Woman in Pink

By 1924, when Soutine painted this seated woman, his luck had just turned. Two years earlier he was penniless in Paris, with canvases he could barely sell. Then the American collector Albert Barnes walked into a dealer's back room and bought roughly 60 of his paintings at once. Almost overnight Soutine had money and a name on both sides of the Atlantic. You can feel that freedom in this portrait. He twists the woman into a rising column of red, coral and yellow, and bends the gold chair beneath her so it seems to melt to the shape of her body. Nothing sits still. The pink dress is worked so thickly that the paint itself becomes the subject, ridged and alive under the light.