School of Paris

also: École de Paris

school c. 1900-1940 France Europe

The School of Paris (École de Paris) is not a school at all but the name for the community of artists - French and émigré alike - who made Paris the centre of Western art between about 1900 and 1940. Many, like Modigliani, Soutine, Chagall, Pascin, and Kisling, were Jewish immigrants drawn by the city's freedom, escaping quotas and pogroms in Eastern Europe; the critic André Warnod popularized the label in the 1920s. They shared studios in Montparnasse and La Ruche, exhibited together, and shared almost nothing else stylistically: Modigliani's elegant elongations, Soutine's convulsed surfaces, Chagall's dreamlike villages. The name marks a place and a moment rather than a program - Paris as the world's art capital - and its force faded with the Second World War.

Cover of Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture by André Warnod . Drawing by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)
Cover of Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture by André Warnod . Drawing by Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920)Public domain (credit: Amedeo Modigliani) · source

Defining characteristics

  • No single style: many individual modernisms gathered under one city
  • Elongated, simplified figures (Modigliani) beside turbulent, thickly painted surfaces (Soutine)
  • Bold personal color and expressive brushwork over academic finish
  • Portraiture at the centre, capturing the community's own faces
  • Dreamlike, folk-inflected imagery drawn from Eastern European Jewish memory
  • Bohemian studio subjects: sitters, nudes, cafés, and street life

Key figures

  • Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) — Italian painter-sculptor of elongated portraits and nudes
  • Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) — Belarusian-born painter of turbulent landscapes, portraits, and carcasses
  • Marc Chagall (1887-1985) — Russian-French painter of dreamlike folkloric scenes
  • Jules Pascin (1885-1930) — Bulgarian-born painter of the Montparnasse scene, the 'Prince of Montparnasse'
  • Moïse Kisling (1891-1953) — Polish-born painter of luminous portraits and nudes

Example works

  • I and the Village — Marc Chagall (1911)
  • Nu couché — Amedeo Modigliani (1917)
  • Carcass of Beef — Chaïm Soutine (c. 1925)

Sources

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