Barbara Purcell at Salmagundi:
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.
more here.
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