Artwork Page for Still Life with Rayfish

Details / Information for Still Life with Rayfish

Still Life with Rayfish

1923
(Russian, 1893–1943)
Measurements
Framed: 111.8 x 94.3 x 11.8 cm (44 x 37 1/8 x 4 5/8 in.); Unframed: 80.5 x 64.5 cm (31 11/16 x 25 3/8 in.)
Credit Line
Public Domain
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Description

The mutilated ray fish in this painting is strung across the top of the canvas, as if tortured or crucified, as its internal organs spill forth. The fish seems to express human anguish, transforming it into a powerful metaphor for suffering. Below the fish is a kettle that seems to twist away from the fish. Chaïm Soutine frequently depicted animal carcasses in his paintings, highlighting their vulnerability and the violence of their deaths. Such paintings may allude to his own despair, from his youth as the 10th of 11 children of parents in poverty in a small Orthodox Jewish community in what is now Belarus, to his early years in Paris as a struggling artist.
A vertically oriented oil painting featuring sweeping, layered strokes depicts an abstracted stingray hung by two points suspended between the painting's upper two corners. The stingray shows a light underbelly, cut open in the lower half to reveal red and purple innards. Upper left, beady black eyes dot just above the stingray's stretched-open mouth. Below the stingray, in the lower left, sits an orange-brown kettle and a cluster of four, undulating orange and yellow sacks.

Still Life with Rayfish

1923

Chaïm Soutine

(Russian, 1893–1943)
Russia (worked in France), 20th century

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