. Marcus stresses that the ascent into the upper echelons of society would have swiftly lifted him from the lower-status circle of the artists he first encountered in Paris, many of whom happened to be Jewish. It is entirely possible that a man of few allegiances to begin with, suddenly being whisked to the south of France and elsewhere for rest cures and the like, by buyers and benefactors—as his paintings continued to gain notice on both sides of the Atlantic—was simply basking in his own arriviste-ness.
And yet it was not a high-society Parisian who launched Soutine’s success, but a wealthy American whose humble beginnings were not unlike that of the artist. Albert C. Barnes was born in 1872 in Philadelphia, the son of a one-armed butcher who’d lost his limb in the Civil War. Much like Soutine, he stepped into the modern age propelled by his own undeniable talents. Barnes, a former physician turned art historian (like Soutine’s former friend Élie Faure), had put himself through medical school at the University of Pennsylvania as a boxer and semi-pro baseball player. After a brief stint as an assistant physician at the State Hospital for the Insane, he ceased practicing medicine and traveled to Germany where he pursued work in the field of chemistry, co-developing and manufacturing the antiseptic Argyrol (at last, a cure for neonatal gonorrheal blindness!), which in turn made him very wealthy.
Art was the obvious next step.
In 1912, Barnes sent a trusted friend to Paris on his behalf to purchase works by well-known and emerging artists such as Picasso and Van Gogh, which he placed proudly on the walls of his factory and utilized in art-appreciation seminars held for his workers. (Barnes made a point of hiring Black employees—a socially progressive vision instilled by his devout Methodist mother—providing fair wages, fair housing, and educational opportunities.) Later that same year, the philanthropic Philadelphian traveled to Paris himself—twice—further amassing works for his collection, not least of which was his new favorite, Matisse. (Soutine was an unknown art student in Lithuania at the time; he didn’t show up until the following summer.)
A decade later, the art-collecting inventor of Argyrol established the Barnes Foundation, transforming a mansion into a museum in stately Merion, PA and granting access to the masses so that they could experience, firsthand, art’s indispensable role in a society. Barnes wished to educate individuals from all walks of life about the intricacies of art history, displaying modern works side by side with classical paintings, Chinese antiques, and African sculpture. (It would take another hundred years for New York’s Museum of Modern Art to pull a similar stunt when it boldly rearranged the global art narrative on its own walls.) In late 1922, the chemist philanthropist traveled to Paris yet again to acquire more work from the Modernists of the day, including 54 of Soutine’s paintings (he purchased five more at a later date.) Before departing, Barnes held a gallery exhibition of his new treasures to much fanfare, then repeated the effort upon his return home. But the avant-garde extravaganza, featuring Matisse, Picasso, and of course, Soutine, was widely panned. A “series of seemingly incomprehensible masses of paint, known as landscapes,” wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer. The post-Impressionist enthusiast from Merion was crushed, writes Marcus: “Educating the public struck him as less appealing after being scorned for it.” Nonetheless, Barnes was instrumental in putting Soutine on the map, both in Paris and Pennsylvania.
Soutine never made it to America—he never made it out of France. As tensions increased in the 1930s, his gastrointestinal health continued to worsen. In 1937, he met a German-Jewish woman named Gerda “Garde” Michaelis, whom he was involved with until 1940, when Garde was sent to an internment camp in the Pyrenees. Fearing for the artist’s mental and physical state, Soutine’s good friend Madeleine Castaing (the Parisian socialite whose portrait he painted in that striking red dress), quickly introduced him to another prospective companion. Marie-Berthe Aurenche was a tormented soul and textbook codependent who had apparently attempted suicide many times. She was also the ex-wife of Max Ernst. Aurenche looked after Soutine in the final years of his life, as the ulcers in his stomach—and the Nazis and Vichy in the region—gnawed away at him. Soutine was unable to see his doctors in Paris and so he remained hidden in the French countryside. His condition worsened and Aurenche daringly arranged for an ambulance that brought him to the city for emergency surgery, where he died shortly afterward, at the age of 50, in the summer of 1943. One more casualty of the École de Paris.
Marcus suggests that Soutine could not have gone to America even if he had wanted—which apparently he didn’t, as he claimed there were no trees there to paint. Lacking proper Russian identification papers would have made a safe passage to the U.S. nearly impossible, and so it’s striking that the largest repository of his work is in Philadelphia at the Barnes Foundation. (Neck and neck with the collection at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris.) Had he made it to this side of the Atlantic, would Soutine have received the medical attention necessary to manage his stomachache? Or did he know in his gut that he was painting viscerally, and urgently, straight into his grave.
When I look at Soutine’s beef carcasses, inspired by Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655), which hangs in the Louvre, it’s all right there: the butchery of war, the dark impulses of humanity, the hole eating away at him. But to see that same blood-red fascination in a portrait of an altar boy, or a bellboy—in a twisted streetscape dotted with dark red rooftops—is to see not so much the horrors of humanity as his own mortality, and vitality. When Soutine chose to leave behind his colorless life in the shtetl, he was choosing red: in all its danger and excitement. The man was not afraid to burn his own paintings—is it any surprise he got caught in the flames?
“My paintings are a heap of shit, but better than Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Krémènge. Some day I will destroy my canvases, but they are too cowardly to do it.” This quote appears in Emile Szittya’s Soutine et son temps (La Bibliothèque des Arts, Paris, 1955), and is one of the few that’s available from the artist. Somehow, Soutine knew what he was in for. This arriviste in Paris, from a poor village in Belarus, who stepped out of one century and leapt into another, couldn’t outrun the thing he was painting.
