Art heritage associated with Belarus in the museums of the world

Chaim Soutine was born on January 13, 1893 in the village of Smilovichi (now the Cherven district of the Minsk region, Republic of Belarus) into a poor Jewish family with many children. From an early age, Chaim showed a love for drawing and painting. In 1907, his parents sent him to Minsk to his older sister, with whom the boy was supposed to live and learn some kind of craft. After a series of unsuccessful attempts (an apprentice at a tailor, a shoemaker), the sister's husband arranges for young Soutine as a retoucher to one of the Minsk photographers. In 1908 or 1909, Soutine began to take lessons at the school of J. Kruger, where he met Mikhail Kikoin. In 1910, together with Kikoin, he went to Vilnius, where he entered a drawing school.

In June 1913, Soutine arrived in Paris, where he entered the Cormon atelier at the Academy of Arts. However, he quickly changes the too "academic" Academy for visits to the Louvre, which becomes his real university. Here he studies the recognized works of the classics of painting, Greek and Egyptian sculpture. He is also interested in music and literature. Among his favorite authors were Montaigne, Racine, Seneca, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Balzac and Rambo, among composers - Bach and Mozart. The first years in Paris, the artist lived in poverty. Before moving to Cité Falguières in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris, Soutine lives and works in "La Ruche" ("Houllier"), an international hostel for poor artists on the left bank of the Seine, created in 1902 by the sculptor Alfred Boucher. Here Soutine meets Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, sculptors Constantin Brancusi, Osip Zadkin, Henri Laurent, Jacques Lipschitz and Alexander Archipenko, as well as Amedeo Modigliani, with whom he will be connected by a strong, but not long friendship (due death of the latter).

Since 1918, Soutine has lived for almost seven years in the south of France, where he is impressed by the beauty of the local landscapes. From there, he brings to Paris about two hundred painted works. American collector Albert Coombs Barnes buys about fifty works from the artist. The following year, art dealer Leopold Zborowski sells a large number of the artist's paintings. In Paris, Soutine settles into a spacious studio on rue Saint-Gotard in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. And in 1927 in one of the Parisian galleries the first personal exhibition of Soutine's works was held.

In 1935, the artist's works were exhibited for the first time in the United States as part of a collective exhibition in Chicago, and in 1937, twelve paintings were exhibited at the State Museum of Petit Palais in Paris as part of the collective exhibition "Masters of Independent Art 1895-1937.".

Chaim Soutine dies on August 9, 1943 in Nazi-occupied Paris.