CHAIM SOUTINE

Searching for an enigmatic painter.

Marcus, managing editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, makes her book debut with an incisive biography of Jewish artist Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Informed by memoirs and biographies of those in Soutine’s circle, the author focuses on his work to reveal the contours of his life, several important friendships, and, in greatest detail, his times. Born in Belarus, Soutine moved to Paris in 1913, when he was 20, gravitating to the buzzing artists’ community of La Ruche in Montparnasse, where his cohabitants included Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipschitz. A “misanthropic, awkward, semisocialized genius,” Soutine made few friends, but he forged a close relationship with Modigliani, even though, Marcus notes, the hard-drinking dapper Italian seems an unlikely companion for the skinny, sickly, and bedraggled Soutine. “Soutine was grateful for the friendship and for the community that came with it,” the author writes, “but Modigliani’s drunken revelries were also distractions for him. He had come to Paris to paint, and painting was his way of life.” Throughout the First World War, as chaos swirled around him, he focused solely on his art. “Paint was what occupied him, not ideologies or politics or even culture.” He struggled financially, often weak from hunger, and was beset by a debilitating stomach ulcer. His fortunes changed, however, in 1923, when collector Albert Barnes bought 54 of his paintings, single-handedly launching Soutine’s career. Suddenly, Soutine had the reputation of being a great painter—but Marcus asserts that he was not an expressionist. He painted what he saw, not what he felt, “and what he saw, what he noticed and studied, was energy: not anxiety, not alienation, not abjection, not intensity of feeling, but energy, extreme vitality, as he detected it” in the life around him.

A perceptive portrait of an artist’s world.