Paris in New York
French Jewish Artists in Private Collections
Jewish Museum, New York
March 5 - June 25, 2000
he Jewish Museum will present Paris in New York: French Jewish Artists in Private Collections, an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Jewish artists working in Paris in the first third of the 20th century, from March 5 through June 25, 2000. Paris in New York will feature 38 works by 12 artists, including Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Mané-Katz, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Elie Nadelman, Chana Orloff, Jules Pascin, Chaim Soutine, and Max Weber, all of whom found inspiration in the vibrant and beautiful City of Light. The exhibition covers the most innovative years of the School of Paris, from 1907 to 1939. With the majority of the paintings and sculpture borrowed from private collections in the New York area - and supplemented with major examples from The Jewish Museum's collection - Paris in New York brings into public view works rarely seen before.
These predominantly East European artists settled in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century. Paris was a mecca for Jewish artists from diverse geographic, economic and religious backgrounds until the disruption by the encroaching threat of Nazi Germany at the end of the 1930s. Originally attracted to the cosmopolitan culture of the city, which was a haven for bohemians and foreigners alike at the turn of the century, most of this community was dispersed by the onset of World War II. But during their time in Paris, these artists were nurtured by the city's dynamic environment and the creative energy of their peers, who together made significant contributions to the stylistic development of French modernist art.
Exhibition highlights include Marc Chagall's Rabbi, ca. 1931, a gouache and watercolor from The Jewish Museum's collection, which was once owned by George Gershwin, and was a bequest to the Museum by Frances Gershwin Godowsky and family in honor of Gershwin. Two bronze sculptures of a husband and wife by Chana Orloff - Madame Peretz Hirshbein, 1924, part of the Museum's collection, and Portrait of Peretz Hirshbein, 1924, in the collection of his son, Omus Hirshbein - are being reunited in this exhibition. Peretz Hirshbein was a Yiddish dramatist and novelist. Amedeo Modigliani's Portrait of Anna (Hanka) Zborowska, 1916, depicts the common-law wife of the Polish poet Leopold Zborowski, who was Modigliani's primary dealer. Zborowski provided the artist with support and studio space - and his wife as a frequent model. Moïse Kisling, who was born in Kraków and came to Paris to study art, created Grand nu allongé, Kiki (Large Reclining Nude, Kiki), in 1925. Books have been written about the sexy Queen of Montparnasse, the artist and model Kiki. Jules Pascin's Hermine in a Blue Hat, 1918, depicts the artist's muse who later became his wife. Max Weber's The Apollo in the Matisse Academy, 1908, was painted during Weber's affiliation with Matisse and the small group of painters that Matisse worked with on a regular basis in the early 20th century. A typical late landscape by Chaim Soutine, Landscape at Oisème, ca. 1936, was painted near the country house of the artist’s major patrons, Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, and suggests the foreboding of the late 1930s.
By 1910, the Montparnasse section of Paris had eclipsed Montmartre as the dominant artists' quarter, and was inhabited by some of the greatest artists of this century, a large number of whom were immigrants. To artists from Central and Eastern Europe, especially Jews, Paris represented not only artistic and personal freedom but also the most advanced and cosmopolitan of cultures. It had an added poignancy for the Jewish artists, especially those from Eastern Europe who were well aware of the discrepancy between their own cultural taboos against visual imagery and France's glory in the visual arts. Paris also represented the world-at-large, the mainstream and spearhead of Western culture, and this was especially important for artists who were leaving a provincial life behind. Montparnasse was the neighborhood in which almost all the Jewish artists lived, worked and socialized. They interacted with the environment of Montparnasse and Paris - the streets, the cafés, the academies - and with each other to produce painting and sculpture which was in the vanguard of artistic creativity.
The Jewish painters and sculptors of the School of Paris have come to be known as the Circle of Montparnasse, a term coined by Kenneth E. Silver in a 1985 exhibition at The Jewish Museum. From about 1907 until shortly after the end of World War I, most of these artists would experiment with new forms in painting and sculpture. Freely associating with the Circle of Montparnasse artists were Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many other pivotal figures of the period. Inspiration was also provided by the Post-Impressionism of Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne whose works were widely exhibited in Paris in 1906 and 1907.
By 1906, the painters Sonia Delaunay, Amedeo Modigliani, Jules Pascin, and Max Weber had arrived in Paris. Weber, who came from America, experimented with the violent color juxtapositions and exuberant paint handling of the Fauves. This group, which included Matisse, first exhibited together in the 1905 Salon d’Automne. The solidly modeled subjects in the Bulgarian Pascin’s portraits and genre scenes reflect the influence of Cézanne and the Fauves. Delaunay was born in Russia and became, with her husband, Robert, a pioneer of non-objective painting. Modigliani, the Italian, upheld a modernist classicism, linked as it was to the Italian masters he revered. His paintings reflect an admiration of Cézanne, but he also achieved a unique expressiveness with his elongated, quietly serene portraits.
The Polish-born Elie Nadelman, influenced by Classical antiquities, pursued a stylized classicism. His bronze sculptures were collected early on by the cosmetics giant Helena Rubinstein, and his drawings by Leo Stein, whose sister, Gertrude, settled in Paris in 1902. Several of the Jewish artists were early exponents of the still-new forms and vocabulary of Cubism, a style characterized by geometric simplifications of form, shifting viewpoints, flattened areas of color and broken contours, with objects and space seeming to merge together. Louis Marcoussis was included in the important Section D’Or exhibition in 1912. Jacques Lipchitz was a pioneer of cubist sculpture. He often used the cubist vocabulary to reinforce a sense of order and clarity in his depictions of acrobats and circus performers. Kisling also explored cubist form in still life paintings. A close friend of Modigliani, the two also collaborated on a number of works prior to the Italian artist’s death in 1920. Kisling often provided Modigliani with studio space.
World War I scattered the Circle of Montparnasse artists in different directions, but many of the group returned to Paris after the war. Both Chagall and Mané-Katz, for example, left for Russia, their homeland, but returned to Paris in the 1920s. Others served in the French Army.
Increasingly, a network of dealers, collectors, and critics would advance the popularity and commercial success of many of these artists by the 1920s. Despite their foreignness, their painterly, coloristic works and expressionistic styles soon came to represent French modernist painting of the interwar years.
Even with their success, many, like Pascin and Modigliani, in particular, continued to move between bohemia and the world of the well-to-do. As they assimilated into the mainstream Parisian art world, however, some conservative critics drew attention to their Jewishness, often linking their painting style to their religious or ethnic heritage, and this criticism was inextricably linked with increasing nationalism. As Jews they remained outsiders. As artists, they shied away from the avant-garde movements that surfaced in Paris in the wake of World War I such as Dada and Surrealism. Chagall, for example, an early adherent to Cubism before World War I, afterward remained faithful to narrative painting in nostalgic evocations of pre-Revolutionary Russia.
By 1931, the French economy had collapsed in response to worldwide depressions following the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash. In 1933, Hitler was elected Chancellor in Germany. That same year, the French art critic Roger Brielle responded to rising xenophobia and anti-Semitism in an article on Jewish painters written for L’amour de l’art. In reply to conservative critics, Brielle sought to fold the seemingly foreign, mostly Expressionist style of the Jewish painters into the rubric of the national traditions in French art, dubbing it an offshoot of Fauvism. According to art historian Romy Golan, Brielle sought to “remove the stigmas of race and nation from Jewish artists, dealers, and collectors, and instead [to] see their contribution to a community of spirit.” Seven years later, in 1940, with the German occupation, foreign artists were no longer allowed to exhibit their work in Paris. Ironically, after World War II, the vitality and passion of the Expressionist style they had helped forge was irrevocably assimilated into the French national style. Arguably, as Golan explains, Expressionism had become a timeless and universal tendency in art, a badge of honor.
“School of Paris works are highly valued and sought after today and collectors of the works of Jewish artists share not only a love of the beauty of these works, but also an abiding curiosity about the lives of the artists,” notes Joan Rosenbaum, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum, in the foreword to the exhibition catalogue. Many of the works in the current exhibition have had surprisingly few owners. In the past 15 years, The Jewish Museum has mounted exhibitions devoted to the work of several of the artists in the show. Some evolved out of the Museum’s 1985 exhibition, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905-1945, such as monographic exhibitions of the works of Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall and Jacques Lipchitz. Others have examined groups of artists and their relationship to one another, such as the current Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918.
The exhibition has been organized by Susan Chevlowe, Associate Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum.
A 64-page catalogue with 29 color and 15 black-and-white images, published by The Jewish Museum, New York accompanies the exhibition and is available in the Museum's Cooper Shop for $19.95 softcover. Edited by Susan Chevlowe, the book includes a foreword by Joan Rosenbaum, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director of The Jewish Museum, and an essay by Romy Golan, Associate Professor in the Ph.D. program in art history at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
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