Modernist Diaspora

Immigrant Jewish Artists in Paris, 1900-1945

Richard D. Sonn

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350185333
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

In the years before, during, and after the First World War, hundreds of young Jews flocked to Paris, artistic capital of the world and center of modernist experimentation. Some arrived with prior training from art academies in Kraków, Vilna, and Vitebsk; others came armed only with hope and a few memorized phrases in French. They had little Jewish tradition in painting and sculpture to draw on, yet despite these obstacles, these young Jews produced the greatest efflorescence of art in the long history of the Jewish people. The paintings of Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and Emmanuel Mané-Katz, the sculptures of Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Chana Orloff, and works by many other artists now grace the world's museums. As the École de Paris was the most cosmopolitan artistic movement the world had seen, the left-bank neighborhood of Montparnasse became a meeting place for diverse cultures. How did the tolerant, bohemian atmosphere of Montparnasse encourage an international style of art in an era of bellicose nationalism, not to mention racism and antisemitism? How did immigrants not only absorb but profoundly influence a culture? This book examines how the clash of cultures produced genius.

1

Is there Jewish Art?

In 1913, Marc Chagall was a young painter living in the artists’ colony known as La Ruche, the beehive-shaped structure at the south edge of Paris that provided cheap studio space for dozens of painters and sculptors. In that year (as it is conventionally dated), he painted Paris through the Window, which both stylistically and thematically is one of his landmark early works. It features surreal features set against a fragmented background that reflects his knowledge of cubism and Orphism, the latter as practiced by his friends Sonia and Robert Delaunay. The man in the foreground with two different-colored faces is presumably facing east and west, towards Russia and France; the heart in his palm may signify his love for both places. A man is shown parachuting from the Eiffel Tower, while a train runs upside down and a man and woman seem about to collide in mid-air. The parachutist may refer to Franz Reicheit, an Austrian immigrant who jumped to his death from the Eiffel Tower on February 4, 1912, when the wearable parachute that he designed failed to deploy. The event was widely covered in the press, which makes me wonder whether Chagall may have painted it in 1912. Chagall would feature the Eiffel Tower in later works, including himself and his wife Bella in the foreground after she joined him in Paris in 1923. It is doubtful that he could actually see the Eiffel Tower through the window of his shabby studio, but that would be misplaced literalism for a work that the poet Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed surnaturel (supernatural). Unlike many of his early paintings, this paean to Paris contained no overt references either to Jews or to Russia.

Figure 1.1 Marc Chagall, Paris through the Window, 1913, oil on canvas. P. 37.438, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift. 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

In 1930, Mané-Katz, another immigrant from the former Russian Empire, painted his own Homage to Paris. Seven years younger than Chagall and from Ukraine rather than Belorussia, Mané-Katz also arrived in Paris before World War I. Mané-Katz too celebrated the presence of Jews in the French cityscape, as captured in the Yiddish saying that indicated a country that welcomed Jews: “happy as God in France.” Mané-Katz showed a young Jew wearing long sidelocks and with phylacteries—leather straps and case holding sacred texts—wrapped around his forehead, arms raised, a bible in one hand, as if in ecstatic prayer, the Eiffel Tower rising from the background. Here, too, West met East, since such a figure would have been alien even to the assimilated Jews of France, much less to French Catholics. This is likely an autobiographical image, since the artist wore peyas or sidelocks when he arrived in Paris in 1913.¹ One can imagine that the Eiffel Tower represented for Jewish immigrants the promise of the French Revolution, since it was built in 1889 to commemorate the revolution’s centenary. Jewish artists felt welcomed into republican France at a time (before World War I) when empires still dominated the continent and when discrimination, trials for blood libel, and pogroms remained realities faced by Jews in Eastern Europe.

The symbolism of the Eiffel Tower becomes more poignant when one considers that Chagall featured it prominently again in a work painted over a quarter-century later. In Bridal Couple of the Eiffel Tower, painted in 1938–9, Chagall posed a joyful bride and groom accompanied by a rooster in front of the tower, now imagined as a site of love.² The city of light is also the city of love; Chagall painted Bridal Couple to express his love for his adopted city: France had conferred citizenship on Chagall in June 1937. The joy expressed in this painting would not last, as Marc and Bella Chagall would soon have to flee from their adopted homeland and become émigrés once again in 1941. Their fame enabled the Chagalls to escape, along with other prominent Jewish artists of Paris, including Jacques Lipchitz, Ossip Zadkine, Moïse Kisling, Mané-Katz, and Man Ray. Others, including Chaim Soutine, Louis Marcoussis, and the poet-artist Max Jacob, would die in France during the war; over a hundred Jewish painters and sculptors would die in Nazi gas chambers.³

The third of a century between the arrival of young immigrant Jews between 1900 and 1913, and the end of the era in 1940 with the collapse of the Third French Republic in the maelstrom of World War II, would become in retrospect a golden age for Jewish art. French critics claimed that this sudden appearance of Jewish artists was unprecedented and that Jews had previously had no tradition in the plastic arts of painting and sculpture, but this was not true. Since Jewish emancipation had liberated many Jews from sequestration in ghettos and rigid adherence to orthodox religious practice in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, there had been an increasing number of Jewish artists practicing their craft throughout Europe. A few had even become notable practitioners of modern painting styles, including Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) in France, Josef Israëls (1824–1911) in the Netherlands, and Max Liebermann (1847–1935) in Germany. Yet these remained relatively isolated examples, and all were notably from Western Europe (Pissarro came from St. Thomas, a Danish colony in the West Indies). A handful of Jews were able to make artistic careers in Eastern Europe, including the sculptor Mark Antokolsky (1840–1902) and Isaac Levitan (1860–1900); their success was truly extraordinary given the restrictions and prejudice they faced.⁴ In 1907 in Berlin, an art show billed as the first exhibition of Jewish artists focused on nineteenth-century painters from Poland, Germany, and France. The artists represented were Maurycy Gottlieb, Artur Markowicz, Josef Oppenheimer, Camille Pissarro, and Lesser Ury.⁵

Figure 1.2 Mané-Katz, Homage to Paris, 1930. Mané-Katz Museum, Haifa, Israel. 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Another emerging Jewish movement at the turn of the twentieth century was Zionism. At the fifth Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1901, the young philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965) lectured on Jewish art and exhibited some contemporary Jewish artists. He argued that art must play a role in Jewish as in other forms of nationalism. Three years later, he received his doctorate in art history and philosophy. In a letter to the Berlin-based artist Lesser Ury (1861–1931), written in 1901, Buber asked, “Is Jewish art possible today?” His rather surprising answer, considering he wrote to a Jewish artist, was no, since Jews had no homeland (later in the letter, he acknowledged that Jewish artists were possible).⁶ In 1906, as if to answer Buber’s call, Boris Schatz founded the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, named after Bezalel ben Uri, the artist mentioned in Exodus and considered to be the first Jewish artist.⁷ In 1908, the eminent Rabbi Abraham Kook helped inaugurate Bezalel, proclaiming “the renaissance of art and of the Hebraic aesthetic in the land of Israel,”⁸ which placed a religious stamp of approval on Jewish representation. Despite Buber’s Zionist message, diasporic Jewish art blossomed in the next decade.

Though the phenomenon of Jews who painted and sculpted was not entirely novel, there had been nothing like the appearance, in Paris as well as in London, Vilna, Kraków, Munich, and Jerusalem, of numerous Jewish art students in the decade before World War I, and their emergence as modernists in the interwar era. These artists were mostly born between 1884 and 1894; a younger generation would be born between 1895 and 1911. A few outliers were born in the 1870s, including Otto Freundlich, Leopold Gottlieb, Mela Muter, and Louis Marcoussis. Nearly all the rest saw the light of day from 1884 on, with Amedeo Modigliani at the head of this generation, and Jules Pascin and Sonia Stern (Delaunay-Terk) born the next year in 1885. Chagall was born in 1887, Chana Orloff in 1888, Zadkine in 1890, Lipchitz and Kisling in 1891, and Soutine in 1893. Mané-Katz was the youngest of this cohort, born in 1894, and so only nineteen when he arrived in Paris in 1913.

Modigliani, Pascin, Chagall, Soutine, and Lipchitz are the best known of a very large group of Jews who made their way to Paris between 1905 (1901 in Muter’s case, 1903 for Marcoussis) and the 1930s. The catalog of a French show on these Jewish artists lists a total of forty-three names: ten from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, four from the German Empire, twenty-seven from the Russian Empire, and one each from Bulgaria and Italy. One authority on the Ecole de Paris, as the French critic André Warnod designated these artists in 1925, provides short biographies of 178 Jewish painters and sculptors. She estimates that over 500 Jewish artists were working in Paris in the interwar years between 1918 and 1940.⁹ With a few exceptions, they lived and worked in one neighborhood, the left-bank artists’ colony called Montparnasse. A few, such as Freundlich and Modigliani, started out in the northern Parisian artist colony of Montmartre, and Marco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Modernism and Diaspora—The School of Paris in an Age of Immigration
• 1 Is there Jewish Art?
• 2 From Montmartre to Montparnasse: New Social and Psychological Dimensions, 1900–1914
• 3 Masculinity and Patriotism: Artistic Responses to World War I, 1914–1920
• 4 Cosmopolitan Montparnasse in Les Années Folles, 1920–1930
• 5 Jews in Jazz Age Paris: The Symbiosis of Music and Art
• 6 Marketing Art: Jewish Critics and Art Dealers
• 7 Nationalism, Internationalism, and Zionism in the 1930s
• 8 The End of Time: Artists in Exile, Hiding, and Deportation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright