Paris Natch

The 20th-century School of Paris is wholly contradictory: the artists within it do not form a consistent or homogenous artistic movement, and there is no manifesto. It was not overtly Parisian nor even, indeed, especially French. Yet the School, which existed from around 1905 to 1939, was not insubstantial. It gloried in its definitively international manner, with leading artists from across the world coexisting in a notion of artistic freedom, while pursuing a style that was loosely configured around Cubism and expressive figuration.

It was centred in what was in those days a defiantly new area for artists in the French capital – namely Montparnasse, between the 6th and 14th arrondissements. The foundation of the School in Montparnasse represented a rejection of not only fin-de-siècle Montmartre, the home of Zola and Toulouse-Lautrec, but also the Latin Quarter, home to the Sorbonne and the heroes of the Enlightenment. Montparnasse had no particular artistic or academic tradition to call on; it was progressive, modern, international, and, crucially, affordable. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse.

Foreign artists, politicians and writers could arrive here, find cheap lodgings, and establish contacts – and they did just that. James Joyce pitched up, as did Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford. Lenin and Trotsky frequented cafés such as Le Dôme, the Café du Parnasse and the legendary La Coupole. Artists from America, rejecting Prohibition gloom and attracted by the free lifestyle represented by les Années folles and the Josephine Baker jazz-era, made it their home, as did Jewish artists fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. It was a time of daring in a place that was truly a melting pot of ideas and talent.

Moïse Kisling (Polish, 1891-1953) Nature morte au pichet blanc oil on canvas 73.2 x 54.5cm (28¾ x 21½in) Estimate: £30,000 - 35,000 €34,000 - 40,000

Party with Pascin, Michonze and Florent Felts in 1925

Jules Pascin (1885-1930) Les Provinciales oil on board mounted on canvas 46 x 38cm (18 x 15in) Estimate: £15,000 - 18,000 €17,000 - 21,000

Pascin and Lucy

La Ruche

Quite quickly, Montparnasse became an emerging, possibly the emerging area of culture and the arts in the French capital. Its history during the 1920s reads like a Who’s Who of Western pre-war culture. The Bulgarian artist Jules Pascin, dubbed ‘The Prince of Montparnasse’, was renowned for his portraits of women and also his sociable lifestyle. Among his circle was Ernest Hemingway, whose Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast includes a chapter entitled ‘With Pascin at the Dôme’. The writer and patron Gertrude Stein lived with her partner Alice B. Toklas at 27 rue de Fleurus, and posed for Man Ray at his studio round the corner in rue Delambre. Nothing about Montparnasse was chic, as Stein relates in her memoir Paris France (1940); “We none of us lived in old parts of Paris then… we lived in the rue de Fleurus… and a great many of us lived on the boulevard Raspail which was not even cut through then and when it was cut through all the rats and animals came through our house and we had to have one of the vermin catchers of Paris come and clean us out.”

It was to this cheap, exciting, emerging quartier that the artists of the world, but particularly of Europe, migrated. The journalist Stanley Meisler describes the moment thus: “an historical phenomenon, an unprecedented and unexpected migration of young artists, mostly Jewish, many from the Russian empire.” One French study estimates that more than 500 Jewish artists were working in Paris during the interwar era.

Many lived and worked in La Ruche, a beehive-shaped building at the southern tip of Montparnasse, designed by Gustave Eiffel for use as a wine bar at the Great Exhibition of 1900. It became a sort of utopian artists’ collective. Fernand Léger moved in, and Marc Chagall, who returned to Paris in 1923 after nearly a decade in Russia, had a studio there. Jeanine Warnod, historian and daughter of the art critic André Warnod (who first identified the School of Paris), depicts La Ruche comprising “poverty, the ghetto, anarchy, individualism, the universe of Kafka”. As well as Chagall, its inhabitants included Amedeo Modigliani, the British painter Nina Hamnett, Chaïm Soutine and, of course, Jules Pascin, represented with two works offered in Bonhams’ sale ‘L’École de Paris 1905- 1939: The Jewish Artists’ in London in March.

The works are from the collection of the Nieszawer and Princ families, who built up the collection over three generations. Alongside Pascin are pieces from the School such as a nude by the German George Kars, and a rare work from Polish-born Cubist Moïse Kisling, whose early Nature Morte au Pichet (1917) is one of the highlights.

One of the most noticeable of these artists was Samuel Granowsky, known as ‘The Cowboy of Montparnasse’ due to his habit – acquired when he was an extra in an early movie – of wearing a Stetson; in the sale is a picture of Granowsky in Paris, on horseback. As Stein saw it, here, briefly, was the epicentre of modernity: “Paris was the natural background for the 20th century.”

The School of Paris became officially known as such after the renowned American collector Albert Barnes visited the city on a buying trip in 1922, giving Soutine and four other artists of the School their first big breaks. All good, one would have thought, but it sparked such resentment and hostility that two years later, the Salon des Indépendants exhibition was obliged to group artists by nation of origin, so that work by French artists was separated from work by immigrants.

This, in turn, led to critic Roger Allard supporting the foreign artists by using Warnod’s term ‘The School of Paris’, in acknowledgment both of their association with French art and of the international nature of this group within the French capital.

Jules Pascin (Bulgarian, 1885-1930) La Figurante du Palace oil on board mounted on canvas 65 x 54cm (25½ x 21¼in) Estimate £18,000 - 22,000 €20,000 - 25,000

Polish artists at La Rotonde Eugene Zack, Zborowski and Hayden

Samuel Granowsky (Ukrainian, 1889-1942) Self-portrait, 1920 oil on canvas 61 x 46cm (24 x 18) Estimate: £2,500 - 3,000 €3,000 - 4,000

Workship of Models at La Ruche 1905

Critics were lined up on both sides: while one side gloried in the School’s international and unrestrained nature, the other was clearly fuelled by a nationalistic anti-Semitism. Camille Mauclair, a once-radical novelist turned conservative art critic for Le Figaro, considered the School of Paris to be an enemy to the state. In a vicious two-volume book, The Farce of Living Art, published in 1930, he typified the School as decadent, anarchic, Bolshevik and, overall, a conspiracy to pass off bad work via unscrupulous dealers. His views were not so much a description of the School of Paris as an indication of the way things were going in France.

As the 1930s progressed, School of Paris artists were gradually marginalised. By 1935, no art publication would write about Chagall and, by June 1940, when France was ruled by the Vichy government and occupied by the Nazis, School of Paris artists were banned from exhibiting.

By the time of the Occupation, the utopian, international dream of an unregulated, liberal art movement that moved across genre and form was over. Samuel Granowsky was part of the infamous Vél d’Hiv roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942. He, and around 20 other School of Paris artists, were subsequently murdered in death camps. Kisling fled to California, where he lived next door to Aldous Huxley. Georges Kars took his own life in 1945, most likely after receiving news of the death of his relatives.

But their work remains. It is testimony to what Paris became during those early decades of the 20th century – not a centre that reflected itself, as perhaps evinced by the post-Impressionists in Montmartre – but a modern, liberal hub in which a huge variety of artistic styles and voices from across the world could find their own expression. Alongside work by Kisling, Kars, Granowsky and Pascin, there are rare pieces such as an oak panel by Léon Indenbaum. Taken from the staircase of a French castle, it shows a stylised woman on a horse and was commissioned by one of Indenbaum’s patrons. There are also two vast paintings representing biblical subjects by Simon Mondzain, inspired by his life in Paris and Algeria.

Belgian artist Pierre-Louis Flouquet perhaps best captured this moment of fleeting but authentic creativity. “School of Paris!”, he wrote in 1928. “Yes, but a School of Paris imagined by a thousand foreign brains tested by the spiritual fever of artists of all latitudes.”

Rosie Millard OBE is a journalist, broadcaster and author