Commanding, incisive and psychologically potent, Portrait de jeune fille of circa 1928 exemplifies Chaïm Soutine’s celebrated portraiture. Unlike contemporaries such as Modigliani who had frequently painted portraits of attractive nudes or fashionable doyennes (fig. 1), Soutine famously preferred to depict.mes mbers of the working class—waiters, bellhops, cooks, and maids—or those otherwise relegated to the margins of modern society (fig. 2).

Often rendered in frontal half-length or three-quarter-length poses with formal dress, these sitters were imbued with a compelling individual identity through Soutine’s singularly visceral handling of paint and expressive distortions. In so doing, Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls underscore, Soutine affirmed his subjects’ bodies and existential plight as worthy of consideration: “Though Soutine may project his inner turbulence and most personal feelings onto his subjects, the viewer never loses sight of a particular physical entity being carefully observed and experienced. Even the […] shiftings and dislocations of body parts do not destroy the essential recognition in each painting of a certain person and a reality specific to him or her” (Chaim Soutine, Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, Cologne, 1993, p. 509).

Gazing intently at the viewer, the anonymous sitter of Portrait de jeune fille holds an expressive physical presence that exceeds the confines of her form. Soutine positions the young girl at the very front of his pictorial space, creating a sense of immediacy that is heightened by energised brushwork. The sitter exudes vitality through Soutine’s spontaneous modeling: her sumptuous, ruddy flesh tones are interspersed with viscous drips of paint, bursts of red and blue pigment and the exaggerated marks of her facial features. As Merlin James writes: “The liquidity and malleability of paint acknowledge the mutability of faces and bodies. Agitated adjustments, pent.mes nti and elisions all speak of animation, suggesting not just that the artist’s perceptions develop as he looks but that his viewpoint is perhaps shifting […]. We detect the direction and speed of the strokes, the discharge of the paint from the brush, the trickle of drops […]. The humanity of his sitters is a matter of full, empathetically felt embodiment that can only exist in t.mes ” (Exh. Cat., London, The Courtauld Gallery, Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys, p. 91). Such unbridled gestural qualities anticipate the figurative works of Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning and would have a significant impact on twentieth century art (fig. 3)

The frenetic intensity with which Soutine renders the sitter’s body is counterbalanced by the abstraction with which he constructs the surrounding elements of the present work, particularly the clothing that dissolves into brightly contrasted passages of red, green, brown and black. While sumptuous blue backgrounds grace a number of the artist’s portraits from this period, Portrait de jeune fille is distinguished by the manner in which Soutine enshrouds the young girl in rhythmic, auratic brushstrokes akin to the “centrifugal waves'' most commonly seen in the artist’s landscapes (fig. 4) (Jack Tworkov in “The Wandering Soutine,” Art News, vol 49, no. 7, November 1950, p. 32). Amplifying the expressive power of the present work, this compositional device parallels similar techniques used in the angst-laden portraits of van Gogh and Munch (figs. 5 and 6). Capturing this same strength of emotion, Portrait de jeune fille distills the expressivity and uniquely vivid quality of Soutine’s portraiture.