Chaïm Soutine’s paintings of Céret, a steeply situated town in French Catalonia, suspended in the foothills of the Pyrenees, are among the most celebrated works of the artist’s career and some of the most daring, uninhibited representational paintings of the twentieth century. Soutine moved to Paris in 1913 and rapidly assimilated and exceeded the outlines of avant-garde painting. He lived in Céret between 1919 and 1922, during which time he produced ‘the first great series’ of landscape paintings in his career, as the art critic David Sylvester wrote. They were characterised by wild applications of paint and directional brushwork that interlocks with the form of the subject; a brooding palette of deep green, red and blue, which evokes a portentous atmosphere; and vertiginous perspectives, which suggest violent recessions or expansions of space. This and Soutine’s subsequent work of the interwar period defied the rappel l’ordre taking place across Europe at that time. Notwithstanding the unclassical, expressionistic quality of his painting, Soutine always worked devotedly from the motif. He refused to invent and was motivated by the appearance of things, and Les Platanes à Céret was almost certainly painted in situ.

This painting (‘The Plane Trees at Céret’) represents Place de la Liberté, the central public forum of Céret. It was a common site of Soutine’s endeavours and the subject of many paintings made during his residence in the town. A closely comparable work adopts the same outlook with only minor alterations to the composition. Both paintings depict the plane trees in an exaggerated upward motion, filling the sky, obscuring it, except for a dramatic cleft in the branches. There is a profound sense of growth apparent from the sweeping, vertical impetus of the tree trunks. The painterly construction of the picture is palpable, and the imagery of the subject-matter is held in tension with the pronounced surface of the medium. Although the composition is layered, and the receding line of trees acts as a screen that partially obscures a row of buildings in the background, the viewer must try and recover these spatial qualities from the agitated, flattened paint surface.

The Céret paintings encapsulate one of Soutine’s key contributions to the history of modern painting. These works reconcile the heightened emotional intensity of Vincent van Gogh and the perspectival distortions of cubism. It was whilst living in Céret that he made the breakthrough. Van Gogh’s images of the Provencal landscape were realised with exaggerated colour and strongly directional impasto; he transfigured the landscape and invested it with an emotional fervour that was subjective and unstable. The same fervour is evident in Soutine’s paintings of Céret. To enhance this emotional content, Soutine composed his pictures without single-point perspective, which had been irrevocably compromised by the discoveries of Picasso and Braque in their analytical cubist phase between 1908 and 1912. Like other paintings of Céret, Les Platanes à Céret does not organise the picture space around a stable horizon line. Whereas most traditional pictures use single-point perspective in which the horizon bifurcates the picture at ninety degrees to the edge of the canvas, Soutine sought to explore new and vertiginous compositions that destabilise the ground beneath the viewer’s feet. Slopes, roads and tree branches curve across the flat surface of the picture, producing exaggerated effects of foreshortening. The design of Les Platanes à Céret is curvilinear; every line of force seems elastic and contributes to the encompassing flux. With their gnarled trunks, the trees seem animated.

In the literature about Soutine’s work, his Céret landscapes have been widely fêted. Writing in 1950 at the time of MoMA’s Soutine retrospective, the curator Monroe Wheeler gave the following account of them:

'In this year [of 1919] Zborowski, now developing a serious interest in [Soutine], proposed his going to a small town in the Pyrenees called Ceret, where he stayed the greater part of the next three years. The vehement and idiosyncratic style that he developed there shocked all of Soutine’s contemporaries, and we still feel a strong impact and some confusion as we look at it today. It is as though this young man […] felt that he had a world-shaking message. The landscapes of the Pyrenees seem, indeed, to be shaken by some cosmic force; the architecture becomes flexible and billows like a canvas, the trees reel and stumble about, and the colors [sic] seem to have been wrested hungrily from the spectrum; his palette seemed to enter the dance with his forms, the color [sic] of one thing whirling away with the form of another.'

Wheeler followed these laudatory remarks by musing whether Soutine was ‘what might be called an abstract expressionist’ avant la lettre—an understandable analogy in post-war New York. As well as being evoked in retrospect as an early kind of abstract painting, the Céret paintings were directly admired and digested by later artists. Certain figure painters working in post-war London, including Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Leon Kossoff, were profoundly affected by Soutine’s work. Amongst them, Auerbach said to Robert Hughes: ‘I can’t deny that Soutine had a very great effect on me, especially the Céret pictures.’

Although the Céret paintings are among the most significant of Soutine’s career, comparatively few of them survive in proportion to the number that Soutine painted. Wheeler described the years 1919–22 as ‘the most prolific of [Soutine’s] life’. He is believed to have painted over two-hundred canvases in that period. However, after he was discovered by the collector Dr Albert C. Barnes in 1923, Soutine underwent a re-evaluation of his achievements prior to that date and ultimately disowned the paintings of Céret. As David Sylvester described, Soutine was ‘a destroyer of his work’: ‘no Céret that came within his reach was safe’; ‘there are stories from several sources about the violence with which he slaughtered them and his joy and relief in the act.’ He actively acquired these paintings for the purpose of destroying them, and the paintings of Céret have consequently acquired in addition to their artistic value the accolade of comparative scarcity. Nevertheless, Soutine’s disapprobation has done nothing to diminish the high esteem in which paintings such as Les Platanes à Céret are held.