CHAÏM SOUTINE | Nature morte à la coupe de fruits et aux trois bouteilles

Charles Hall Thorndike, France (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Christie's, New York, 9th November 1999, lot 317
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

The canvas is not lined. Examination under UV light reveals a spot of retouching towards the centre of the left edge. Otherwise this work is in overall very good condition.
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The present work by Chaim Soutine is a delicately-rendered still life painted in the years following his move to France from Vilnius. Depicting two gnarled spoons and a sparsely-populated fruit bowl, the protagonists of this dining table attest to the artist’s aesthetic of austerity during the early years of his oeuvre. Around the time at which Nature morte à la coupe de fruits et aux trois bouteilles (circa 1916) was painted, Soutine had recently finished art school and moved into a studio in Montparnasse. Reflecting the meagre conditions in which the artist was living, the menu for Soutine’s early still lives was undoubtedly as deficient in rich cuisine as the artist’s own palate. Three bottles of wine are dotted around the table, and the white flesh of a cut apple is sticky and brown with oxidisation, seeming to presage the decaying flesh of the artist’s later subjects. While the singularly emotive, visceral quality of Soutine’s work resists a canonical reading of modernism, there are elements of the present lot which manifest the influence of Cézanne in the flattening of forms and colours, while also showing evidence of the Cubist foreshortening of perspective. The considered yet bold application of impasto in the present work is evidence of Soutine’s ability to stretch the potentiality of oil. The artist stands apart from many others in his profession for never having executed any drawings, conducting the process of working and reworking an image entirely in layers finished with oil or pastel. The gradual contraction of pictorial space around Soutine’s later subjects, particularly in his still lives depicting fleshy, flayed carcasses and fish, is contained embryonically in the present work.

In Nature Morte each object is foregrounded as a discrete entity endowed with purpose, serving as evidence for the artist’s increasing fascination with the expressive power of individual objects. Tuchman, Dunow and Perls have remarked on the artist’s particular rendering of inanimate objects in the following years, noting that ‘the anthropomorphic suggestions in the landscapes [...] and still-lifes (the grasping claws or handlike forks) make us aware of the power of associations now originating for Soutine in the actual objects. The paint and stroke are as evocative of energy as ever, but the object depicted takes on greater and greater attention' (Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow & Klaus Perls, Chaim Soutine, Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1993, p. 340).



This work will be included in the forthcoming third volume of the Chaïm Soutine Catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow.