ABSTRACT
Over two million Jews left Russia between 1881 and 1914, most headed for the New World. Some Jewish immigrants found their way to France, and some enrolled in the art academies that catered to these young would-be artists. Most Jewish immigrants arriving in Paris settled on the Right Bank, in the Marais district that became known as the Pletzl of Paris. The art of Chaim Soutine is the expression of a kind of Jewish mysticism through appallingly violent detonations of color. The myth of Soutine’s anguish and awkwardness obscures the artist’s appreciation of the great masters of realist art that he saw in the Louvre. The maternity theme was typed feminine even when rendered in a modernist idiom in the hands of artists of the caliber of Mary Cassatt or Mela Muter. Mela Muter was almost a generation older than Chaim Soutine and her distinctly expressionist style emerged a decade before his did.
