Soutine’s Portraits: Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys review

These vivid, fleshy paintings of restaurant and hotel staff in 1920s France reveal the brutalised souls beneath the uniforms

The Butcher Boy looks like a killer who has bathed in blood. His black eyes are full of trouble. One of them is a horrible round hole in the pink, red and white hunk of flesh that is his face. The same crimson gore that streaks it saturates his once-white smock. Behind him there is more blood, a sea of red. He is a man of meat, a glaring golem of animated flesh.

Chaim Soutine painted this meat monster in Paris in about 1919-20. The first world war had left the French art world exhausted. Soutine’s Butcher Boy might be an image of the war’s psychological effects – perhaps this brutalised youth has come back from the front full of violence – yet for art dealers craving the latest new thing, Soutine’s directness was also a commercial godsend. For in 1919 the latest new thing was that old thing, unpretentious figurative painting, free from the taint of the avant-garde. The dealer Paul Guillaume cashed in on this conservative mood when he found a market for Soutine’s “traditional” portraits.

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