The Idiot

Around 1920 Soutine was living in Céret, a small town in the French Pyrenees close to the Spanish border, where his dealer had sent him to paint far from Paris. He had come to France from a poor Jewish village near Minsk, and in these years he was often hungry and almost unknown. This portrait sets a local man against a burning red ground, his body pulled out of shape, the ears and hands too big, the black clothes edged in a white line that seems to shudder. Soutine laid the paint on thick and worked it fast, so the whole figure looks pushed around by the brush. He turned hard on his own Céret pictures later and destroyed a great many of them. This one he let live.