La mesa

In 1919 Soutine had been in Paris six years, painting hard and selling almost nothing. That year the dealer Leopold Zborowski, who also handled Modigliani, began paying him a small allowance and sent him south to Ceret in the Pyrenees, taking the canvases in return. This table belongs to those years. The coffeepot, the bottle, the dish of fruit and the two pieces of meat refuse to sit still. The tabletop tilts away to the right and the objects look as though they are sliding rather than resting on it. Meat stayed with him. Six years later he had a whole beef carcass carried up to his Paris studio and went on painting it while the neighbours complained about the smell. The picture belonged to Paul Guillaume, one of the first dealers to buy Soutine seriously, and passed from his widow's collection to the French state in 1963.