La Polonaise

This painting will be included in the forthcoming third volume of the Chaïm Soutine catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow.

Against a midnight blue ground, a russet-haired young woman–her identity unknown to us today, but her individuality here powerfully expressed–rests one cheek on her palm in a posture of weariness or resignation. She is engrossed in her own thoughts, her eyes downcast and averted; her ruddy skin and large hands betray a lifetime of hard work, and her narrow, sloping shoulders seem to dissolve into the encompassing depths. Yet her face bears evidence of hopes and passions that her meager life circumstances–she was most likely a maid in a bourgeois home–have not managed to quash. Her lips are full and sensuous, and her right eyebrow arches in a subtle show of self-assurance or even bravado; her plain white blouse dips to reveal a graceful collarbone. “These ‘subdued’ figures all have an inner life, an internal rumble: a certain feverish pulse and anxious stirring under the surface,” Esti Dunow has written. “The quiet of the faces does not create harmony, but reveals some undercurrent of tension” (An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine, exh. cat., The Jewish Museum, New York, 1998, p. 142).
Soutine painted this understated yet powerfully affecting portrait circa 1935, very likely during one of several consecutive summers that he spent near Chartres at the home of his patrons Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing. Fervent admirers of the artist, the Castaings devoted themselves single-mindedly during these sojourns to supporting his work. They searched high and low for old canvases for him to use, helped to convince the local inhabitants to pose, and on occasion restrained him from destroying paintings that suddenly provoked his wrathful disapproval. “Soutine was not an easy guest, moody, solitary, demanding, subject to fits of anger, plagued by weeks of being unable to paint, then total absorption in his work,” Billy Klüver and Julie Martin have written. “But their commitment to the painter was total” (ibid., p. 108).
During the latter half of the 1920s, Soutine’s main models had been the valets, bell-hops, and waiters who served the fashionable echelons of Parisian society as they reveled in the nightlife of this prosperous era. Now, with the Depression well underway worldwide, he painted domestic servants instead–maids, cleaning girls, cooks, and laundresses, clad in simple household garb rather than the fancy-dress uniforms of figures on public display. Although the tempo of Soutine’s painting slowed down during these years, becoming quieter and more meditative, the intensity of his engagement with his anonymous sitters never flagged. In the present La Polonaise, the figure is seen close-up, pressed against the picture plane, all sense of physical distance obliterated; on the surface of the canvas, we can follow the movement of Soutine’s heavily loaded brush, as he constructs the angle of her cheek and jaw, the shadow beside her nose, or the swoop of her hair.
“His canvases rivet the viewer with their convincing physical presence and their kinetically charged substance, which embody the fervid inner need that compelled the artist to paint them,” Dunow and Maurice Tuchman have concluded. “Soutine’s intense observation of the visual world, and his impassioned identification with it, all set in motion by peculiar intensity and obsessiveness, enabled him to attain a state of expressionistic exaltation that was exceptional and unprecedented in his day” (Chaim Soutine, exh. cat., Galerie Thomas, Munich, 2009, p. 9).