Fat boy slim
Chaïm Soutine’s Pastry Cook of Cagnes has kitchen whites as ill-fitting as his jumbo ears: both need to be grown into. Or has a hard life already meant that he’s worried away any puppy fat and his clothes now hang off him? This is a portrait of youth, but not innocence.
The white stuff
Little pastry cooks and their initiation into the working world had long been a cute, comic subject for French artists. Soutine’s iterations on the theme ditch the sweetness, however. His human insight recalls another famous character in white, Watteau’s Pierrot, who is no figure of fun but a hesitant boy dressed up as a clown.
Shape shifter
Here the tense mouth, suspicious eyes and clenched hands contribute to the sense of experience. The paint, too, has an anxious life of its own. As one of the abstract expressionists hooked on the artist’s emotive brushwork, the Dutch-American Willem de Kooning, said: “Soutine distorted the pictures but not the people.”
Front of house
A Lithuanian Jew who had lived the penniless artist stereotype in Paris, Soutine was drawn not to the glamour of the roaring 1920s nightspots, but those who peopled the world below stairs. His portraits of bellhops and cooks would seal his reputation and earn him a fortune.
Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys, The Courtauld Institute of Art, WC2, to 21 January
