Untitled: Women’s clothing and ageing femininity in the portraits of Chaim Soutine

Abstract

Chaim Soutine’s (1893–1943) representation of clothes in his portraits has attracted very little scholarly or curatorial attention to date. For the first time in the near century of literature that has accumulated about the artist, this article discusses the women in Soutine’s portraits, focussing on their clothing and age, and ageing femininity more generally as a subject within Soutine’s practice. The status and fashions of women in inter-war France provide a context to demonstrate that youth, newness and fashionableness were not subjects for the artist, who instead favoured white women of middle- to older-age wearing their ‘Sunday best’ as his models. His practice of framing, containing and presenting women for inspection is also demonstrated for the first time, as well as the nuanced balance he strikes between accurately representing the details of studied garments and intensely working wider areas of colour in the same painting. The article’s wider conclusion is that acknowledgement of the complexity and rigour of Soutine’s art – including his detailed depiction of his sitters’ clothing – has consistently been blocked by the image of Soutine as purely expressionistic, uncontrolled painter, an image that must be released if new analysis of his work, such as that undertaken in this article, is going to take place.