Chaïm Soutine (1894?-1943), Russian-born French expressionist painter, the vehemence of whose work reflects his struggle to reveal the inner nature of his subjects. A native of Smilovichi, near Minsk, Belarus, he immigrated to Paris in 1913 and soon developed a highly personal vision and technique, sacrificing careful composition and good drawing to feverish intensity and employing thick pigment in vivid, often deliberately ugly colors. His paintings, most of which were executed between 1920 and 1929, include pitiless psychological portraits of bakers, valets, and choirboys (Pastry Cook,1922, Louvre, Paris); still lifes of sides of meat in various stages of putrefaction (Carcass of Beef,1925?, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York); and tormented landscapes with scudding clouds and bending trees ( Sinister Street,1921?, Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland). He often reworked or destroyed his earlier paintings, and he produced little new work after 1930.

See also Expressionism.