The Turkey

In 1925, in a studio near Montparnasse, Soutine began painting dead animals in series. Alongside his famous flayed carcasses of beef came plucked and half-plucked birds, and this turkey is one of them. A couple of years earlier the American collector Albert Barnes had bought dozens of his canvases at once, and for the first time Soutine had money to spend. The bird is not laid out on a table, as in an old still life. It hangs from the hook of a small skylight, its long body stretched on a diagonal against the pale window frame, the beak open, the feet curled up. The Orangerie links these hanging fowl to a ritual Soutine saw as a child in a Jewish village near Minsk, where on the eve of Yom Kippur a chicken is swung over the head and then slaughtered. The painting belonged to the dealer Paul Guillaume, the man who had first shown Soutine's work to Barnes.