Still Life, Gladiolas

Here, Chaim Soutine’s expressive flowers, luminous against the dark background, reflect the influence of the artists he most admired: Rembrandt van Rijn, Francisco Goya, and Gustave Courbet. He made ten paintings of gladioli, perhaps drawn to these flowers because they were the color of blood, a substance depicted in many of his still lifes of dead animals. A critic in 1926 found blood an apt metaphor for Soutine’s painterly and emotional force: “His work looks to me like a hemorrhage. Before rendering his soul, the artist spits up all his blood. And each spurt gives birth to a new vision, singularly intense, tragic, and painful.”

Soutine struggled in poverty after arriving in Paris in 1913 from Russia (present-day Belarus). His fortunes changed in 1922, when the American collector Albert Barnes bought fifty-two of his paintings, likely including this one. Barnes gave the work to his wife, Laura, who in turn bequeathed it to the Brooklyn Museum.