Amedeo Modigliani

Chaïm Soutine assis à une table
1917

Pencil on paper 44.1 x 29/28.6 cm Signed 'Modigliani' in pencil lower right.

Amadeo Modigliani was a portrait painter. While his nudes may often dominate the public's image of Modigliani's art, his portraits of Parisian painters, poets, sculptors, art collectors and gallerists represent the core of his oeuvre.
“For Modigliani, assimilating the people around him through painting and drawing must have been an entirely elemental desire, something like a fundamental drive; at the same time, the question of whether or not they were particularly close to him was by no means decisive,” is how Werner Schmalenbach has summarised Modigliani's deep interest in people (Amadeo Modigliani, exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 1991, p. 25). On canvas and on paper he created portraits of important and less important individuals from his circle, and with these pictures he became - presumably without any wish to do so - the chronicler of that bohemian world of Montparnasse which so decisively shaped the art of those years.
Chaïm Soutine, who is depicted in our drawing, was part of Amadeo Modigliani's closest circle of friends - like the artists Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine or the art dealer Max Jacob. Modigliani portrayed him multiple times, for example, in three large-format paintings now housed in collections including those of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The two artists were bound not just by a friendly relationship but also, according to Werner Schmalenbach, by a particular mental affinity (cf. op. cit., p. 36). This bond becomes palpable in our masterful drawing: Modigliani captures Soutine's boyish wildness and striking physiognomy in a highly reductive and nonetheless clearly accentuated manner.

Catalogue Raisonné

Parisot 2006 vol. III, 162/17

Provenance

Jacques Dubourg, Paris; Private collection, Paris; Augstein Collection, Hamburg; Private collection, South Germany

Literature

Osvalo Patani, Amedeo Modigliani, Catalogo Generale Disegni, Milan 1994, p. 187, no. 303 with ill. ("Chaïm Soutine seduto a un tavolo")