Here is the unique and surprising story of two brilliant painters, seemingly opposite in everything, in appearance and artistic style: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) and Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943). Side by side, these two would write a major, obscure and mysterious chapter in the history of modern art. Under what circumstances did these two giants meet, and how did their bold friendship grow, a friendship that lasted only five years before death separated them?
This article will focus on those five years, during which Amedeo, in his thirties, and Chaïm, in his twenties, painted and spent time together, amid material hardship and spiritual exaltation. Bohemia, did we say?
The Meeting of Two Giants
Amedeo Modigliani was born in Tuscany to a wealthy family; Soutine fled the poverty and pogroms of a Russian shtetl. Two Jews, strangers in Paris, who, before World War I, would meet and become partners in hardship and in art. Modigliani drew inspiration from African, Far Eastern and Oceanic tribal art, as well as from Paul Cézanne; Soutine admired Rembrandt.
Both wanted to paint portraits, but the Italian searched for beauty, for the pure line, for a stylized, chiseled drawing, and for that he elongated the faces of his subjects, while the Russian favored ageless figures, bleeding cuts of meat, still lifes and dismembered landscapes.
Amedeo, handsome as a god, charming and a heartbreaker, never abandoned his friend, but died before him, in 1920, at only 36, in a Paris hospital. His pregnant partner took her own life two days after his death, jumping from a window at her parents’ home.
Chaïm, whom some described as unkempt and others as ugly, would meet, almost by miracle, an American billionaire who bought fifty of his works. But the comfort, fame and renown brought by his chance meeting with Albert Barnes, his savior from Philadelphia, would not last. The Nazi occupation and illness put an end to them. Chaïm died in 1943, during surgery in a Paris hospital, largely forgotten and in a state of deep psychological, not just physical, distress.
Modigliani’s paintings fetch high prices today. Who doesn’t know the portraits, the nude paintings? The poverty, the alcohol and drugs, the angelic face, the early death, the suicide of his pregnant partner: all of these turned him into a legend. Amedeo Modigliani, the last of the cursed painters, led a truly bohemian life. Chaïm Soutine, less famous than his friend, astonishing and shattering in his tormented paintings, is nonetheless considered a forerunner of abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and even Francis Bacon are his acknowledged heirs.
American abstract expressionism would not be what it is without Chaïm Soutine’s paintings. Soutine’s contribution to 20th-century art still isn’t appreciated by the general public as much as it deserves.
Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine met in Paris in 1915, in the middle of the war. Amedeo, the handsome prince of Montparnasse, a favorite with women, had already spent eight years in the capital. He came from a bourgeois, educated family that lived in a fine house on the main street of Livorno, and he recited Dante and Lautréamont fluently and with ease, while Chaïm, who had arrived from a shtetl on the edges of Russia only two years earlier, wild haired, unkempt, shy and withdrawn, still spoke halting French.
A Shared Jewish Culture
Their shared culture as Jews and their devotion to their artistic calling drew the two artists together, who met thanks to the initiative of a third Jewish artist, the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. Modigliani and Soutine, however, came from different worlds. The first was born in 1884 in Livorno, to a wealthy family that had lost its fortune. Amedeo’s health was fragile, and his loving mother cared for him and encouraged him to paint from a young age. After studying and traveling in Rome, Florence, Venice, Capri and Naples, young Amedeo settled in Paris.
The second, Chaïm Soutine, was born in 1893 in Smilovichi, a village near Minsk, in what is now Belarus. Living conditions in the shtetl were extremely harsh, and little Chaïm was born into a large family that often went hungry. It is said that the gifted boy painted a portrait of the village rabbi, in defiance of the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4). The rabbi’s son, a butcher by trade, beat the bold young painter severely.
Chaïm’s mother obtained financial compensation from the rabbi that allowed her to send her talented son to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vilnius. Two years later, Chaïm arrived in Paris, at the time a refuge for Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing the terror of pogroms for a country that was, in that period, less antisemitic.
All the men of draft age went off to the front. In Paris remained the sick, the disabled and the foreigners. Modigliani, a foreigner and an artist exempted because he suffered from tuberculosis, was likely viewed with suspicion. Near “La Rotonde,” the legendary café where many Jewish artists gathered around its tables, people raised their fists shouting “death to foreigners.” And yet, quite paradoxically, the Paris of those days, tolerant as it was, let its foreign artists live and create.
But under what conditions. Modigliani and Soutine rented a room together in the artists’ colony in the 15th arrondissement, Cité Falguière, where they suffered gnawing hunger, bitter cold and an infestation of bedbugs that rained down on them and tormented them. Art dealers still had no interest in unknown artists. Modigliani, about ten years older than Soutine, was the first to recognize his talent and took him under his wing, like a loving and protective father.
The two worked, suffered and caroused together. During that period of dire material hardship, Amedeo made at least four portraits of his friend Chaïm. The first, in a small format, is especially intense. The white dots in the pupils seem to hint at a rare wisdom, a gift for vision and prophecy.
Little by little, young Chaïm matures, gaining self-confidence, and this growth shows in his friend’s paintings. In another portrait, in a larger format, Chaïm is painted wrapped in an impressive coat, his hands on his knees, but his fingers spread apart as in the priestly blessing.
It’s not certain Soutine was pleased with being portrayed this way, as a priest. The boy from the shtetl was, of course, steeped in Jewishness, in his upbringing and his sensitivity, but he had no wish to be a representative of Jewish art. This is how art historian and curator Marc Restellini tells it, in the documentary broadcast on the French channel France 5, on which this article is based (1).
A Shared Enthusiasm for Classical Art
It wasn’t only their shared Jewishness that brought the two painters close, but also their shared enthusiasm for the classical artists who preceded them. Soutine greatly loved François Clouet (1515-1572), Chardin (1699-1779), Goya (1746-1828), Corot (1796-1875) and Courbet (1819-1877), but above all he worshipped Rembrandt (1606-1669).
Soutine often visited the Louvre and danced passionately in front of Rembrandt’s paintings, while the guards watched him with puzzled eyes. Rembrandt’s “The Flayed Ox” inspired a series of paintings starting in 1925, the closest of which to Rembrandt’s work bears the same name.
Rembrandt’s work was meant to release the scream that had been stifled in young Chaïm’s throat when he watched the local butcher of his hometown slit the throat of a goose with open pleasure. For his whole life, Chaïm struggled to let out that strangled scream.
Soutine would pay a later tribute, in 1931, to a Rembrandt painting depicting a woman about to bathe in a river:
You can find Chaïm Soutine’s version of this painting, titled “Woman Entering the Water,” from 1931, here.
And what about Modigliani? A year after Paul Cézanne’s death, in 1907, 56 of his works were shown at the “Salon d’Automne,” at the “Grand Palais” in Paris, a retrospective that left a deep mark on the artists of his generation, Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and others, and Modigliani, too, was greatly influenced by it.
Two Friends Find, Side by Side, Each His Own Style
Modigliani was a frequent visitor to the Trocadéro Museum, which at that time was full of ancient sculptures from Africa, Asia and Oceania. The painter was so impressed by them that he decided to pursue his earlier ambition of being, first and foremost, a sculptor, and even added that title to his name.
In 1908, Amedeo became acquainted with the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși, whose name in French is pronounced Brancusi. Brancusi taught his friend Amedeo the fundamentals of his art. Modigliani drew inspiration from sculptures from Africa, Egypt, Cambodia, the Cycladic islands and the Iberian Peninsula, but he did not imitate them; rather, he mixed them, one element from here and another from there, to create a combination of his own.
Modigliani sculpted with great enthusiasm, but before long he was forced to give up the pursuit he regarded as his true calling. Stone and marble dust had damaged his lungs. Amedeo, who like Brancusi saw sculpture as a great art and had devoted himself to it heart and soul, giving everything he had, was bitterly disappointed.
He only managed to complete thirty sculptures. The grief over the end of this period gnawed at him and never let go. In the paintings that followed, you can see the influence of sculpture. In the work “Red Head,” for example, the figure’s neck seems to float and the face resembles a mask, in the style of the sculptures of the Fang people of Gabon. Slowly, shaped by his experience with sculpture, the artist developed his distinctive style, reminiscent of painted sculptures.
Chaïm Soutine, alongside his friend Amedeo, also found his own way. Chaïm painted the poverty of everyday life. Three salted fish, that was his meal. And beyond expressing poverty, the painting cries out with a double violence: the killing of the animal and its being eaten afterward. The sights of the shtetl of his childhood left their mark on him forever.
Bohemian Life in Montparnasse
Amedeo and Chaïm devoted their days to work and creation, while in the evenings they went out together to spend time in the bars of Montparnasse. During World War I and between the two world wars, the Montparnasse neighborhood became an important artistic center, even more cosmopolitan than Montmartre had been before it.
On the café terraces, Amedeo and Chaïm met Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Moïse Kisling, André Derain, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Jean Cocteau, André Salmon, Adolphe Basler, and the muse-model-painter-singer-actress, the queen of the neighborhood, Kiki de Montparnasse, among many others.
But above all, Amedeo and Chaïm frequented the café-brasserie La Rotonde. In 1911, Victor Libion bought a shoe shop and turned it into an artistic café, one of the most famous in Paris and indeed in the whole world. Victor Libion, who had come to Paris from his home region of Auvergne, understood everything. He instructed his waiters to let the artists sit wherever they liked, without demanding a steady stream of orders they could not have paid for anyway.
He also displayed their works on his walls, paintings that in any case had failed to sell elsewhere. Victor Libion gave the artists a pleasant place where they could warm up, drink and eat, meet colleagues, talk, and earn a little money. Libion turned the café into a popular spot thanks to the pleasant atmosphere he created with his generous, warm and captivating personality.
Modigliani, outgoing, would sit on the terrace and dash off portraits for a franc or two to pay for his drinks. The withdrawn Soutine would sit in a corner and watch in silence. But though he was known as gloomy, tormented and taciturn, he and Amedeo had their share of fun together. Both drank to excess, and Chaïm even admitted that one day he was so drunk from this habit that he circled endlessly around La Rotonde unable to find the entrance…
Another kind soul, besides Victor Libion, was the Russian painter-sculptor-designer Marie Vassilieff, a multi-talented artist, an active and successful woman who founded an art academy, organized lectures, salons and parties, an important figure in Montparnasse, whose sought-after cloth and leather dolls sold for high prices in London, Berlin and New York. In 1914, Marie Vassilieff opened a popular canteen for poor artists in her studio.
For just a few cents, the painters found a warm place to sit, meet colleagues, eat, and, for a tiny bit more, even drink a glass of wine. Marie Vassilieff’s canteen, registered as a private club, enjoyed the privilege of staying open late into the night, unlike the other cafés and restaurants, which were forced by the curfew to close early.
Marie Vassilieff and Ossip Zadkine taught the guests Russian dances, Picasso imitated a bullfighter to entertain the crowd, a Norwegian artist played the violin, and a Swedish artist played the piano (2). Artists from every corner of the world rubbed shoulders with the local French artists, influencing them and being influenced in turn. This is how the “School of Paris” was born. Conversations about the nature of art and each artist’s personal dreams went on with great enthusiasm.
Modigliani and Soutine: Art as a Way of Life
Modigliani and Soutine both focused on portraiture. Their shared goal was to reflect the soul through it, but Amedeo revealed its poetic sublimity through what might be called “beauty,” while Chaïm revealed its tormented struggles through what might be called “ugliness.”
The goal was shared, but the technique was opposite. The search for the soul’s expression, for Modigliani, passed through stylized drawing, sensual posture, and purity of line and form. Amedeo elongated necks and faces, and many of his figures are surrounded by a halo of light that seems to emanate from within them, from their innermost being, drawing the viewer’s eye.
Chaïm’s paintings, which needed no preliminary sketches, shake the viewer with the shock they create. The eye zigzags between patches of color and surfaces of light, woven in a beauty both repulsive and alluring at once, vibrating in every direction, hesitating, not knowing how to enter the picture.
Amedeo’s pure line becomes chaotic in Chaïm’s hands. The latter often made his subjects look uglier and older, distorting their features, even when they were still young. Paulette Jourdain, for example, the secretary of the art dealer Léopold Zborowski, was about twenty-five when Chaïm painted her.
Marc Restellini, who interviewed Paulette Jourdain when she was already past eighty, recounts that when she opened her door to him, he saw before him the portrait Soutine had painted some sixty years earlier. Chaïm had seen the future, and with remarkable accuracy. Amedeo used to say that his friend’s models were condemned to look, later in life, just as they did in the paintings.
Léopold Zborowski
Léopold Zborowski, a Polish poet, arrived in Paris in 1910, and five years later became one of the most important art dealers there. Zborowski was struck dumb when, in 1916, he discovered Modigliani’s works at the studio of the Swiss painter Émile Lejeune, who offered the space to fellow artists and held exhibitions and evenings of concerts and poetry there (studio address: Émile Lejeune, Salle Huyghens, 6 rue Huyghens, 75014).
An excited Zborowski rushed to La Rotonde, where his wife and another friend were waiting for him, and announced passionately: I’ve found someone ten times better than Picasso… Zborowski made Modigliani an offer he could not refuse: he would provide him with a studio, models and supplies, as well as a monthly allowance, and in exchange Amedeo would hand over all his works to him (which he could not sell on his own anyway).
On Zborowski’s advice, Amedeo began investing in nude paintings. The solo exhibition Léopold organized for him at Berthe Weill’s gallery, located at 46, rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement, the only one Amedeo had in his lifetime, in 1920, included 32 works, four of them nudes.
One of them was hung near the window and drew a crowd on the street. The neighborhood’s police inspector demanded that the paintings be removed for offending public morals. Berthe Weill, sharp-tongued as she was, was forced to take them down. The exhibition went on, but not a single painting sold. Zborowski’s hopes of selling on the back of the scandal were unexpectedly dashed. The nude paintings did not achieve the result the art dealer had hoped for. Scandal, yes, but no financial profit…
Amedeo, who enjoyed relative comfort thanks to Zborowski’s support, pressed his benefactor into supporting Chaïm as well. Zborowski was not eager to take under his wing “the drunken, ill-mannered painter whose clothes were none too clean.” The elegant and well-spoken Amedeo pleased him, but his friend, scruffy and unkempt…
It is said that Amedeo gave Chaïm a lesson in manners before a dinner at Zborowski’s: he taught him to sit upright at the table, to eat with a fork, to avoid wiping his nose on his sleeve… It is also said that Modigliani painted Soutine’s portrait on the dining room door of Zborowski and his wife’s home. They were horrified by the gesture, but Amedeo reassured them: don’t worry, in a few years this door will be worth its weight in gold… Amedeo spared no effort to secure his friend Chaïm’s future.
A Stay in the South
The war was wreaking havoc, shortages were increasingly felt, Paris was being shelled, Modigliani’s health was deteriorating, and his partner, the painter Jeanne Hébuterne, was pregnant. In 1918, Zborowski sent him, along with his companion Jeanne and his friend Chaïm, to the south of France, to Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer. Jeanne gave birth to a daughter, also named Jeanne. The sea air and sunshine did Amedeo’s lungs good, and brightened the colors in his paintings.
The light of the French Riviera reminded him of the light of Tuscany. During this break, Modigliani painted, at Zborowski’s request and without much enthusiasm, the only four landscape paintings of his life, which he had preceded with two sketches.
Soutine, unlike his friend, knew no rest. He wandered alone, taken by the unfamiliar landscape, painting trees tormented by the wind, tortured and distorted landscapes. The ground trembles, the landscape and houses move in circles, the echoes of war and the memories of the shtetl combine to create masterpieces under the artist’s hand. According to the biographer and art critic Olivier Renault, Soutine’s paintings make the viewer hear the wind’s howl in their ears and set their soul spinning with the terror of life’s violence.
Olivier Renault also says that Modigliani’s art seems calmer compared to Soutine’s, but at the core of both lies the same inner vertigo, to which each painter gave a different expression. Modigliani and his friend Soutine lived for art; nothing was more important, and when they painted, creating a world and watching it come into being, nothing else existed anymore.
The End of the Bohemian Life
Modigliani and Jeanne returned to Paris in 1919. Jeanne was pregnant again. Amedeo’s health worsened, and a year later, in 1920, he died in the hospital, on the site of what is today the medical school:
Centre universitaire des Saints-Pères
5 Rue des Saints-Pères
All the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse, shaken, accompanied “Modi”‘s coffin to its final resting place at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Two days later, Jeanne, eight months pregnant, jumped to her death from a fifth-floor window at her parents’ home, leaving behind a 14-month-old daughter.
Only ten years later did Jeanne Hébuterne’s father give his permission to move her body to Montparnasse, to rest forever beside her partner. The baby left behind after her parents’ tragic deaths was adopted by Amedeo’s sister, Margherita, a French teacher in Florence. Jeanne Modigliani, despite her difficult start, led a meaningful life, had two daughters, and in 1958 wrote an important biography of her father (3).
Modi’s death marked the end of the bohemian era. Chaïm had lost his best friend, his loyal protector. It is said that on his deathbed, Amedeo made Zborowski swear to keep supporting Soutine, but the dealer was only looking for a way to get rid of him. Soutine moved between the artists’ village of Céret, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Paris, when an unexpected event changed his life.
The American billionaire Albert Barnes, who had made his fortune as a pharmacologist, arrived in Paris in 1922 to buy paintings for his enormous collection in Philadelphia, made up mostly of French art. Barnes was left speechless in front of Soutine’s paintings and sent Zborowski to buy up everything he could of his work. Soutine’s fortune changed overnight: money, fame and renown. The first thing he did was buy a well-tailored suit and a fancy car.
A year later, luck kept smiling on Chaïm Soutine when he met the wealthy Madeleine Castaing, a respected designer and antiques dealer, who, together with her husband Marcellin, bought paintings from him and supported him, not only financially but also emotionally, with boundless admiration and deep friendship. Soutine spent a great deal of time at the couple’s estate near Chartres.
Starting in 1941, after several years of financial comfort and relative happiness, Soutine and his partner Marie-Berthe Aurenche (who had previously been Max Ernst’s second wife) were forced to flee and found refuge in the Touraine region. Soutine’s health continued to decline, and the terror of the occupation and the war finished the work of destruction. A stomach ulcer turned into cancer. As his condition worsened, Soutine was rushed, two years later, in 1943, to a clinic in Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, at 6 rue Lyautey, and there, on the operating table, he drew his last breath.
Only a handful of friends, Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, accompanied him on his final journey at the Montparnasse Cemetery. In 1960, his partner Marie-Berthe Aurenche was buried next to him after taking her own life at age 54.
Modigliani achieved greater success than Soutine thanks to the tenderness, sensuality and melancholy that run through his art, but connoisseurs are slowly beginning to recognize Soutine’s own greatness as one of the pillars of the “School of Paris.” The last two bohemians, Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine, left behind a unique and original legacy, unlike any other. In their five years of close friendship, they shared a life of material hardship and intense revelry, but above all, both of them burned with the fire of creation to which they devoted their short lives.
(1) France 5, Passage des arts, Modigliani-Soutine, derniers bohèmes de Montparnasse, aired Saturday, March 2, 2019 at 10:30 p.m., directed by Catherine Aventurier
(2) Marie Vassilieff’s studio, “Villa Marie Vassilieff,” once the Montparnasse Museum, today serves as an “Art and Research Center.”
Villa Marie Vassilieff
Chemin de Montparnasse
21 avenue du Maine
75015 Paris
33 (0) 1 43 25 88 32
(3) Jeanne Modigliani, Modigliani sans légende, Gründ, 1961
And in a new, expanded edition:
Jeanne Modigliani, Amedeo Modigliani, une biographie, Olbia, 1998
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