Soutine's Houses

Chaïm Soutine's Houses was painted in the small French town of Céret. At first glance the scene looks as though an earthquake had just struck, but this isn't a literal depiction of what the eye saw — it's Expressionism, painting the artist's inner state rather than the world outside.

Soutine was twenty-seven at the time, weighed down by the anxiety of having achieved nothing yet as a painter, by the daily grind of getting by financially, and by the hardship of living, as a Jew, forever as a foreigner rather than a citizen of his own country. That turmoil is written into the way he distorted the house — the one place in the world meant to feel warm and secure — into something twisted and unstable.