1922

Landscape, Céret

Russian (active France), 1893 - 1943

Chaim Soutine lived in Céret, a small, steeply sloped town in the French Pyrenees, from 1919 to 1922, where he executed a celebrated series of turbulent landscape paintings. This thickly painted composition depicts the vertiginous, white-walled buildings and overhanging trees of the Place de la Liberté in Céret. Completed toward the end of Soutine's first residence in the south of France, during which the artist's landscapes became increasingly anguished and frenzied, Landscape, Céret imbues the picturesque town square with a menacing atmosphere in which the convulsive forms of the buildings and trees strain and push across the surface of the canvas, with scarcely any sky in view.