Chaim Soutine

After working for many years in Paris, Soutine produced a series of works in towns in the South of France. He had been sent to the Midi by his dealer Léopold Zborowski in 1918, and he painted fervent landscapes at Céret that prefigured the violent brushwork used by artists of the COBRA movement and Abstract Expressionism. From 1923 to 1925 Soutine divided his time between Cagnes, neighbouring villages, and Paris. The dynamic paintings produced at Cagnes took on a lighter air of fairy-tale enchantment. The palette became brighter and more luminous and the brushstrokes more rounded. The tree had a special place in his work of this period, as protector, rendered on the same scale as houses and men.  In Paysage à la route montante, the steep mountainous paths afford Soutine a plunging perspective which he welds together under the over-arching tree. The canvas barely contains the swirling energy of the forms resulting in a strangely claustrophobic relationship with nature. As Maurice Tuchman wrote: 'Soutine would always make spatial compression uniquely meaningful to his own expression, thereby transforming what could have been merely a pictorial into a supremely personal metaphor. This became Soutine’s means of expressing the ineluctable fusion of all form and matter, the identification of form and flesh and pigment that is so basic to his still lifes, landscapes, and portraits throughout the 1920s’ (M. Tuchman, 'Chaim Soutine (1893-1943). Life and Work', in Maurice Tuchman , Esti Dunow & Klaus Perls, Chaim Soutine. Catalogue Raisonné, Cologne, 1993, vol. I, p. 18).