Authenticating the paintings of Chaim Soutine can only be done with certainty from research.

The paintings of Chaim Soutine are not exactly pretty. He turned everything into a convulsion. Mostly, it is borderline nightmarish. It is hard the resist the thought that how he painted must have been an expression of how he felt. At the same time, Soutine put so much humanity in Soutine, in his portraits of him; which are how we mostly know him; that we forever feel bad, feel sorry, for him. That he died of a burst ulcer; in the midst of living in hiding; makes it worse.

Performing a technical analysis of one of Soutine’s paintings is similar to digging for survivors after an earthquake. We remove one element at a time to figure how it all happened and to see what is underneath. Fabulously interesting.

If you have a painting that you believe is or could be by Chaim Soutine, please send us a few photos of it.