Russians, such as Marc Chagall, Michel Kikoïne, Pinchus Krémègne, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaïm Soutine or Ossip Zadkine; Poles, such as Moïse Kisling, Morice Lipsi, Louis Marcoussis or Henri Hayden; Bulgarians such as Jules Pascin or Hungarians such as Bela Czobel or Alfred Reth — all set out for Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. Once the effervescence of the early years had passed, they shared a deep refusal of systems, of all formalism, and a determination to pursue the singular itineraries that their recent status as artists at last permitted. Thus, if one can observe the presence of numerous Jewish artists within modernity — even if they rarely figure as pioneers — it is because the arrival of these creators, who for the first time engaged with secular art, was practically contemporaneous with the first waves of the avant-garde.
For all that, it would be absurd to speak of a Jewish style — any more than of a Christian style — as one speaks of the Baroque style or the Mannerist style.
Jewish artists inscribe themselves within various already-recognized currents — Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism… Many, such as Lipchitz, Zadkine, Henri Hayden, Marcoussis, Alice Halicka or Sonia Delaunay, took the Cubist path. Others, such as Chana Orloff, drew from it lessons for arriving at a greater stylization, a greater simplification. Still others took part in the return to order, a more or less realist, more or less expressive figuration — Moïse Kisling, Marek Szwarc. They all belong to that nebulous grouping, that site of modernity then forming, christened the École de Paris.
Today, this heteroclite gathering has lost much of its aura. Or rather, all these creators are no longer lodged under the same sign. In the introduction to the recent exhibition devoted to them at the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, its director Paul Salmona writes:
“At the hôtel Drouot, the paintings of the foreign artists active in the capital during the first forty years of the twentieth century — when they are not Marc Chagall, Amadeo Modigliani or Chaïm Soutine — are classed under the appellation ‘École de Paris.’ In this commercial context, it is a relatively devalued category that claims to designate artists of the interwar period not attached to the avant-gardes. This usage results from a paradoxical inversion of the meaning of this locution and makes us forget what its genesis was.”1 However, by selecting only three Jewish artists, the author runs the danger of giving the impression that the École de Paris was exclusively Jewish. Paradoxically, in making this “selection,” Paul Salmona unwittingly inscribes himself within the trajectory the École de Paris would follow — which, after being assimilated to foreign artists, finds itself reduced by criticism — often, though not always, antisemitic — to Jewish artists.2
It was in January 1925 that André Warnod, in an article in Comoedia, invented the appellation École de Paris, to take up the defense of the foreign artists sidelined at the 1924 Salon des Indépendants.3 In October of the same year, in a book titled Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture. École de Paris (The Cradles of the New Painting. School of Paris),
he brought together very disparate personalities who shared no common formal characteristics and whose only common point was to practice their art in the French capital.
As is well known, art historians and critics often impose, in haste, picturesque or metaphorical titles on styles, groups, or schools. Certainly, these “baptisms” answer to the necessity of defining a new tendency observed on the basis of a corpus of works created shortly before.
It nevertheless remains astonishing to group under the name “École de Paris” artists who all come from elsewhere. In fact, between 1905 and 1930, Paris was a chosen land for many foreign artists who cast a fascinated gaze on the French capital, haloed with an almost mythical prestige.
Political exclusions, the desire for emancipation, or the attraction of the “capital of the arts” were among the reasons for this immigration. In this displacement from the periphery toward the center, the discovery of new systems of representation aroused in these creators a sometimes frenzied will to “catch up.” Various aesthetic tendencies were assimilated and “recycled” at record speed. More than a movement, the term École de Paris embraces a generation of creators of all nationalities, for whom one would be hard pressed to find a common denominator.
Among them, many were Jews, fleeing Eastern Europe, where antisemitism and pogroms were the rule and where access to instruction in the artistic disciplines was limited by severe numerus clausus quotas. Let us specify that, contrary to the consecrated commonplace, all these creators do not come from a shtetl — that poor Jewish village lost in the countryside, devoid of any artistic baggage. Certainly, many of them, having lived in a milieu in which religion forbade all representation, bore the weight of a traditional society that rejected the practice of the plastic arts. But it is not rare for these newcomers to have acquired a training before arriving in France. Thus Kisling came from Kraków, a city known in Poland for its long and important artistic tradition. At the Academy of Fine Arts, he had Josef Pankiewicz as a professor, who oriented him toward the Impressionists and toward Cézanne. While Chagall came from Vitebsk, a town distinctly less important than Kraków, it was nevertheless a medium-sized merchant city and an important railway hub. Despite a society and family that did not embrace his choice, Chagall began his artistic education in 1906 with a local Jewish painter, Yehuda Pen, then had his first encounter with modernity in St. Petersburg (1907–1910). When, on his arrival in Paris, he joined La Ruche, that “cosmopolitan residence of poor artists,” he was already an accomplished painter.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of Jewish artists who took their distance from their community and engaged in plastic activities whose aesthetic criteria were no longer dictated by religious needs.
The Jewish village, “a world within a world” folded back on its traditions, loses its certainties and a fissure opens in the familiar and reassuring world.
The Jewish intelligentsia, seeking to emancipate itself from religious tradition, becomes impregnated with new ideas. Thus, creation took two distinct, even opposed, directions. On the one hand, the renaissance of a Yiddish literature or theater, and to a lesser degree, of the plastic arts, manifested the will to affirm the existence of a culture proper to this minority. On the other hand, in quest of a universal artistic language — especially in Paris, where one witnessed an avant-gardist one-upmanship — the creators tried to free themselves from distinctive traits of a national or ethnic order.
The myriad of artists converging toward the capital, moved by the same desire for political, social, and cultural emancipation, did not pass unnoticed and gave rise to the belief in the existence of a foreign school, predominantly Jewish, that was invading French art or at least “contaminating” it.
But did these artists conceive of a relation between their artistic practice, often inspired by modernity, and their origins? Rarely — because the prestige of French art, whose epicenter remained Paris, prompted them to an effort of assimilation and cultural apprenticeship. Indeed, most of the artists of Jewish origin produced works without direct relation to Judaism.
They were in this city above all to paint, sculpt, absorb art by visiting galleries and that temple which is the Louvre. Beyond a shared desire to free themselves from the frameworks of Jewish life, they sought in Paris artistic know-how and recognition. All, however, do not share the certainties that animate the sculptor Ossip Zadkine: “Thus I lived my life, which was above all absorbed by the labor of the sculptor. In France, where I acclimatized, where every tree, every house and every carved stone became deeply mine, sheltered from racial antagonisms, from quarrels of factions and from sly, base jealousies… My Jewish origins took an intimate place, living behind closed doors, within myself… I rather poorly defined the specific contributions that could in some way harm the integrity and moral prosperity of the French. I found none of them in myself. I lived as a Breton, or an Alsatian, or a Pyrenean Catalan living as French in France (then) comes the disaster. The defeat and the fascists’ grip on France,” he wrote.4
No doubt, with many creators it is a matter of establishing, consciously or not, a subtle equilibrium between their identity and their plastic production.
One may even follow Jean-Michel Foray’s remark concerning Chagall, which could be applied to other artists: “How to articulate modernity and a vernacular, Jewish and Russian culture…, the question of identity, the anxiety of the loss of identity, is central in Chagall’s work — and perhaps common to Jewish life and to modern art — it is this question that determines the strategies of identification and adaptation that found his art.”5 But this equilibrium, or rather this tension, varying from one artist to another, does not in any way result in a common vocabulary or language. Despite this observation, the term “Jewish expressionism” will often return apropos of Soutine, Kikoïne, Krémègne, Modigliani, or even Pascin.
This art would thus be characterized by the melancholy, the inner laceration, the existential anguish proper to the Jewish world. This vision even gives rise, years later, to an exhibition titled “Humanism and Expressionism: The Representation of the Human Figure and the Jewish Experience.”6
But, in that case, would Picasso’s blue, “miserabilist” period make the Spanish painter a Jewish artist?
One finds an attempt at such a definition in the preface to the catalog Jüdische Künstler unserer Zeit (Jewish Artists of Our Time), for an exhibition in Zurich devoted to international Jewish art held during the 1929 Zionist Congress: “The flourishing of Jewish art is one of the most comforting manifestations of our renaissance. The painters Chagall and Chaïm Soutine and the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz are the most authorized representatives of twentieth-century Jewish plastic art… In vain would one seek among Jewish artists common formal traits. But a community of feelings, of ideas, of aspirations presides over their works. Jews are Gothics. They sacrifice form to the expression of the inner life, they spiritualize it.”7
As often, when specialists, in desperation, have recourse to terms as general as feeling, spirituality, or expression, one remains in the vague.
Nevertheless, a few attempts to develop a Jewish art took place.
In Russia, the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts was founded in 1915. Likewise, the formidable series of illustrations for Had Gadya, produced by Lissitzky (1918–1919), would be published by an action group in favor of popular Jewish culture, the Kultur-Lige. However, the artist treats this eminently Jewish subject in a style that combines the popular naïveté of the loubok8 with Cubism.
In Paris, a case apart is that of the journal that became mythical: Makhmadim, a Hebrew plural meaning at once delights, pleasures, and beauties. Devoted to Jewish national art, it was founded by the group of Jewish artists who lived at La Ruche, among them Joseph Tchaikov, Léo Kœnig, and Marek Szwarc.
The latter speaks of it with great lucidity: “With Tchaikov, we had the idea of a monthly journal devoted to Jewish art… This periodical was to treat of Jewish style in the plastic arts, that style proper to our whole creation. It was to serve us as homeland and follow us everywhere, as the tent follows the nomads we were. We spoke of the journal with real tenderness. It came into being and lasted several months. Six or seven issues appeared on dark gray, royal blue, or brick red paper. About ten artists collaborated, but I greatly fear they were the only ones to appreciate and propagate it. This first journal of Jewish Art had this originality that, to the exclusion of any text, it was composed only of drawings. The drawings were hectographed by ourselves — that is, obtained by transferring the original onto a gelatin surface — and this technique seemed to us the height of progress.”9
The result, however, Marie Vacher remarks, is that despite the Makhmadim’s innovative claims and a very decorative style, impregnated with Jugendstil, one can see the influence of the Bezalel school10, by way of two members of the group who had studied there: Kœnig and Lichtenstein. It is interesting, however, that Marek Szwarc’s account ends with another inhabitant of La Ruche, Chagall, who did not collaborate on the journal: “Older than us, already an accomplished artist at the moment of his arrival in Paris, he was of solitary temperament and kept apart. Without our suspecting it, he realized our ideal better than we did.”
Chagall is probably the only artist whose art treats Jewish themes by drawing on the figures of style that are part of Jewish culture — above all that of the Luftmensch. In his pictorial universe, where characters renounce the principles of gravitation, the painter never renounces his roots. His imaginary world remains anchored in a precise time and space, that of the Jewish village. But, even if one can speak of a “Chagall style,” it is a language that belongs only to him and that is not adopted by other Jewish creators.
For all that, when the artist takes on that monument of French culture which is La Fontaine’s Fables, the critics make no mistake. At first, he is attacked as a foreigner. Thus, in 1930, in the Antwerp newspaper La Métropole, Hubert Colley writes: “I did not recognize La Fontaine in the image Chagall offers of him… What Chagall offers us, in a hundred gouaches, are the Fables of Chagall. La Fontaine… was only the pretext. For the Russian neither transcribes nor comments on the Frenchman: he denatures him Russian-style…”11 Ten years later, in the context one knows, Robert Rey, Inspector of Artistic Creation, goes further by commenting on Vollard’s choice of Chagall: “To illustrate the most Cartesian and most lucid of poets, he chose a Slavic Jew whose art consisted, through a seductive disorder of colors borrowed from Oriental popular imagery, in suggesting exuberant levitations. Experiments that might have had their interest in a museum of contemporary ethnography, but that could only unbalance the public.”12 One finds here a French version of the racist argumentation used during the famous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937.
However, one need not wait for the atmosphere reigning in France during the Occupation to see violent reactions, of xenophobic and antisemitic accents, against Jewish artists. The idea that immigrants represent a problem for the State — more particularly Eastern Jews considered the least desirable of all — was self-evident for the French administration. Certainly, foreigners as a whole were often targeted. Xenophobia and chauvinism did not spare other nationalities and opposed the École de Paris to the École française, an equally vague term. “Not only does this emigration do harm to our painters, but it is also dangerous for French art and taste… without being accused of xenophobia, one can say that the majority of the incoherencies, the inanities, the deliberate deformations with which a certain school amuses itself bear foreign signatures… Is this really the moment, despite everything, to open the door so widely to outside influences, to magnify the art of the neighbor by granting it half the picture rail in our salons and a permanent museum all to itself, when our young school suffers a painful crisis and needs encouragement?”13
It is striking to find a similar discourse coming from a Jewish critic: “The moment has come for France to make its examination, to perform a return upon itself, and to find in its national fund the primary elements of its salvation. The École de Paris is a house of cards built in Montparnasse… The ideology of the École de Paris is oriented against the École de France, which is governed by the dynastic principle of unity in time.”14
One could thus see in the critiques of the École de Paris a combat between the artists who exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants — the two sites of modernity — to the detriment of the Salon des Artistes Français and the Salon de la Nationale, “which were folding back more and more on the ‘safe’ values of craft and national good taste.”15 However, one observes that these juxtapositions systematically point to the corruption “imported” by the “mixtèques” that the foreign artists were. Nothing new, since previously Cubism had already been assimilated to “Boche art” by its detractors, despite the absence of German creators in this movement. However, this presence of the Other — to take up the title of the Musée d’Art Moderne exhibition — finds a perfect scapegoat in the figure of the Jew, for “virulent antisemitism strikes… and demonizes modern art in its entirety, by calling it Jewish, therefore coming from elsewhere.”16
The pretext is at hand: the presence of dealers and collectors already established in Paris who are of Jewish origin. It is often forgotten that, while art is made by artists, it is made known by critics, dealers, and collectors. Thus, in 1928, Wilhelm Uhde writes: “More than three-quarters of all dealers, critics — such as Louis Vauxcelles, Florent Feis, Waldemar George, Adolphe Basler, Max Jacob, Claude-Roger Marx, Marcel Hiver, Gustave Kahn, Jacques Belinsky — and collectors are Jewish. It is they who, in their time, recognized the great values, defended them, made them famous… It is thanks to them that great paintings of real value entered the museums.”17
This positive, even valorizing, observation is turned around by Fritz R. Vanderpyl in the Mercure de France of 15 July 1925 (p. 390), who questions the existence of a Jewish painting.18 The answer is cutting: “Go visit the painting galleries of the Louvre, from bottom to top and from one end to the other, for as many hours as you wish, examine every canvas or panel and every artist’s name written beneath, from the thirteenth or twentieth century — you will not find a single Jewish one.” The critic, however, makes a small concession by mentioning a single exception, that of Pissarro who, according to him, is “attached by his ancestry to Portuguese Semitism.” Then we learn that “suddenly, we see Israelite painters proliferate. In the postwar Salons, the Lévys are legion… where, all of a sudden, did this desire to paint come from among the descendants of the twelve tribes, this passion for brushes and palette which — despite the Law — one seems to tolerate, even encourage, in the most orthodox milieus?”
But it is above all the explanation of this phenomenon that brings Vanderpyl’s antisemitism to light. For him, indeed, there is no need to take into account the upheaval in Jewish society and the desire for emancipation of these artists. The reason for this change is quite simply mercantile, for “the day painting became, for many, a speculative science, the Jew could practice it. The former calligrapher of the Talmud set himself to buying canvases and colors.” In other words, the pictorial practice among Jews has nothing to do with art and everything to do with commerce. The contribution of the Jewish diaspora to the international success of the École de Paris — like the entry of some fifty Soutine canvases into Alfred C. Barnes’s famous collection in Philadelphia, the latter also acquiring works by Lipchitz — feeds this accusation.19
Moreover, according to Vanderpyl, this flowering of Jewish creators during the modern period does not prevent the low quality of their works. These painters and sculptors appear, and this is no simple chance, at an era opened by the Fauves and in which “nine-tenths of the works hung… are not only of an inevitable mediocrity, not only of a dirty coloring and a poverty of material that is anti-French, but they are also sad and scatological, of a wilful ugliness, often imprinted with obscenity without the single excuse of charm.” “Scatological,” “obscene,” based on geometrical formulas — the critic targets Cubism and post-Cubism — and above all “anti-French”: one can hardly denigrate the plastic production of the avant-garde any further. And it is quite naturally that the Jew finds his place there, for “no one is unaware that nothing is ugly in nature… the Jew has no doubt been tempted by this new axiom which… seems to admit all deformations; this was one more reason to become a painter.”
Squaring the circle, a “double bind.” Sometimes Jews are not capable of painting, sometimes they set to work when art becomes degenerate. Camille Mauclair, in his book Les Métèques contre l’art français (The Métèques against French Art)20 (1930), makes it understood that Jews are the agents of the decline of the West.
He, like the nationalist press as a whole, reproaches Jews for their corrupting influence and their venal motivations. For Mauclair, modern art is summed up as “a vast international conspiracy fomented by Jewish dealers and Jewish critics against the ethnic aspirations of France,” writes Christopher Green.21 Jewish art is presented as an invention aimed at disintegrating the classical spirit.
One can end with the affirmation of another critic, Jewish moreover, Adolphe Basler, who poses the same question as Vanderpyl: Is there a Jewish painting? “No, we answer… are they distinguished by their ethnic character, do they bring the slightest Jewish accent to the art they practice? They reflect only the artistic culture of the country in which they live. They show admirable gifts of assimilation, gifts that allow them to satisfy all tastes — the taste of the day, the taste of the country they inhabit, and even the taste that is not conditioned by fashion… There are Jews who have learned to do painting and sculpture in Paris, Berlin, Munich, London, Amsterdam… The exalted spirit of the Jewish nationalists being as arbitrary as the hateful ideas of the racists who erected antisemitism into dogma, this only complicates the problem of Jewish painting — a problem quite imaginary at bottom.”22
Thus, paradoxically, according to Basler, two tendencies believe in the possibility of an existing Jewish art. On the one hand, a national, even nationalist, vision that dreams, without however succeeding, of an artistic form that could serve as spiritual expression for the Jewish community. On the other, the supposed notion of a modern Jewish art is taken up by the defenders of “the integrity of French art.” In other words, if the existence of a modern Jewish art remains secondary for the majority of the Jewish artists of the École de Paris — then instrumentalized and stigmatized in a xenophobic France barely emerged from the Dreyfus Affair — it owes its definition to the adversaries of every form of “métissage.”
Paul Salmona, “Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris pour école, 1905-1940” (“Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris as School, 1905-1940”), Paris, mahJ ed., 2021, p. 2.↩︎
Thus, an exhibition is held at the Billiet gallery in Zurich on the occasion of the 1919 Zionist congress, “The Jewish Artists of Paris.”↩︎
In 1924 a controversy erupts around the hanging at the Salon d’Automne. The alphabetical order is replaced by a distribution by nationality.↩︎
Ossip Zadkine, Journal, 17 September – 22 December 1940, archives of the Zadkine museum of the City of Paris.↩︎
Jean-Michel Foray, “Chagall et les modernes” (“Chagall and the Moderns”), Chagall connu et inconnu (Chagall Known and Unknown), Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, 2003, p. 51.↩︎
“Humanism and Expressionism: The Representation of the Human Figure and the Jewish Experience,” Pontoise, Musée Tavet-Delacour, 2008.↩︎
Waldemar George, Galerie Billiet, Zurich, 1929. The same year, another exhibition is held in the same gallery, “The Jewish Artists of Paris.”↩︎
The loubok, woodblock prints engraved in Russia, take the form of simple, narrative graphics inspired by literature, by religious and popular stories.↩︎
Marek Szwarc, in Marie Vacher, “Joseph Moiseevitch Tchaikov. From La Ruche to Makhmadim and Soviet Ideology (1910-1937),” Les Cahiers de l’École du Louvre, no. 1, 2012, p. 11.↩︎
Marek Szwarc, op. cit., p. 11.↩︎
Hubert Colley, La Métropole, Antwerp, 20 February 1930, in “Marc Chagall, Les Fables de La Fontaine,” Céret, Musée d’art moderne, 1996, p. 17.↩︎
Robert Rey, La peinture moderne ou l’Art sans métier (Modern Painting, or Art without Craft), 1941, p. 18.↩︎
Jean Robiquet, L’Information, 14 February 1922, in Gladys Fabre, “Qu’est-ce que l’École de Paris” (“What is the École de Paris”), École de Paris, 1904-1929, La Part de l’Autre, Musée de l’Art Moderne de Paris, 2000-2001, p. 33.↩︎
Waldemar Georges, “École Française ou École de Paris,” Formes, June 1931, in Gladys Fabre, “Qu’est-ce que l’École de Paris,” op. cit.↩︎
Gladys Fabre, op. cit., p. 31.↩︎
Christopher Green, “Les cubismes de l’‘École de Paris’” (“The Cubisms of the ‘École de Paris’”), in École de Paris, 1904-1929, La Part de l’Autre, op. cit., p. 61.↩︎
Wilhelm Uhde, Picasso et la tradition française (Picasso and the French Tradition), Paris, Éditions des Quatre-Chemins, 1928, p. 81. The artists are fully aware of the determining role of dealers and gallerists. “I am very glad to notice that here many people, dealers and collectors, have begun to take an interest in Cubism. I think you do not even suspect the immensity of the work already done by you,” writes Jacques Lipchitz to Léonce Rosenberg (14 May 1916).↩︎
The date of 1925 is not innocent. Let us recall, it is in that same year that André Warnod forged the term École de Paris.↩︎
“I will mention only for the record the Slavs disguised as representatives of art in France at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia,” Louis Vauxcelles, L’Excelsior, 26 Nov. 1923.↩︎
Camille Mauclair, Les Métèques contre l’art français, La Nouvelle Revue critique, 1930.↩︎
Christopher Green, Les cubismes et l’école de Paris, p. 61.↩︎
Adolphe Basler, “Y-a-t-il une peinture juive?” (“Is There a Jewish Painting?”), Le Mercure de France, 15 November 1925, pp. 111-118.↩︎