Self-Portrait

The expressionist painter Chaim Soutine was born in Smilovits (now Smilavičy, Belarus), into an impoverished and traditional religious family. He fled his family and hometown in 1909 and studied painting, first in Minsk and later in Vilna. In 1913, he settled in Paris; in 1940, he was forced to hide from the Nazis in the French countryside until his death in 1943 on his way back to Paris for medical attention. Although his work was never explicitly Jewish in terms of its subject matter, critics always viewed him as a representative Jewish artist, in part because of the emotional intensity of his style and in part because he associated with other East European Jewish artists who settled in Paris.