Retrato de um homem (Émile Lejeune)

The man here is Emile Lejeune, a painter from Geneva, and around 1922, when Soutine painted him, his studio on the rue Huyghens in Montparnasse was one of the busiest rooms in Paris. Concerts by the young composers known as Les Six were held there, along with poetry readings by Apollinaire and Cocteau and an exhibition of African art put on by the dealer Paul Guillaume. Lejeune was about to give all that up and move his family south to Cagnes. Soutine paints him with the distortions he pushed everywhere in these years: the neck stretched long above the tie, the nose and ears traced in thin red lines, the mouth reduced to a single red mark. It is a likeness built out of nervous paint rather than careful drawing.