Chaïm Soutine

Chaïm Soutine painted as if the paint itself were flesh. Born into a poor Jewish family near Minsk in the Russian Empire, he made his way to Paris around 1913 and lived for years in real hunger among the immigrant painters of Montparnasse, close friends with Amedeo Modigliani, who believed in him early. His canvases writhe, portraits and landscapes alike smeared and twisted with thick, urgent paint.

His fortunes turned in a single afternoon. In 1923 the American collector Albert Barnes walked into his squalid studio and bought dozens of his pictures on the spot, and Soutine, penniless one day, is said to have hailed a taxi and ridden it all the way to the Riviera the next. For one series he hung a whole ox carcass in his studio and painted it as it rotted, dousing it in fresh blood to keep the colour and horrifying his neighbours with the smell.

The war closed in on him. As a Jew in occupied France he hid in the countryside, moving to stay ahead of arrest. A stomach ulcer he had long suffered burst, and a risky journey to Paris for surgery came too late. He died there in 1943 and was buried under a name that was not his own.