Old Woman
c. 1923–24
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
unframed: 65 × 54 cm · framed: 88.9 × 78.7 × 8.6 cm
Classification
Painting
Department
Modern European Painting and Sculpture
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Gift of the Mildred Andrews Fund
Accession Number
1988.94
Tags
About this artwork
The woman portrayed here seems to bear the weight of the world on her shoulders. Her ghostlike silhouette in tones of green and brown is bent over, her eyes look downward. The positioning of her large hands emphasize an inward-looking, melancholic state of mind. Chaïm Soutine’s early experience of religious persecution had a large influence on his art. As an expatriate Russian Jew living in Paris, Soutine had to escape from the French capital and hide in order to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. He ...