This winter, I was in London and saw an exhibition of a painter whose work I have met and re-met throughout my life, Chaim Soutine. It was a small exhibition, in two rooms at the Courtauld Gallery, of the French painter’s intimate, visceral portraits of waiters, pastry chefs, bellboys and chambermaids. They were painted mainly between 1919 and 1929, first in the town of Céret, in southwest France, and then in the Paris of opulent restaurants and grand hotels. The exhibition was the first time that these portraits, many of which are in private collections, had been brought together, and the show had the feeling of lost time—as though, if we looked closely enough, the portraits, in their swirl of paint, would tell us something we needed to know.
Soutine was born in Smilovichi, Lithuania, in 1893, to a Jewish family of limited means. He studied art in Vilnius and arrived in Paris, twenty years old and virtually penniless, in 1913—the year the Armory Show opened in New York and Diaghilev’s “The Rite of Spring” premièred in Paris. It would have been hard to ascertain what exactly Soutine, as an immigrant, had to offer this cultural ferment. His pictures were seen as uncouth “monstrosities,” and he himself was uncouth, unruly, and unmoored: an outsider. He turned up in Montparnasse and found himself living in a kind of commune of squalid apartments called La Ruche (“the Beehive“); among his neighbors were Chagall and Archipenko, also Jewish immigrants. Shortly after his arrival, Soutine was befriended by Modigliani, who championed his work to his own dealer, Léopold Zborowski, who, despite misgivings, gave Soutine a tiny allowance. Even so, Paris was too expensive. Zborowski encouraged him to decamp to Céret, in the Pyrenees, an informal artists’ colony; both Picasso and Braque had spent time there—perhaps greatness would rub off.
It was in Céret that Soutine made his first portrait of a member of the local hotel-kitchen staff, the pastry chef Remi Zochetto, in his white uniform, crinkled like a meringue, his outsized ear like a crusty palmier. Zochetto is one of the few subjects known by name; but there’s evidence that all the portraits were painted from life. Others followed—the bellboy in his red uniform, with a supplicating palm; a valet, seated with his arms crossed, truculent, on a three-legged stool; a chambermaid in a blue apron, her face like a windfall apple. What did he see in them? Like Soutine himself, they were young, unsure of themselves, living apart from their families, apprenticed to craft. There are no records to indicate how he asked or cajoled them into posing for him. Zochetto claimed that he was offered ten sous, but recalled, “He didn’t have ten sous!” Soutine offered him a painting, instead. Why did they pose? Was it to find themselves, for once, at the center of someone’s gaze? The relationship between a model and a painter is a curious one: the lines of power run both ways. What if the pastry boy decided not to return? To reject the pose? The postures Soutine requested—and got—were the poses of courtesans and kings. The figures fill the picture plane and eradicate it.
Soutine left Céret and returned to Paris. In an afternoon that must have felt as if the tent of his life had been struck by lightning, his fortunes changed. In December, 1922, Dr. Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, bought fifty-two of his canvases. Soutine moved to a larger studio. He was able to buy a suit. He bought carcasses of cows at the butcher, hung them up in the studio, and painted meat. The carcasses were infested with flies. He kept at it.
Like Caravaggio, who painted some of the most disturbing and beautiful pictures in the world, and whom these portraits call to mind, Soutine was interested in the agencies of the flesh. In the snarl of paint on the canvas, you can feel his hand on the brush. A pulse seems to flush the painted body beneath the uniform; the art critic Élie Faure, an early champion of Soutine, wrote that his work “gives off a profound heat.”
The first time I recall seeing a painting by Soutine was thirty years ago, in a gallery on Madison Avenue. I remember stomping snow off my boots to go inside. His reputation was then in eclipse. I was with my first husband, who is a painter, and we were about to make an offer on an apartment. I wanted to have a baby. The picture, of two children, braving the wind on a hillside road, determined against Soutine’s brackish torrent of trees, moved me. Who were those children? Were they leaving home? Returning? Lost? I said to my husband, “I want to buy the picture.” I had not bought a picture before; the thought of buying a picture, certainly one in an East Side gallery, had not previously occurred to me. He said, reasonably, that I could either buy the picture or buy the apartment. We bought the apartment. I had a baby. My husband and I separated. I married again, and acquired two stepchildren. I had another baby.
It was a similarly cold, snowy day when I went to see Soutine in London, and my eldest daughter accompanied me. As we walked through the galleries, we came across a group of schoolchildren whose attention had been directed to a painting by Degas; the children had their arms in the air, copying the dancer’s fourth position. I thought of Lewis Carroll’s Alice: “ ‘What is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’ ” Stories teach us how to read our own lives, but pictures, too, lead us toward the lives that could be our own.
Some days later, my daughter asked me to send her the image of the painting by Soutine that I remembered from that other winter day long ago, “Two Children on a Road.” The next morning, on my way out the door, I saw, as if for the first time, a framed eight-by-ten color photograph of two of my children. In the foreground, a little girl in a printed summer pinafore and blue sneakers is pulling hard at a red wagon. Her brother, in red shorts and an orange T-shirt, is standing guard, walking a little ahead of her. It is clear from his stance that he would help her if she would let him, but she that has refused help. Her whole body strains at her task. Behind them is a swale filled with long grasses and cattails, and the sandy road at their feet winds into the hillside. “That’s what I thought, too,” my daughter said when we spoke on the telephone the next day. The painting looked like the photograph.
I’m not sure what to make of all this. I didn’t buy the painting. But the life it represented was one that came to me. The photograph is a kind of proof. The child, putting her weight to her task on the country lane, buffeted by the wind. I think I took the photograph, but I don’t remember. If I did, which child was I seeing through the camera’s eye? In the exhibit in London, the faces stare from the frames, caught not off guard but on: the position from which we peer down the tunnel of time. Chaim Soutine came from elsewhere to France, and he painted pictures of those who perform small tasks: waiting on tables, carrying bags, constructing a petit four. He gave them the stature of kings, and the pictures say to the viewer, “Make a life.”
