Chaïm Soutine

Paris in 1915 had emptied of young men. Modigliani had tried to enlist the year before and was turned down on health grounds, and the painter he put on this small board was in the same position, a foreigner who was not in the army. Chaïm Soutine had reached Paris in 1913 from the art school at Vilna, and before that from Smilavichy, a shtetl near Minsk. He was about ten years younger than Modigliani and had little French when they met in Montparnasse, where neither of them was anyone yet. This is the earliest of the portraits Modigliani made of him. It is oil on wood, roughly the size of a sheet of writing paper, a head seen straight on rather than the seated half-lengths that came later. The following year Modigliani took Soutine to his own dealer, Léopold Zborowski, which is how Soutine began to sell. The museum in Stuttgart bought the panel in 1959, with money from a state lottery.