Still Life with Violin, Bread, and Fish

This was painted in 1922, and across Paris in those same years the fashionable still life was a cool, analytic thing, with the Cubists breaking a guitar or a bottle into tidy planes. Soutine went the other way. He took a few plain things a poor painter would have on hand, a loaf of bread, a fish, a violin, and made them heave, worked in thick, restless paint against a swirling background. He knew the old masters of this kind of picture, Chardin above all, who two centuries earlier gave humble kitchen things a quiet dignity. Soutine kept the modest subject and threw out the calm. The violin is the odd guest, its dark curve set among the food, a shape he could bend the way he bent faces and landscapes. The picture belongs to the collection of Carl Im Obersteg, a Basel businessman who gathered modern art between the wars, and it has hung on loan at the Kunstmuseum Basel since 2004.