Éva

Soutine painted this woman in a black dress in Paris in 1928. He had come there from a village near Minsk, one of many poor Jewish immigrants in Montparnasse, and by the late 1920s an American collector had bought dozens of his canvases in a single sweep and pulled him out of real poverty. Éva sits with her arms folded, a little wary, and the painter never explained who she was. Decades later, back in the part of the world Soutine had left, the picture took on a life he could not have foreseen: during the Belarusian protests of 2020 her folded-arm pose was printed on posters and shirts as a quiet emblem of defiance.