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Lot 3241 - Z40 Impressionist & Modern Art - Friday, 24. June 2016, 02.00 PM

CHAIM SOUTINE

(Smilavichy 1893 - 1943 Paris)
Paysage du Midi. Circa 1919.
Oil on canvas.
Signed lower left: Soutine.
64.5 x 44.5 cm.

Provenance:
- Henri Bing, Paris.
- Paquereau, Paris.
- François Reichenbach, Paris.
- Paulette Jourdain, Paris.
- Galerie André Urban, Paris (from 1959/-).
- Paul Pétridès, Paris (-/November 1972).
- Art Collection Trust, Basel (November 1972/1985).
- Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, Israel (1985 / May 31, 1990).
- Private collection, Switzerland.

Exhibitions:
- Paris, Galerie Charpentier, 1959, no. 46 (with label on the reverse).
- Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum und Tübingen, London, Lucerne, 1981 to 1982, no. 40 (with colour image).
- New York, Gallery Bellman, 1983 to 1984, no. 10 (with ill.).

Literature:
- Tuchman, Maurice / Dunow, Esti and other: Chaim Soutine (1893 - 1943): Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, Cologne, 2001, no. 30, p. 140 (with colour image).
- Courthion, Pierre: Soutine. Peintre du déchirant, Lausanne, 1972, no. I, p. 224 (with different date and size).

We can make out rudimentary trees, a path and houses in the background. The landscape as a whole appears to curve. For the viewer, the feeling is oppressive and vertiginous. This is typical of the so-called Céret phase of the work of Chaim Soutine.
Soutine visited the south for the first time in the spring and summer of 1918, together with Modigliani, Foujita and the dealer Léopold Zborowski. The trip coincided with the bombing of Paris and was the first time that Soutine had left the capital, after having arrived there five years previously as a Lithuanian migrant.
From 1919 to 1922 he lived mostly in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees, where Picasso and Braque had painted together at the beginning of the decade. The picturesque, tiny villages in the south of France with their old houses and gnarled olive trees had already inspired many artists, such as Renoir, who had lived there for eleven years from 1908 until his death.

In this period Soutine often shows figures in his landscape, as in the case here. On the one hand, they establish the pictorial scale, on the other hand he creates a metaphorical depiction of the relationship between man and nature. He wishes to draw the viewer into the landscape, so that they can move through it and breathe it in. Overhead however, as ever, a threatening character hovers – analogous to Soutine’s own feeling of vulnerability as a Jew in occupied France.
The present painting is a typical example of Soutine’s wild, almost abstract landscapes. Painted with swooping, flourishing impasto, a compact, almost claustrophobic scene is captured.
Maurice Tuchman writes: “In 1919-1922 Soutine created a group of works, which are unique within the modern period: pictures which emanate a vibrant, exuberant feeling, and quite rightly might be described as ecstatic.” (Tuchman, Dunow et al.: Soutine, Cologne 2001, p. 46)


CHF 300 000 / 400 000 | (€ 309 280 / 412 370)

Sold for CHF 240 500 (including buyer’s premium)
All information is subject to change.