Kossoff and Soutine in Hastings

SOUTINE | KOSSOFF

1April - 24 September 2023

The connection between painters Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) and Leon Kossoff (1926-2019) has long been acknowledged but never fully explored - until now. Soutine | Kossoff, the first exhibition devoted to both artists, focuses on two areas of shared interest, paintings of landscapes and of people. By hanging the two artists' work in adjacent gallery spaces, rather than side by side in the same space, Soutine | Kossoff uses the distinctive layout here at Hastings Contemporary in a new way. Visitors can immerse themselves in the work of each artist in turn, reflecting on contrasts and shared qualities as they move from room to room.

There may be marked differences in style and scale between the work of Soutine and Kossoff, but the two artists had a great deal in common. Although the former was born in 19th century Belarus and the latter in 20th century Britain, they shared a reverence for the history of European painting and in particular for the work of Rembrandt van Rin, whose expressive later style they both studied closely. Caring little about current artistic fashions, they focused on the task of looking and then expressing what they saw - and their feelings about what they saw - in paint. Soutine became an acknowledged master of the School of Paris, Kossoff a master of the School of London.

Each left a body of work that combines technical brilliance with simple humanity.

SOUTINE IN CÉRET

Born and raised in Smilavicy, a small town in Belarus, Chaim Soutine left home at sixteen to study at the Vilnius Drawing School. From there he joined the migration of Jewish artists from the region to Paris, arriving in 1912. Immersing himself in the immigrant artistic community in Montparnasse, he befriended Amedeo Modigliani, and in 1918 they travelled together to Cagnes-sur-Mer, a resort on the French Riviera.

They also visited Céret, an old town set in the foothills of the eastern Pyrenees.

With the financial support of his dealer Léopold Zborowski, Soutine returned to Céret a year later and began painting with ferocious intensity, turning the genre of landscape painting on its head in a series of expressive, often violently distorted, paintings. These caught the eye of American collector Albert C. Barnes, who bought fifty-two works, enabling Soutine to escape poverty for the first time in his life. The Céret paintings were to become pivotal in the history of modern painting, inspiring painters on both sides of the Atlantic, from Willem de Kooning in New York to Leon Kossoff, Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon in London.

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Les platanes à Céret oil on canvas

с 1920

The streets and squares of Céret are lined with plane trees, which provide shade and shelter as they do across southern France.

Van Gogh painted urban planes against a backdrop of buildings in a famous 1889 painting, The Road Menders. Perhaps Soutine had this work in mind when he chose this composition, but there any resemblance ends. While Van Gogh constructed even his most experimental paintings with carefully arranged, coherent marks, we can see here how Soutine has applied paint roughly, not following a plan but combining colours intuitively, to create a vibrant surface and an unsettling mood.

Collection Diethard Leopold

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Cagnes Landscape with Tree oil on canvas

с 1925-26

Soutine seems to have had mixed feelings about Cagnes-sur-Mer, the resort on the French Riviera he first visited with Modigliani in 1918. In one of very few surviving letters, sent to his dealer Léopold Zborowski in 1923, he wrote: 'I have only seven canvases. I am sorry. I wanted to leave Cagnes, this landscape that I cannot endure. I even went for a few days to Cap Martin where I thought of settling down. It displeased me. I had to rub out the canvases I started. On other occasions Soutine responded positively to the warm coastal light of Cagnes, working in a higher key and with a gentler touch than he had in Céret.

Tate

Bequeathed by John Levy 1977

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Le Mas Passe-Temps, Céret

oil on canvas

с 1920-21

This is not a landscape to gaze at: Soutine is not showing us the weather on a particular day or describing the play of sunlight.

Instead we are presented with something like a battleground, with dark, writhing vegetation on the left threatening the buildings to the right. Here is nature green in tooth and claw: a scene from a horror film. The paint in the dark areas is thick - almost muscular- and the surface violently disturbed, revealing colours reminiscent of

'rather dark semi-precious stones, peridot green and jargoon brown, bloodstone and a suggestion of amethyst', as Monroe Wheeler put it in the catalogue for Soutine, his celebrated 1950 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

National Galleries of Scotland

Purchased 1981

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Paysage aux cyprès oil on canvas

с 1922

In 1928 Soutine's first biographer Waldemar

George noted the violent rhythms animating many of the Céret works. 'Houses oscillate on their foundations,' he wrote, 'and move ardently hither and thither in the landscape, turning it topsy-turvy as in a series of seismic shocks.' The houses in this village seem to be collapsing into a central rift, an upheaval of which the figure in the left foreground appears blissfully unaware. Both Soutine and Kossoff adopted the traditional technique of including a figure in the foreground of a landscape, both to suggest scale and to welcome the viewer into their world.

Private Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Groupe d'arbres oil on canvas

с 1922

Like William Blake in his illustrated books, Soutine took considerable liberties with the forms of nature. As a student at the Vilnius Drawing School he had been taught to work from life and did so throughout his career. During his time in Céret, however, he bent and twisted the shapes of plane tree and grape vine to fit his creative needs.

What we see here is ostensibly a cluster of buildings seen through a clump of trees, but both natural and man-made forms are wildly distorted. The trees writhe this way and that, forming a sinuous pattern - an Art Nouveau motif brought to life. Beyond, the buildings are caught up in the same wild dance.

Private Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Place de Céret oil on canvas

с 1922

In Les platanes à Céret the paint handling is expressive, but it is clear what the painting is 'of'. Here, expression has almost taken over. We can still make out the distorted forms of buildings and trees, but they have been reduced to elements within a wildly imaginative composition. It may be that Soutine was expressing powerful emotions in this work - perhaps grief at the death of his friend Modigliani in 1920 - or we may be observing the fruits of a purely artistic experiment. What we see here is not a record of a place, but of the painter's actions. Each gesture, furious or measured, is there in front of us, in an exhilarating tumult of colour.

Private Collection

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943)

L'Arbre de Vence

oil on canvas

c 1929

According to legend, this ash tree was planted in 1538 on the orders of Francis I of France, to thank the citizens of Vence for hosting his delegation during negotiations for the Treaty of Nice with Charles V of Spain. A tourist attraction in Soutine's day as now, the venerable ash has - like the people he chose to paint - a strikingly individual character. As with his portraits of this period, he shows us an immediately recognizable likeness, the branches dark against vivid blue. Painterly experiment is mostly confined to the trunk of the tree, across which we see a play of blue, yellow and red, while the circular bench below is a lustrous Soutine green.

Private Collection

LEON KOSSOFF

KOSSOFF IN LONDON

Leon Kossoff was a Londoner through and through. His parents, Wolf and Rachel, had separately left Ukraine as children to escape anti-Jewish violence. By 1926, when Leon was born, Wolf owned a bakery in Bethnal Green. Kossoff grew up in the East End but was evacuated in 1939 and spent the next four years in Norfolk before undertaking National Service in war-ravaged Europe. Enrolling at St Martin's School of Art in the early 1950s, he met Frank Auerbach, and for a decade the pair explored the capital's bomb sites and building sites. In 1961 Kossoff moved with his wife Rosalind and son David to Willesden, where he began studying the railway landscapes of north London.

Kossoff knew and admired Soutine's Céret paintings, and he approached the scenes and sites of London in the same adventurous spirit. Painted freely and spontaneously after a long period of study, these works display the kind of bold, gestural brushwork, strong colour and imaginative treatment of perspective that we associate with the Céret canvases. Neither artist accepted the restrictions imposed by convention or current fashion, preferring to risk everything in their quest for what Kossoff called 'the living image'.

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Demolition of YMCA Building, No. 4, Spring oil on board

1971

In 1971 the Young Men's Christian

Association commissioned a new London headquarters off Tottenham Court Road.

The demolition of the existing building - a grand Edwardian edifice - inspired Kossoff to create several paintings. This version places us at ground level, with a man at work nearby. The arms of a wrecking crane can be seen to the left. Half-demolished buildings rise precipitously above us, almost filling the frame, as Soutine's hills dominate his canvases. Frank Auerbach likened the bomb sites and building sites of post-war London to 'a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountain and crags.' Kossoff's excitement at experiencing this scene translates into a vibrant panorama of paint.

Tymure Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Demolition of the Old House, Dalston Junction, Summer 1974 oil on board

1974

We are looking over the rooftops of north London and the shoppers of Ridley Road market, towards leafy Canonbury. In the right foreground, two men are dismantling the roof of a building, prior to demolition.

Kossoff had made numerous drawings of this view but was only inspired to paint when this process began. Perhaps the revealing of this new, strange skeletal form energised him. Based around the diagonals of railway line and street that meet above and to the left of the centre, the taut composition offers dizzying perspectives. Shapes and colours jostle, violent strokes fly this way and that, leaving behind loops and tendrils of paint, yet as a whole, the painting is harmonious, even serene.

Tate

Purchased 1975

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

York Way Railway Bridge from Caledonian

Road, Stormy Day oil on board

1967

Under a tumultuous sky we see the ordinary London scene transformed. Paint has been pushed, scooped, dragged and flung about the board, making this less a topographical description than an outpouring of feeling - a landscape of convulsive gestures. 'Why do I paint so thickly?' Kossoff asked himself during a rare interview, early in his career.

I don't know. It is my natural way.' He also worked rapidly, covering a board and often then scraping the paint off and starting again. While his studio became a landscape of paint-soaked newspaper, each finished painting emerged fresh and spontaneous.

Arts Council Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Children's Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon oil on board

1971

Soon after it opened, Kossoff began drawing at the Willesden Swimming Pool, noting how the light changed during the day and through the seasons and also how the quality of sound affected his perceptions.

Here, the children's pool is painted in a high key not only because of the light flooding in through those wide windows, but also to reflect the exuberant hubbub of young people at play. Similarly, the language of quick, calligraphic strokes mimics the children's rapid movements. While working on the painting, Kossoff found, as he often did when depicting groups of people, that figures morphed into family members, such as his son David, shown jumping in.

Tate

Purchased 1981

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

City Building Site oil on board

1961

Now that building sites are hidden behind hoardings festooned with warning signs, it is difficult to imagine the landscape of demolition and construction Kossoff roamed with fellow artist Frank Auerbach in the 1950s and 1960s. 'What fires him,' wrote his executor Andrea Rose, 'is the activity going on in the deep pit in which men scrabble and toil, giving form to the abyss. Here this frenetic creative activity is suggested by a welter of strokes in contrasting earth tones, with brisk diagonal strokes dragged across the centre of the composition and here and there a stab of yellow.

Property of a European Collector

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Railway Landscape near King's Cross, Dark

Day

oil on board

1967

Like Soutine, Kossoff kept one eye on the present and one on the past. As a depiction of a specific place at a specific time, this painting belongs firmly within the English landscape painting tradition. It is rooted in empirical observation. It deals in facts.

What makes Kossoff an exciting modern painter is the way in which he presents the information gathered over months of looking and drawing. The paint is applied freely, almost joyfully. We see the land receding below us, the sky above, but the railway tracks leading away from us also suggest ladders, climbing up the picture plane like the flights of steps Soutine depicted several times in paintings of Cagnes. This trick of perspective animates the painting still further. It quivers with life.

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Willesden Junction, Summer, No. 2 oil on board

1966

When Kossoff moved from Bethnal Green to Willesden in 1961, he rented an old builder's shed in Willesden Junction as a studio. The energy and movement he had previously discovered on building sites he now found in the local railway network. There are no trains on view here, but a sense of motion imparted by vigorous brushstrokes animates everything we see, from the railway tracks to the three cooling towers of the power station in the top left and the wide summer sky. It's a radically simplified vision of landscape, but complex in texture: every stroke of paint seems multi-layered, every colour shot through with contrasting

hues.

Alfred East Art Gallery

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Small Head of Rosalind, No. 1 oil on board

1970

This tender painting depicts Kossoff's wife

Rosalind, whom he married in 1954. Painted during the long and painful creation of Nude on a Red Bed, it demonstrates how effective his approach of drawing in paint could be in capturing mood and character.

The use of a few bold lines to describe the face is reminiscent of German Expressionist woodcuts, but the stroke of a paint-filled brush creates a quite different aesthetic and emotional effect. Each of these marks is a caress.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Seated Woman oil on board

1957

Like Soutine, Kossoff tended to focus closely on his sitters, offering little to distract the eye. This figure, reduced to a few bold lines in a morass of turbulent paint, is nevertheless an individual - the author N.M. Seedo - whose exhaustion is palpable.

Its dark power also perhaps reflects the mental anguish suffered by the artist as he felt his way forward. 'The struggle that he was engaged in ... was nerve-racking,' Seedo recalled. 'He seemed to go through heaven and hell, falling in love with every happy stroke of the brush, and hating all the obstacles, all the distortions and misleading paths that the canvas, paint and brush put in his way to some unknown goal.!

Leon Kossoff Estate

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Nude on a Red Bed oil on board

November-December 1972

Kossoff's wife Rosalind is shown lying on her side, nude, on a red bed. Her figure is roughly painted and heavy outlined - as spontaneous as a sketch, but monumental.

The turbulent trails of paint covering the lower part of the work show that Kossoff worked rapidly, fiercely even, yet the figure is tenderly drawn. This 'nude' is a vulnerable woman lying with her legs curled and hands pillowing her head. Her unhappy expression suggests that she is not comfortable in this role. Indeed, Kossoff described the months it took to complete this painting as 'torture' for her. On this last day he had already painted her once and scraped off the paint. Then, seized by sudden inspiration, he made the work we see here in fifteen minutes.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Two seated Figures oil on board

1967

In the 1950s Kossoff was taught by painter David Bomberg, who urged his students at Borough Polytechnic to 'find the spirit in the mass'. An artist's feelings about a motif, he argued, mattered more than formally coherent representation. Kossoff himself was acutely aware that he was attempting something near-impossible in trying to convey living, moving reality in paint. This is less a painting 'of' two seated figures, Kossoff's parents, as it is a richly textured, flowing expression in paint of the artist's emotional experience of a particular moment.

Property of a European Collector

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Head of Seedo oil on board

1964

This is one of many depictions by Kossoff of author N.M. Seedo, who had fled her native Romania to escape anti-Jewish violence.

Published the same year this work was made, her autobiographical novel In The Beginning Was Fear begins, 'Fear was my cradle. In it I huddled up and rocked myself to sleep at night and with it I woke each dreary morning. By Kossoff's standards this is a small portrait but it has monumental power. Seedo's face seems to have been dragged from the depths of paint so thick it is almost sculptural: a face that has known suffering but is the stronger for it.

The Roden Family

Chaim Soutine

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

La Communiante (La Mariée)

oil on canvas c 1924

According to the title this work depicts either a girl taking her first Communion or a young bride. A similar dress would have been worn for either occasion, and it is the dress which steals the scene. Soutine painted white clothing repeatedly, perhaps enjoying the challenge of showing all the subtle variations in value with strokes of differing hue. Here it's as if colour has leaked from the flowers garlanding the girl's head, spreading through the frothy fabric in washes, trickles and dabs. The voluminous quality of the dress is further enhanced by the patterned background. Lighter on one side than the other, it creates an illusion of depth and movement.

The Lewis Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Le Paysan oil on canvas c 1919-20

Soutine kept no records of who sat for him and, like Kossoff, he mostly painted people who are known to the wider world only through his paintings. This countryman he probably found in Céret. As so often with Soutine's portraits, the sitter's character shines through so strongly that we could probably identify the man from this work, yet the paint is applied as boldly as in any of the Céret landscapes, the face stabbed and iabbed with yellow and red. Looking at this violent, beautiful painting, we might remember a remark made by Soutine to a friend later in life. 'I would have stopped it had I not succeeded, he said of his career. 'I might have become a boxer.'

The Lewis Collection

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Le valet de chambre

oil on canvas

с 1927

When Amedeo Modigliani painted a portrait of Soutine in 1917 he made the face asymmetrical, with one eye bigger than the other: a wry nod, perhaps, to Soutine's own portraiture, in which natural asymmetry is often exaggerated. In some of his early portraits the effect borders on caricature, but here it stresses the individual character of this hotel worker uniformed in rich red and lush, velvety black. The valet's ears are also striking, as they often are in Soutine's portraits. It is difficult to say whether this was artistic licence or whether he was, in fact, a connoisseur of ears.

The Lewis Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Le petit pâtissier oil on canvas

с 1927

For this, the last of his series of pastry chefs, Soutine has placed his model in the macho posture of a Renaissance prince, reminiscent of Holbein's painting of Henry Vill and Titian's of Charles V. Perhaps some irony is intended in this instance, but if so it is overwhelmed by the personality of the pastry chef, who seems vulnerable but tough. Soutine was by this time studying Rembrandt, whose influence may explain why this pastry chef is more solidly three-dimensional than previous versions.

Coincidentally, the pâtissier's hat is represented with a bold stroke of white very similar that used by Rembrandt to show his own hat in Self-Portrait with Two Circles.

Private Collection

Chaïm Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Valet (Le Valet de chambre)

oil on canvas

с 1927

Compared to other contemporary portraits of uniformed men, this one brings us closer to the sitter, while also obscuring him. The artist has cropped the figure, cutting off the elbows (emasculating that macho posture), so that the long head is comparatively bigger. At the same time, however, the eyes and mouth are less defined than in other portraits, the expression harder to read. The contrast between face and background is also less pronounced, further enhancing the gentle, thoughtful quality of the portrait.

The tawny-coloured background sends us back to Rembrandt again, particularly Soutine's favourite painting of his, The Jewish Bride.

Private Collection, courtesy of Ordovas

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Young Woman in a White Blouse oil on canvas

с 1923

Studying this portrait we can understand why Soutine was so greatly admired by young painters of the 1940s and 1950s who valued self-expression above academic ideas of representation or form. The white blouse of the title is a swirl of rough strokes on a dark ground, the background simply a convenient neutral colour. There is nothing to distract us from the focus of the portrait: the sitter's intelligent, life-worn face.

The mouth has an ironic twist. The eyes, brimming with blue, hold our attention with their beauty and their sadness.

Courtauld Institute

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Le Rouquin oil on canvas c 1917-19

Here is a dapper young gent in shirt and tie, his handkerchief poking out of the chest pocket of a jacket with sculpted shoulders and generous lapels. In front of a patterned backcloth he sits with legs crossed on a red chair, eyes fixed on some distant point, mouth set in a firm line. We take all this in, then our gaze rests on the hand protruding from the cuff of this proud young man's dandyish jacket. Long and limp, it lies there like some fleshy sea creature. Unlike so many of the other hands painted by Soutine

- hands clasped together in front of the sitter or resting on a model's hips - these are not the hands of a working man, curled and blunted with labour. Perhaps this is in fact an elegant hand: a hand to display.

The Lewis Collection

Leon Kossoff

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Between Kilburn and Willesden Green, Winter Evening oil on board

1991

Having studied the railway landscapes of north London for many years, Kossoff turned his attention to trains after witnessing his grandson's excitement whenever a diesel came into view at the bottom of the garden.

Here is a moment of everyday wonder, seen by countless people but rarely recorded by artists. The scrubby trees and half-hidden brick buildings are transformed by the artist's energetic treatment (as they are, in the child's eyes, made magical by the sudden appearance of the train), into a scene of drama. With its restless strokes of grey, white and blue, the sky has echoes of Soutine's Céret.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Christ Church, Spitalfields

oil on board

1989

As a boy Kossoff passed this London landmark every day, and later recalled being awed by its vast presence. In the late 1980s he read about the church in Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor and returned repeatedly to his old neighbourhood to draw it, noting that 'it is by its monumental flight into unimpeded space that we remember this building'. In this small painting he conveys the bulk of the church by presenting it from ground level in bold strokes, with the portico rearing above us and leaning over as if weighed down by its own mass.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Sally in an Armchair, No. 7 oil on board

1987

Kossoff rarely painted anyone who wasn't a close friend, a family member, or one of the small, evolving group of models whose first names often appear in his titles:

Fidelma, Pauline, Sally ... These sitters required considerable reserves of patience.

I can go on for years, he once remarked,

'before the presence of the sitter animates the painting'. Like the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who would repeatedly tear the clay or plaster from the armature of a sculpture then build it up again, Kossoff constantly repainted and scraped down his boards. A new day necessitated a new start because, as he put it, 'Every time the model sits everything has changed. You have changed. She has changed.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Portrait of Philip oil on board

1962

Soutine and Kossoff shared an overriding preoccupation. 1 struggle for truth, explained Kossoff to an interviewer, echoing Soutine's earlier assertion: 'Only art is truth.

But how difficult it is to achieve!' Their shared quest for authentic expression led both artists to take risks, trusting their instincts instead of following academic convention.

Kossoff made numerous drawings of his brother Philip before embarking on this powerful portrait. The head fills the board, far larger than life-size.

Massive, but composed of quick, bold strokes, it as much a portrait of this fearless artist as of the sitter.

The head, complete with proud quiff of hair, is a massive, immutable fact, stone-coloured and apparently as solid as stone. Yet at the same time this portrait of Kossoff's younger brother is a ghostly apparition, emerging eerily from the dark background. The artist's quest to capture life in paint finds particularly powerful expression here, in a work that suggests the transience of the former while celebrating the materiality of the latter. Describing the peculiar power of Kossoff's work, art historian David Sylvester noted 'the fertile contradiction in the work between the unmelting thereness of the paint's existence and the insubstantiality of what it is supposed to convey.

Private Collection

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Head leaning on Hand oil on board

1959

Here we see the left side of a man's head, tilted away from us. The ear is a hook of blue on the upper right of the head, the mouth a downturned blue curve to the lower left that rests against a perpendicular blue line indicating the hand. This, Kossoff's first painting of his father, Wolf, is a brave experiment in reducing form to the barest of essentials while retaining emotional power. At a time when many artists were abandoning portraiture, in favour of abstract painting, Kossoff perhaps saw this approach as a way of reinvigorating the genre. Every gesture he made while studying his father is here, preserved in the thick paint.

Sir Torquil Norman

Leon Kossoff (1926 - 2019)

Portrait of Chaim oil on board

1988

When their father died in 1983, Kossoff began painting his brother Chaim, shown here in a portrait that combines the intimacy of a sketchbook drawing with the grandeur of a king's head pressed into an ancient coin. Like Soutine, Kossoff focused intensely on his subjects, whose features often fill the frame. Deft gestures and a simplified palette give a clear, uncluttered impression, enhancing our feeling that the artist has a deep, easy knowledge of his subject.

Private Collection

PORTRAITS

In scale, style and mood, the paintings of people made by Soutine and Kossoff are markedly different. Their approaches differed, too, with Kossoff repeatedly drawing and painting the sitter until their presence inspired him, while Soutine painted from scratch following a period of contemplation. Yet there are tantalising similarities. Both artists preferred to paint ordinary people - often family members in Kossoff's case, working people in Soutine's. Both chose to focus closely on the model, often not bothering with setting or background, but placing the sitter within the frame like a carved saint in a niche.

Soutine and Kossoff shared a fascination for the creative potential of their medium but used paint inventively not for the sake of doing so but to better express how they felt as they painted. Reflecting both their shared love of paint and their shared humanity was their reverence for Rembrandt: it was the Dutch artist's painting A Woman Bathing in a Stream (1654) that first inspired Kossoff when he visited the National Gallery at the age of ten, and both he and Soutine painted versions of this work. They each took the rough, expressive manner of painting championed by Rembrandt in his later years, and developed their own, individual style.

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

June Servante

oil on canvas

c 1933

Compared to Soutine's earlier works this portrait is painted with a light touch.

The pose too is less aggressive than that adopted by some of his earlier models.

This unnamed young woman - clearly a particular individual - appears to be lost in thought. Her white apron holds all the colours we might expect having seen previous portraits, but it is the face we are drawn to this time. Often we see Soutine's models front on, but here the young woman's face is turned slightly away, the shape of the nose exaggerated by dark shadow. The hair is picked out here and there with coloured lights. The eyes, deft touches of blue, look inward.

Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Maternité (or Pietà)

oil on canvas

с 1942

The alternative titles provided for this painting suggest contrasting emotional scenarios. In the first, a mother holds a sleeping child; in the second, she mourns her dead child, echoing Mary lamenting over the dead Jesus in a traditional Pietà.

There is no record of who this mother and child were or what their situation was, but Soutine painted what was for him an unusual subject while hiding in rural France from Nazi persecution, tormented by the stomach ulcers that were soon to kill him.

Whether she is mourning her child, her times, or, for that matter, the artist, the mother's sorrow is palpable.

Property of a European Collector

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Portrait d'une eune fille (Fille en blouse bleue)

oil on paper laid down on canvas

с 1937

Leon Kossoff was not the only artist in 1950s London to express admiration for Soutine. Francis Bacon owned a copy of the catalogue (with its precious colour plates) accompanying the 1950 Soutine exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

This young woman's hand has that quality often seen in Bacon's own paintings of seeming to be melting into colours. To paint so spontaneously, such bravura, required a huge physical and emotional effort on Soutine's part. 'He worked intensely until he reached a state of exhaustion, wrote the sculptor Chana Orloff, who knew him well. 'The rapidity of his execution was incredible!

The Lewis Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Portrait du garçon en bleu oil on canvas c 1928

Whereas many of the Soutine portraits in this exhibition are executed with strongly defined strokes of contrasting colours, the paint surface here is made up of tiny patches of colour that are close in value.

Paul Cézanne used a similar method in the portraits he made of similarly anonymous men in serge jackets, but this boy in blue has a vivid, living presence that is all Soutine.

However he painted, it seems he was not exploring a style or pioneering a new way of looking, but using whatever he felt was the best approach to express his feelings about this particular subject, at this particular moment. No wonder the young Kossoff expressed admiration for 'the living reality of Soutine.!

The Lewis Collection

Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943)

Tête de jeune fille oil on panel

Perhaps it was this young woman's hair that attracted Soutine's attention, pouring over her shoulders in a golden-brown cascade picked out with red, black, yellow and teal blue. Soutine painted portraits in profile throughout his career, allowing us to see just a little of the sitter's character but focusing more on the paint. Here the face is built up from a few broad strokes, pale against a background that is roughly darkened to maximise the contrast. We're at a pivotal point, between the loose, expressive style espoused by Rembrandt, Titian and Constable in their later years, and the approach taken by artists who came after Soutine, whether Willem de Kooning in New York or Leon Kossoff in London. Paint is taking on its own life.

The Lewis Collection

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