In the first monograph written about the Expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine, the Polish-French art critic Waldemar George exclaimed that his “work looks to me like a hemorrhage. Before giving up the ghost, the painter spits out all his blood”.

George was perhaps thinking of a painting Soutine had done three years earlier, in 1925. In Boeuf écorché (Carcass of Beef), an ox is strung up by the ankles, its blood a deep red stain against the blue studio in which it hangs. One of many bloodied still lifes by Soutine to center animal carcasses, the painting functions as an Expressionist homage to the Baroque — a tip of the hat to Rembrandt, who in 1655 produced his own Boeuf écorché, now at the Louvre. The brash and resolute modernity of the Expressionists may seem to sit uneasily with the muted tones and detailed focus of the Dutch Masters. But as Walter Benjamin suggested in his doctoral thesis that same year, “like expressionism, the baroque is not so much an age of genuine artistic achievement as an age possessed of an unremitting artistic will”. Soutine, willful as he was, did much to bring the two together.

Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilavichy, a village near Minsk in what was then the Russian Empire. He was from a poor family — his later biographers would exult in the degree of his abasement, perhaps thrilled to cast the young Jewish artist as a refugee in need of French money and French class. (“Tragic Lithuania!” George exclaimed of Soutine’s homeland, in reference to the historic Duchy. “Who in France can even guess at such a place?”) When he was seventeen, he left home for art school in Vilnius, some 300 kilometers away, before continuing on to Paris three years later with two friends.

In interwar Paris, he found an artistic scene that was thriving on a mixture of neglect and encouragement. Before long he moved into La Ruche, the infamous Montparnasse artists’ hostel that had been constructed by the sculptor Albert Boucher for the use of the city’s penniless painters. Montmartre was over, and Montparnasse’s cafés — Le Dôme, La Rotonde — were full of a new energy, much of it coming from outside of France. Rent in La Ruche was cheap or non-existent; residents lived in more-or-less glamorous squalor. “Disorder, total disorder”, the Swiss-French modernist poet Blaise Cendrars wrote of La Ruche in 1913, the year Soutine moved in. “Photographs of Léger, photographs of Tobeen, / which you don’t see / And on the back / On the back / Frantic works / Sketches, drawings, frantic works / And paintings…”

The crowd in and around La Ruche, mostly but not exclusively Jewish, was later referred to as the “School of Paris”. It most famously included Marc Chagall, but Soutine quickly fell in with Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani depicted Soutine several times; his 1918 portrait of his friend, which was painted on the back of a door in their shared art dealer Léopold Zborowski’s apartment, shows a pretty young man with full red lips, not too dissimilar from Soutine's own self-portrait from that same year.

The young Soutine spent hours in the Louvre, obsessively studying the Masters he found there. A friend later told the art critic Pierre Courthion that when he was trying to explain the specific magic of a Rembrandt, “he entered into a state of overexcitement that looked more like an angry outburst”. His paintings were bold and tactile and modern, but also erudite: he referenced Chardin, Corot, Delacroix. After he learned French, he read Balzac, Baudelaire, and Montaigne in addition to the Russian novels of his youth.

After Modigliani’s early death in 1920, Soutine began escaping Paris for longer and longer periods. He left first for the Catalan village of Céret in the French Pyrenees, but returned often to Paris, where in 1923 he made his first major sale of sixty paintings to the American pharmaceutical magnate Albert C. Barnes. (The Barnes Collection in Philadelphia still holds twenty-two of Soutine’s paintings, including one from the series on pastry chefs that first caught Barnes’ attention.) The purchase — which was, from Barnes’ perspective, a pittance, just 37,600 francs — suddenly catapulted Soutine not only to fame but also to some measure of financial freedom. The story goes that he ran immediately from his art dealer’s apartment into the street, where he hailed a cab to take him to the French Riviera.

Two years later, Soutine was back in Paris, where he rented a studio at 8 Rue Saint Gothard in the 14th Arrondissement, not far from the Parc Montsouris. He would travel the eight kilometers north to the slaughterhouses of La Villette and bring carcasses back: chickens, turkeys, rabbits, and the spectacular ox, which he hung from the ceiling. His model, Paulette Jourdain, told later biographers that he would spend hours in the market choosing the perfect carcasses. She was in charge of regularly going to buy him more blood, which he would splash onto the bodies to revivify their tones. Presumably the neighbors complained, because soon the health department showed up. Jourdain had to plead with the inspectors to let him keep the meat; finally, they relented, on the condition that he promise to regularly inject the carcasses with ammonia.

He produced dozens of these still lifes — the French term for still life, nature morte, literally means “dead nature” — which bridge the gap between the Masters and the Moderns. Chardin’s 1728 Nature morte à la raie (The Ray) was transposed into Soutine’s painting by the same name. Rather than copying, however, Chiara Palermo argues that Soutine “reenacted” the paintings of his heroes. He didn’t simply copy but painted from life, subjecting himself not only to the memory of the greats but also their own experience of blood, of guts, of decay. While arguably better known for his portraits, like the series of “petits pâtissiers” that reportedly first attracted Barnes’ attention, it is in his still lifes that we see his skills and erudition collide with the messiness of life and death.

George and many later interpreters liked to cast Soutine as something of a naïf, primarily in prey to powerful and frenzied emotions. When Soutine told him that his work represented “the implementation of a conception of art”, George laughed it off.

Indeed, even in death Soutine became a foil for others’ interpretations. After his death in 1943, while in hiding from the Nazis, he was buried in the southeastern corner of the Cimitière du Montparnasse. His grave is surmounted by a cross, a motif chosen by his final companion, Marie-Berthe Aurenche, the former wife of the painter Max Ernst. Soutine had never converted, but “we had sometimes talked about the Christian religion”, Aurenche claimed, “and I had the impression that Soutine wanted to know it better”.