Un peintre de peintre : Chaïm Soutine (1894-1943)

A lecture of Catherine Soussloff, Ph.D.at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) University of British Columbia (UBC), as part of the cycle of lectures ” Excellence of the Canadian research”

Chaïm Soutine’s portraits of the early 20th century pass over or through the subjects of artist, sitter, and viewer.  The relationalities established by the School of Paris through the genre of portraiture extend to each other— to an interconnected group of artists, dealers, collectors– and to the specifics of an older tradition of portraiture that these groups esteemed in common. Soutine’s paintings of artists, maids, bellhops, and bakers also reference the waves of immigrants to the urban centre of Paris, where the genre of portraiture fulfilled a need for the assertion of identity, belonging, and acculturation.  This analysis of Soutine’s early portraits seeks to understand the historical, technical, and theoretical aspects of Soutine’s painting, which the American critic Clement Greenberg—and many others since him–referred to as “painterliness.”