Soutine’s paintings are so different in appearance from other paintings, and from anything with which we are familiar in the real world, that the first effect is likely to be one of utter bewilderment. There is but little clue for their classification in any of the traditions, and often they seem to be mere masses of thick, brilliantly colored paint, thrown together without rhyme or reason. But even with all this bewilderment there is a feeling of intense and pervasive power that arrests and holds the attention; then we begin to perceive that this apparent jumble of strange elements is a design that conveys the feeling of power.
Executed circa 1921, Les gorges du Loup (La maison hantée) IV epitomises a period of intense creative exploration that Soutine had embarked on several years earlier, when – on the advice of his dealer, the Polish poet Léopold Zborowski – the artist installed himself in the picturesque Pyrénéen town of Céret in the South of France. Soutine’s prolific output during this t.mes – there are approximately 200 canvases from his three-year stay in Céret – represents some of his most ground-breaking and celebrated work.
As Esti Dunow writes, ‘It was here that he came into his own, that he developed the personal expression of his art. Very quickly after he arrived here, the highly figurative style that was his until 1919 attained a pitch of violent expressionism, marked by intense colours and powerful, distorted forms verging on sheer abstraction in certain pictures’ (quoted in Exh. Cat., Céret, Musée d’art moderne de Céret, Soutine, Céret 1919-1922, 2000, p. 10).
Maurice Tuchman commented on Soutine’s work from this period in the following way: ‘His Céret landscapes have often been referred to as unstable and earthquakelike, vibrating with movement, upheaval, and fever. Indeed, Soutine's avoidance of any pure horizontals or verticals in his forms accounts in part for the feeling of instability. The chaotic swirl of brush and paint, together with the packed tangle of forms, creates an intense image of raw energy. But while the Céret landscapes appear tumultuous and anarchic, the underlying pictorial organization is deliberate’ (M. Tuchman, E. Dunow and K. Perls, Chaïm Soutine, Catalogue raisonné, vol. I, Cologne, 1993, p. 97).
'The chaotic swirl of brush and paint, together with the packed tangle of forms, creates an intense image of raw energy.'
Having discovered Soutine’s works from this period shortly after the artist’s return to Paris in 1922, the renowned American collects or Albert C. Barnes, who once owned the present work, noted this sense of deliberateness and intention in his 1925 essay on the artist: ‘The great variety in the colour, the bizarre directions of line, and the unusual divisions of space, give rise to a series of powerful and stirring rhythms that flow from one end of the canvas to the other. These rhythms, greatly diversified in size and intensity, render the basic feeling of rhythmic power that is to be found in all of his best work’ (A. C. Barnes, The Art in Painting, New York, 1925, p. 327).
While depicting an urban view enclosed by a rocky landscape, the title of the present work, Les gorges du Loup (La maison hantée) IV, links it to an area near Nice famous for its waterfalls, where the artist ventured out for an occasional change of scenery while based in Céret. However, it is worth noting that two works by Soutine with similar titles from the collects ions of the National Galleries of Scotland and the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation have recently been retitled to reflect that, due to their compositional elements and stylistic features, they probably depict Céret itself (figs. 3 and 4).
Right: Fig. 4, Chaïm Soutine, Chemin de la Fontaine des Tins à Céret, circa 1920, Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation, New York (previously titled Les Gorges du Loup)
In its compositional dynamism, energetic brushwork and the thick and gestural application of paint, Les gorges du Loup (La maison hantée) IV is exemplary of the intense creativity that defined this pivotal moment in Soutine’s creative career. Representing, in Dunow’s words, ‘the pure and essential Soutine’, works from the Céret period influenced several subsequent generations of artists, among them, the American Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s (fig. 5), who were deeply inspired by the artist’s ‘seemingly uncontrolled but immensely descriptive brush gesture’ (Hjorvardur Arnason quoted in Exh. Cat., New York, The Jewish Museum; Los Angeles, Los Angeles Museum of Art and Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Museum, An Expressionist in Paris. The Paintings of Chaïm Soutine, 1998, p. 77).
