By Luciano Migliaccio
The Masp work The Large Tree was painted in 1942 (Cogniat 1945, p. 35). As Soutine lived the last years of his life in hiding and the war impeded the circulation and dissemination of information, the work remained inaccessible to scholars until its publication by Cogniat in 1945. This painting can be considered representative of Soutine’s oeuvre, for it is closely related to the terrifying environment of World War II, expressing the artist’s anguish before the most inhumane aspects of this conflict. In the landscapes painted in Civry-sur-Serein and in the images of the young men depicted in that rural environment, one can perceive the weight of an all-threatening catastrophe which later materializes and the “portrait” of a windswept tree becomes an obsessive symbol for the artist, victimized due to his Jewish origin. The tree grows out of all proportion against a hostile sky, an innocent victim of the unleashed fury. The images are of wounded impotence – such as Windy Day in Auxerre (Washington, Phillips Collection) painted in 1939 – or of somber dismemberment, such as the works in the forties (The Great Cypress of Civry, Vaduz, Basel, Art Collection Trustee; Before the Storm, Castaing Collection; The Trees Along the Road, Haifa, Ilin Collection) which take this process to abnormal dimensions on a cosmic scale, such as in the Masp work The Great Tree, in which the tree is blasted by gusts of wind that inflate it with spasmodic swellings.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

---