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 left for Paris, where he lived the remainder of his life, except for the years 1940 to 1943, which he spent in the French countryside, hiding from the Nazis. 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.