哈伊姆·苏丁肖像

This is one painter's portrait of another, made in Paris in 1916 while the war ground on to the north. Amedeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine were both poor, both Jewish immigrants, both fixtures of the cafes of Montparnasse. Soutine had arrived from what is now Belarus a few years earlier, the child of a village tailor, and he painted in wild, thickly loaded strokes that were the opposite of Modigliani's cool, elongated calm. Modigliani, ten years older, felt protective of him and painted him several times. He sits here in mismatched clothes, hands awkward in his lap, staring out with heavy eyes. Modigliani once described his own drunkenness by saying that everything danced around him as in a landscape by Soutine.