Chaim Soutine

“[Marcus] treats her subject with the intimacy and admiration of a friend.”—Wall Street Journal

“Marcus sets the painter apart from the historical context in which he lived, defining his work by its unrelenting life force rather than the specter of death that surrounded him.”—Art in America

“Marcus’ electrifying and zealously corrective biography embodies the energy and boldness of Soutine’s paintings and extends our appreciation for the painter and his radical creations.”—Booklist (Starred)

“A perceptive portrait of an artist’s world.”—Kirkus

“It’s not often that an art history book comes along so sharply perceptive about its subject and so grippingly written that reading it is akin to the thrilling experience of looking at the paintings themselves. This is what Celeste Marcus has achieved in her transformative account of Chaim Soutine. He is here in all his majestic peculiarity and intensity but most importantly he is here, at last, on his own terms, the vitality and power of the paint conveyed with all the intelligence and absorption his astonishing work deserves.”—Simon Schama, author of The Story of the Jews

“This gorgeously written account of one of the most fascinating artistic lives in modern history is an illumination. Chaim Soutine has often been described as enigmatic and elusive, yet as Marcus says, ‘he is there, right before our eyes,’ in his art. This book opens our eyes to him as never before.”—David A. Bell, Princeton University

“Chaim Soutine was a painter of startling originality whose work seems to capture the dream-like feel of life. In this remarkable book, Marcus traces the wellsprings of Soutine’s vision and shows us how he saw his world.”—Dexter Filkins, author of The Forever War

“Celeste Marcus’s life of the great Russian French painter Soutine is more than a biography. In her passionate reconsideration, Marcus sets out to rescue Soutine from interpretations she judges wrong-headed: Clement Greenberg’s dogma about abstraction, or projections of Expressionist suffering or Jewish victimhood. For Marcus, Soutine is a painter of energy, and her scrupulous, detailed story is charged with her own argumentative energy. She has drawn the paintings and lived in the archives, and she tells Soutine’s life, as if from the inside out, with zeal, devotion, and eloquence.”—Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters