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Art of the 20th Century
Chaim Soutine
Chaim Soutine
(b Smilovitchi, nr Minsk, 1893; d Paris, 9 Aug 1943).
Russian painter of Belorussian birth. He was brought up in a Lithuanian Jewish ghetto and took an early interest in drawing, encountering opposition in his community for his defiance of the Talmudic interdictions concerning images. At 16 he left for Minsk, and between 1910 and 1913 he studied at a small academy in Vilna (now Vilnius) that accepted Jews, where he learnt about Russian art and its avant-garde movements. He was a brilliant student, expressing himself only in tragic themes. Like his fellow students Pinchus Krémègne and Marcel Kikoïne (1892–1968), he dreamt of going to Paris and was able to make the journey in 1913. He enrolled in Fernand Cormon’s studio in the Académie des Beaux-Arts (1913–15) but quickly realized that his visits to the Louvre, where he discovered Fouquet, Tintoretto, El Greco, Raphael, Goya, Ingres, Courbet and Rembrandt, were for him a more fruitful form of study.
