Steve Stern

History happens back there in the world where he’s only a tourist. He’s no more concerned about the armistice than he was about the tidings of a revolution in Russia. Although he had taken a moment to wonder how his family may have fared, and to gloat over the fact that Chagall and Mané-Katz were stuck in the mother country they’d
foolishly returned to. He’d also recalled the pair of conspiring celebrity emigrés Modi had pointed out at the Dôme.

The book that sparked my interest in Soutine—beyond the paintings themselves—was Stanley Meisler’s marvelous Shocking Paris, which details the history of the School of Paris and its more outstanding members. My gratitude to that book for revealing a world. For Modigliani’s picaresque exploits there was Jeffrey Meyers’ Modigliani: A Life, and for the very rich background of the period, Dan Franck’s Bohemian Paris and Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton’s Vichy France and the Jews. A shout-out to those who found the artist before me: Rick Mullin’s book-length narrative poem Soutine, and Ed Ifkovic’s novel Soutine in Exile.