1924
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Old Woman is a 1924 unspecified by Chaïm Soutine, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see an older woman sitting straight, hands folded in her lap, her face tilted slightly up. Soutine painted her over and over—same pose, same blank stare, same twisted fingers. The colors are thick and messy, like he slapped them on fast. Her eyebrows arch too high, her chin juts too sharp, but you can’t look away. If you like how the paint feels alive, try impasto next.
In the nearly 200 portraits Chaïm Soutine painted, he was remarkably consistent in his approach:he almost always painted solitary, unidentified models, seated in half- or three-quarter-length poses facing frontally with hands placed on the hips or folded in the lap, as seen here. The physical distortions—the woman’s large hands, arched green eyebrows, and pointed chin—executed with agitated, slashing brushstrokes heighten the portrait’s expressive qualities. The sitter here is remarkably similar to the figure in another Soutine portrait of a schoolteacher named Melanie at the Columbus Museum…
Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , was inspired by Soutine's work for his short story "Skin."
Read the full account in the museum source.
Chaïm Soutine (French: ; Russian: Хаим Соломонович Сутин, romanized: Khaim Solomonovich Sutin; Yiddish: חײם סוטין, romanized: Chaim Sutin; 13 January 1893 – 9 August 1943) was a French painter of Belarusian-Jewish…
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