Nedira Yakir ©
How to define the ‘École
de Paris’[1] is still an open question, some eighty years after
the event. More than with any other modernist movement, the boundaries of the Ecole
de Paris oscillate
between attempts to describe it purely on stylistic grounds, and attempts to
categorise it by societal categories. Therefore, despite the popular undisputed
artistic status of artists such as M.Chagall, A. Modigliani, J. Pascin, A.
Archipenko, and O. Zadkin, the issue of how they can be uniformly branded under
the title the ‘École de Paris’ is still an ongoing dispute, fraught with
historiographic distortions and logical contradictions that involve questions
of ethnicity, nationalism and gender.
Definitions of the École de
Paris
In the modernist lineage mapping of the
avant-gardes, the defining qualities of the Ecole de Paris are claimed to be a stylistic combination of Fauve’s figurative
genres and vibrant colour combined with varying degrees of Cubist-inspired
fracturing of form and space. It is claimed that the nostalgic mood of the Ecole de Paris sets them apart from other contemporary
movements equally inspired by the innovations of the Fauvism and Cubism[2]. A racial and societal specificity
— they were Jewish, and immigrants –is an additional framing that
sets the Ecole de Paris apart from other contemporary modernisms
and contradicts modernist stylistic definition. There is a cross feeding
between the racial essentialising of the communal bohemian activities that took
place in Montparnasse and the artistic expression of nostalgia. While nostalgia
is a mood present in Modigliani’s languid nudes as well as in some of the
expressive qualities of Chagall’s Stetle paintings, it cannot be applied to all other artists
active at the time in Montparnasse, say Zadkin, Orloff or Archipenko and
others. Thus, the artistic activities in Montparnasse were an aggregate of
diverse nationalities, foreigners and French alike who practised a wide variety
of styles and expressions.[3]
The great number of portrait paintings of
partners, colleagues, friends, and other fellow bohemians in the artistic
corpus of the Ecole de Paris offers a lively documentation of the
social and professional mutual support that was part of the community as well
as friendships rivalries and mutual admiration. For example, the portraits
painted by J. Pascin, R. Brooks and H. Soutine indicate the passion of recording
the times and its main protagonists, whatever the gender or economic situation
of the artists. Similar in intent, if different in medium, is the documentation
of Parisian life in the photographs of Brassai, A. Kertesz, and Florence Henri.
But the strongest images of the fun that the bohemian life entailed are
represented in the iconic and constantly repeated depictions of Kiki of
Montparnasse and, in particular, the ubiquitous paintings of the Japanese,
Leonard Foujita. In these representations, nostalgia gives way to the
modernists wholehearted welcome of modernity[4] as well as representing an involvement
with, and fascination for daily life led in the bohemian hub of Paris, the then
undisputed capital of modernism.
M. Kisling’s painting L’Émigré, 1919, represents his own experienced
reality and can also stand for one of the central effects of modernity, that of
mass migration, a trait that is still with us in the early twenty-first century
and is still a topic for much debate and nationalistic based fears. The
culturally accepted search for, and expression of, the artists’ national
identity as different from the dominant one is still being discussed in
different terms when related to the early twentieth-century immigrant artists.
The initial bracketing of the Ecole de Paris as East-European Jewish artists active in Paris, is
still dictating the way the movement is being defined today, without being able
to free itself from the modernist legacy. In this sense, though the term Ecole
de Paris no longer
contains an antisemitic connotation, it still contains a general notion of
Otherness.
École de Paris a shifting term
The term ‘École de
Paris’ was coined
by André Warnot in 1925, at a time when a strong xenophobic and
antisemitic cultural and political atmosphere prevailed. [5] Despite recent claims that no clear
antisemitic attribute was linked to the term Ecole de Paris in his 1925 text, the implications of such
intent can be gleaned from his text written a year earlier on the same topic.
In a discussion in 1924, Warnot supported the controversial decision made by
the French Salons to group art works in their annual exhibitions in accordance
with the artists’ national and or racial origins. This seemingly
administrative arrangement Warnot attempted to justify by claiming to
distinguish between artists whom he defined as being ‘Chez Nous’ — that is either French natives or
those who have successfully assimilated such as van Gogh, Pissarro, Sisley
— and the others who bastardise French culture, basically the foreign
artists of the mid 1920s. At the time, the artistic community of Montparnasse
was perceived by right-wing fractions as consisting mainly of East-European
Jewish immigrants and the Jewish artists amongst the many other nationalities
attracted the strongest reactions and racial bracketing. [6] In this vein of selective analysis, the
art of the Jewish artists seemed to be the sign of a double primitivism; that
of their peripheral European native country and of their race.[7] By and large, the primitivism of Brancusi
or say Picasso is evaluated in different terms from that of Marc
Chagall’s. In the latter’s art, primitivism was also a sign for the
artist’s racial and cultural background rather than pointing solely to
his intellectual engagements. Indeed, Jews en masse were perceived as embodying
artistic primitivism despite the fact that individuals were seen as epitomising
modernity. The prevalent use of colours was seen as indicative of Jewish lack
of taste and refinement, an ascribed vulgarity that was explained away by the
lack of refined training due to the biblical and traditional prohibition of
image making. A distinction was made between the use of colour by say, Soutine
and Chagall, and the rhetoric of modernist liberation associated with
non-Jewish artists such as Matisse, R. Delaunay, or Kandinsky. The perception
of modernity in relation to Jews was predicated on and stressed secularism and
economic mobility while Jews’ involvement in artistic modernism was
interpreted in negative terms.
The original, pejorative connotations of
the term Ecole de Paris
have eventually been redefined and changed into affirmative, positive meaning
mainly during the Second World War and, in particular, in the post-war art
history literature. In a simplistic textual way it can be argued that the
meaning of the term Ecole de Paris depends on what is understood by the words
‘Paris’ or even ‘École’. In effect, the emphasis
on Paris signals a double opposition: to France in on one hand and to Europe on
the other. Internally, the word ‘Paris’ stands as an artificial
homogenising attempt by all the varying ‘schools’ of style that
were active in Paris during the interwar years. In mainstream art history the Ecole
de Paris, however, has
come down as being specific to the Parisian quarter of Montparnasse, where the
modernism that was being formed stood apart from, even if it was at times
dependent on, Cubism that was associated with Montmartre.[8]
The reading of ‘Paris’ as
distinctive from ‘France’ might seem innocent enough but changes
its ring when we consider some of the historical meanings contained in this
distinction. ‘France’ for Warnot and his circle stood for pure
indigenous culture, while ‘Paris’ stood for the expression of the
foreign art made in Paris.[9] Such a linguistic/geographical
distinction also underpinned the naming of the two national museums built in
1937 in Paris for the Exposition Universelle. The Musée d’Art
moderne de la Ville de Paris (hereafter MAMP) was to house modernism while the
Musée des Monuments Français contained plaster copies of famous
cathedrals and thus connoted a vision of the nation and patriotic pride.[10]
The most significant studies to disrupt
and intervene with the mainstream definitions and perception of Parisian
modernism during the early twentieth century are Kenneth Silver’s 1989
critical study of the political impact on culture during the interwar years, Esprit
de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World war, 1914-1925 ; followed by Romi Golan’s (1995) Modernity
and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars. Both authors have argued for a
contextual societal analysis, against the autonomous modernist claims. Their
studies focuses mainly on the political context by foregrounding the impact of
nationalism and the xenophobic culture of the time. A final stage in
constructing the meaning of the Ecole de Paris was a museological interpretation provided in this year’s exhibition L’École
de Paris 1904-1929, La part de l’Autre, at the MAMP, the subtitle of which reads as the
curators’ intention to redefine the Ecole de Paris within notions of the Other. This
scenario imbues and emphasises Paris as the undisputed and dynamic capital of
modernism and cosmopolitanism but also contains some questionable
redefinitions. In the exhibition’s given chronology, the name, biography,
art and presence of Picasso were inserted as a keynote. Thereby, the meaning of
the Ecole de Paris
traded its former Jewish specific definition for a blanket inclusion of all
‘foreign artists’ in Paris.
The impact of the name of Picasso
A replacement of the crude reductionism
contained within the binaries of Montmartre and Montparnasse is unquestionably
an enriching one. But unfortunately some of the implications of such a
reinterpretation in relation to the Ecole de Paris bring about other kinds of generalisation
or distortions. In the MAMP exhibition the privileging of Picasso as the
archetypal ‘foreigner’ who has eventually become to signify French
modernism is problematic when related to the Ecole de Paris. To use the name of Picasso either as a
trope for the modern artist or as an economic device to pull audiences to
exhibitions of lesser-known artists is a well rehearsed plotting that has
gathered momentum since his death. But on this occasion the selection of 1904
as a starting point for the Ecole de Paris, because it marks Picasso’s arrival at
Montmartre, is bewildering on several counts.[11] For one, by the autumn of 1909 he left
the bateau-lavoir for the more comfortable 11, boulevard de Clichy near place
Pigalle and three years later, on October 1912, he moved to the Boulevard
Raspail. Since then, he constantly lived in gradually more lavish houses both
in Paris and in Southern France.[12] Picasso’s forays to Montparnasse
can be explained as revisiting bohemian life especially seeking the company of
writers[13] rather than that of painters and when he
frequented Montparnasse, it was the more middle-class environs of the 6th
arrondissement, to the north of the boulevard Montparnasse, rather than the far
less affluent cité d’artistes south of the boulevard in the 14th arrondissement.[14]
So what was there about Montparnasse that
singles it out as a category worthwhile to retain? It is neither the racial
background of its artists, nor the stylistic specificity defined by modernists,
but the combination of societal, artistic and political economic dynamics that
took place there. As Y. Fisher and A. Marés argue[15] in the early 1920s Montparnasse contained
no less than 14 independent academies[16] that accepted both women and foreigners,
who were excluded from the official École des beaux-arts. In addition, the independent academies
offered a freer form of tuition, as well as contemporary practices and ideas.
These academies had a two-way benefiting system for the modernist French
artists like: Matisse, Bourdelle, Lothe, Léger and Ozenphant and for the
foreign or women artists interested in modern art. Thus, the racial, national
separation that used to be made when representing the EdP is not only questionable on a political,
ethical basis but is also lacking in straightforward factual accuracy. Indeed,
there was a wide range of nation-specific organisations[17] that, despite their specificity, in total
add up to a cosmopolitan mix.[18] The legendary image of bohemian life in
Montparnasse of endless partying and festivities was initiated by André
Salmon’s 1926 influential biography: Modigliani, sa vie et son oeuvre, written after the artist’s
premature death.[19] Many of the photographs of the
café life and the bals masqués also helped to perpetuate this image. There was
however another side to it. The lifestyle for aspiring artists who congregated
at the Ruch in the Passage Dantzig,[20] where cheap studio and living spaces were
available was centred around art making and finding ways of sustaining that
vocation, to which the many fund-raising activities and charitable
organisations testify. The community was a network of visual artists, writers,
painters and sculptors of an international nature that was intent on
internalising French culture.[21]
The outcome of an insistence that the Ecole
de Paris is a phenomenon
specific to foreign artists inevitably brings about historical distortions.
Most prominently, in this context is the recent redefinition of the Ecole de
Paris through the
insertion of Picasso into the school as a key figure, while Matisse who was
pivotal for it has been excluded because of his Frenchness. In effect, it was
Matisse’s impact that was central to the Montparnasse community, with his
opening of the independent academy on January 6 1908. Thus his tuition was both
accommodating paths to modernism as well as becoming a personal source of
influence. His inspirational example was not only stylistic but also a model
for imitation, as it indeed was for Marie Vassilieff. After studying at
Matisse’s academy in 1908, she established the Russian academy and in 1911
went on to open her own Vassilieff academy. The exclusion of Matisse
exemplifies how an appraisal of art predetermined by a national classification
of adjectivising the artists[22] inevitably comes up with an historical
distortion. The distortion that results from evaluating artists according to
their national or racial origins acts as a double distortion: one by
segregating the foreigners, the other by eradicating the contributions of
French artists to the group
Gender and the École de Paris
I have indicated the paradoxes inherent in
the attempts to define the Ecole de Paris in either national or racial categories. The gender issue is still a mute
one in relation to the movement. An even greater distortion of the Ecole de
Paris is being
perpetuated by the lack of discussion of women’s role there. The degree
of feminising of the Ecole de Paris is extreme by racial and gendered ways; the first by
feminising the foreigner, the other by the use of Kiki as a trope for
Montparnasse. Kiki stands for the mid-twenties ideal of beauty; she stands for
the model of numerous artists, from the Ecole de Paris to photographers, films and Surrealism;
she stands for the new woman with her cropped hair, for sexual vitalism with
her make-up, and for a vivacious fun loving personality. But while her image is
omnipresent, she is only known as Kiki, a familiar name without a surname, an
example of the gendered practice of naming of which Vassilieff is also a victim
to a certain extent. So far, the literature has not settled on how to spell her
name and consequently her surname appears in different spellings in various
publications. In respect of the importance allocated to primary sources for
history writing of artistic Montparnasse the first hand memoirs both of Marevna[23] and Kiki (1929), are still relegated to a
secondary level of importance. We must look to feminist historians to reinstate
them as artists and individuals and to rewrite their roles so that they will
emerge either from total omission or from the equally pernicious relegation of
their names to the inferior regions of footnotes.
To the best of my knowledge, even feminist
literature is relatively mute about Kiki’s art. And yet, she exhibited it
in 1927 and following it she obtained a contract from Bernheim-Jeune. While the
representation of the femininity of Kiki signals Montparnasse, her personality
and art, painting and writing are obliterated. In order to uncover what were
the real implications of being a woman in the interwar years in Montparnasse,
another model of inquiry is needed[24]. Some of it does feature in the
women’s writing, recollecting their own experiences, but it is equally
eloquent, and prolifically so, in their paintings. Images of women of
Montparnasse, painted by women offer a different representation from that
promoted by the masculine gaze. Such alternatives are expressed in the art of
Marie Laurencine, whose paintings address the issue of the individual within an
avant-garde group. Similarly, Vassilieff in her Café de la Rotonde, 1921, not only modernised the image of the
Madonna and Child but also depicted new spaces of motherhood. Whether out of economic
necessity, or as a new mode of reclaiming the public spaces, it is in the realm
of the café that she places the mother and Child.
While the extensions and broadening of the
Ecole de Paris open up
new possibilities for consideration, ones that eschew the divisions into
abstractions, surrealism, photography and figurative art as distinct sections,
it still impacts differently in relation to woman artists. Is the example of
the current interest in Sonia Delaunay, in terms of her individuality as
distinct from that of her husband Robert, an indication of the difficulties of
inclusion of women artists in the discussion of a modern art movement? In this
context Sonia Delaunay’s self-portrait titled Philomène, 1907, the classical tragic tongueless figure can be read as
an astute comment on the voicelessness of women artists. Much of women
artists’ work has been recently retrieved. But the problem of how to
reinscribe them into the masculinist avant-garde still waits to be fully
defined. Unfortunately, biographical events still impact differently on
women’s reputation. H. Orloff, an active sculptress at Montparnasse,
seemed to have lost out in her international reputation after emigrating to
Israel by more than did Marcel Janko. Goncharova and Exter are still being
aligned mainly to theatre design.
The original xenophobic and antisemitic
connotations of the Ecole de Paris have been eradicated from its historiography after
the Second World War. But recent attempts to re-frame the School still seem to
suffer from its old historical malaise in a new guise. To conclude, I would
argue that neither racial, national or gendered segregation help in giving the Ecole
de Paris a positive
cleaned-up image that reflects the factual elements of the artistic community
of Montparnasse. The feminising of the Ecole de Paris is perpetrated on two levels: by making
Kiki its trope, and by feminisation of the Other, be it specifically Jewish
artists or in general foreign ones. And while even when critical consideration
and displays disclaim any pejorative racial adjectivising, the Othering in
relation to woman artists still remains firmly in place.
[1] The italics signal the constructed aspect of the term.
[2]For example: the Italian Futurists, the German Expressionists, or the Parisian Section d’Or or Orphism.
[3] For a most interesting breakdown of the various nationalities, see J.-L. A. Andral et al, ‘Abécédaire’, pp. 367-397, in the catalogue: L’École de Paris; 1904-1929, la part de l’Autre. Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris, 2000.
[4] For discussion purposes, I am distinguishing between ‘modernity’ to refer to societal and political aspects, and ‘modernism’ referring to artistic ones, even though the terms are strongly interconnected.
[5] See Eric Michaud, ‘Un certain antisémitisme mondain’, pp. 86-88 of the Exhibition catalogue, op. cit., about the way that patriotic antisemitism during and after the Dreyfus affair has been replaced by a cultural antisemitism after the First World War.
[6] A trend that was carried on after the Second WW but without the pejorative connotation as for instance W. Haftmann’s, (1965)‘Marc Chagall and the Jewish Strain in the Ecole de Paris’, pp 26-263, and ‘Amadeo Modigliani’ pp. 263-264, in Painting in the Twentieth Century.
[7] For a detailed analysis of the cultural and political antisemitism of France during that time, see E. Michaud, (2000) ‘Un certain antisémitisme mondain’, pp.85-102. In particular p. 90 discusses the nationalists’ fears of what was termed ‘l’enjuivement’ of French painting.
[8] For a short and clear distinction of the two quarters and the sub-division within Montparnasse, see D. Cottington (1998) Cubism in the Shadow of War; The Avant-Garde and Politics in Paris 1905-1914. Yale, pp. 47, 123, 194.
[9] The same distinction was maintained in the ’36 World Fair, accompanied as a further set of comparisons by the colonial dominions.
[10] For the cultural politics of Paris Exposition International, see Chapter two in general, and p 43 in particular, in James D. Herbert, Paris 1937 :Worlds on Exhibition, Cornell University Press (1998).
[11] Picasso went to Montmartre because it had already been a centre for Spanish, especially Catalan artists since the late 1889 when Utrillo, Calasaro and Casas go to Paris and make Montmartre their haunt.
[12] About his middle class aspirations, see the many reports about how it was Fernande Olivier's inability to fit into his new life-style that caused their break-up, as well as about the life of affluence that he led after his marriage in 1918 to Olga.
[13] Françoise Gilot claims in her autobiography that Picasso sought mainly the company of writers, an association that has eventually enabled him to acquire a sophisticated argument line in relation to his art.
[14] See D. Cottington, op. cit, p. 47.
[15] Pp. 103-113 in the exhibition catalogue. See also Antoine Marés, ‘Pourquoi des étrangers à Paris?’, pp 138-147.
[16] The trend was an acceleration and variation of the three independent academies opened and run by practising artists during the nineteenth Century : Académie Colarossi est. 1815, Académie Julian est. 1868 and Académie Delédluse est. 1888.
[17] An example is The Montparnasse academy that was run by the Scandinavian artist Arinius, the French Lothe and Metzinger and Polish Jewish Kisling in 1917. There are records of 23 associations that range from intra-national societies such as the Franco-Scandinavian one, to national specific organisations: the USA had 5 associations, 6 Polish, 4 Russian, 1 Jewish, 1 Swedish and one association of collectors.
[18] For instance, of the 70 students in Matisse’s Académie during 1910-11 there were 5 students from the USA, 4 Germans, 2 Hungarians ,6 Scandinavians, 2 Russians and one Japanese, but very few French students.
[19] For detailed documentation and interviews of café life and parties, see: Jean-Marie Drot et Dominique Polad-Hardouin (1999, original 1995), Les Heures Chaudes de Montparnasse. Hazan, Paris.
[20] Of the 140 artists living and working in La Ruche were from central European countries.
[21] In that respect see how Hanna Orloff recalled her difficulties to befriend French families and the effect that Hubert’s suicide after Modigliani’s death had on her. In Jean-Marie Drot et Dominique Polad-Hardouin (1999, original 1995), Les Heures Chaudes de Montparnasse, Hazan, Paris.
[22] I am using the term in Griselda Pollock’s mode of analysis in relation to the ‘adjectivising’ of woman artists.
[23] See Marevna, (1972), Life with the Painters of La Ruche, London Constable, a section of which is reprinted in appendix 3 of Gill Perry’s (1995) Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Manchester University Press.
[24] Gill Perry in her attempt to look at woman in the Parisian Avant-garde.