Soutine's Village

Chaïm Soutine's Village is built from the plainest elements of a landscape painting — houses, trees, sky — yet in Soutine's hands they become something else entirely. True to Expressionism, everything in the frame is twisted and distorted, not a record of what the eye saw but an outpouring of the artist's inner state.

The painting dates from after the American collector Albert Barnes, taken with Soutine's work, bought thirty of his paintings in a single purchase — a windfall that left Soutine financially comfortable. Yet the stormy anguish and unease inside him persisted all the same, a restlessness that would later drive him toward the dead-animal still lifes for which he is now so well known.