Chaim Soutine: The Tortured Vision of a Shtetl Boy in Paris

The Boy Who Was Beaten for Drawing

In the small Lithuanian shtetl of Smilavichy, near Minsk, the tenth child of a poor Jewish mending tailor did something forbidden: he drew pictures. In the traditional Jewish world of early twentieth-century Eastern Europe, the Second Commandment’s prohibition against graven images was taken seriously. Art was suspect. Drawing was dangerous.

When the boy drew a portrait of the local rabbi, the rabbi’s son beat him so badly that he was bedridden for days. His mother sued, won a small settlement, and the boy used the money to buy art supplies. It was, perhaps, the most consequential beating in the history of modern art.

Chaim Soutine (1893–1943) became one of the most powerful painters of the twentieth century — an artist whose raw, distorted, emotionally violent canvases influenced Abstract Expressionism and still shock viewers today. He painted as if trying to tear reality open and show the screaming flesh beneath.

From Smilavichy to Paris

Soutine’s childhood was one of grinding poverty and isolation. His father mended clothes for a community that could barely afford to pay. The family was large, food was scarce, and the boy’s desire to make images set him apart from everyone around him.

He studied art briefly in Minsk and Vilna, then in 1913, at age nineteen, scraped together enough money to travel to Paris — the magnet that drew so many Eastern European Jewish artists. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and settled in La Ruche (“The Beehive”), a ramshackle artists’ colony in Montparnasse where Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and other immigrants lived and worked in tiny studios.

The poverty in Paris was different from the poverty of the shtetl — it came with freedom. Soutine could paint whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted. And he painted with a fury that alarmed even his fellow artists. He was unwashed, socially awkward, subject to fits of rage and despair, and completely dedicated to his art.

Modigliani and Friendship

Soutine’s closest friend in Paris was Amedeo Modigliani — the elegant Italian-Jewish painter who was his opposite in nearly every way. Where Modigliani was handsome and charming, Soutine was unkempt and difficult. Where Modigliani painted serene, elongated figures, Soutine painted convulsing landscapes and tortured faces.

But they shared a deep bond: both were Jewish outsiders in the Parisian art world, both were poor, both were sick (Modigliani with tuberculosis, Soutine with chronic stomach ulcers), and both were driven by a compulsion to paint that overrode everything else. Modigliani painted Soutine several times, and Soutine was devastated by Modigliani’s death in 1920.

The Carcasses

Soutine’s most famous paintings are his beef carcasses — enormous, glistening sides of meat, painted in reds, purples, and blues that are simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. Inspired by Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, Soutine hung actual beef carcasses in his studio and painted them over days as they decomposed.

The neighbors complained about the smell. The police arrived. Soutine reportedly poured buckets of blood over the meat to keep the colors fresh. The resulting paintings are visceral, overwhelming — images of flesh stripped bare, of mortality made visible.

Some scholars connect these paintings to Soutine’s childhood exposure to shechitah (Jewish ritual slaughter) and the kosher laws governing the treatment of animal flesh. Whether or not Soutine intended this connection, the carcass paintings vibrate with the tension between sacred and profane, between the beauty of paint and the horror of death.

Sudden Fame

In 1923, the American collector Albert C. Barnes visited Paris and bought approximately fifty of Soutine’s paintings in a single day. Overnight, Soutine went from destitution to relative wealth. He bought new clothes (which he quickly ruined), ate at restaurants, and continued painting with undiminished intensity.

His landscapes of Céret and Cagnes-sur-Mer — churning, tilting, almost nauseating in their energy — look like the earth itself is in agony. His portraits of bellboys, pastry cooks, and waiters transform ordinary people into figures of existential intensity.

Hiding and Death

When the Nazis occupied France in 1940, Soutine was trapped. As a Jewish foreign national, he was in extreme danger. Friends helped him hide in the French countryside, moving from village to village, but the stress and deprivation worsened his chronic stomach ulcers.

In August 1943, his ulcer perforated. Friends smuggled him to Paris in a hearse — the only vehicle unlikely to be stopped at German checkpoints. He arrived at the hospital too late. Chaim Soutine died on August 9, 1943, at forty-nine. He was buried in Montparnasse cemetery, steps from where he had once starved for his art.

Legacy

Soutine’s influence on later art is immense. Willem de Kooning called him “the greatest painter of the twentieth century.” Francis Bacon cited his carcass paintings as a primary inspiration. The raw, physical intensity of his brushwork — paint applied in thick, swirling masses — paved the way for Abstract Expressionism.

He was a man who was beaten for drawing and died in hiding, whose art transformed suffering into something terrible and beautiful. The shtetl boy who broke the commandment against images created some of the most unforgettable images in the history of art.