Paysage à la route montante

Between 1919 and 1922 Soutine lived and worked in Céret, in the French pyrenees, making occasional visits to southern France and Paris. Maurice Tuchman has remarked of the works from this period "His Céret landscapes have often been referred to as unstable and earthquakelike, vibrating with movement, upheaval, and fever. Indeed, Soutine's avoidance of any pure horizontals or verticals in his forms accounts in part for the feeling of instability. The rock and tilt of houses on their foundations, the shift of trees, and the slipperiness of the ground are made literal by this device. The chaotic swirl of brush and paint, together with the packed tangle of forms, creates an intense image of raw energy. But while the Céret landscapes appear tumultuous and anarchic, the underlying pictorial organization is deliberate" (op. cit. p. 97).