Chaim Soutine – From Russia to Paris by Ben Uri Research Unit

Chaïm Soutine and his contemporaries – from Russia to Paris

Chaïm Soutine

and his contemporaries from Russia to Paris Ben Uri 2012

Ben Uri • London • 4 to 28 October 2012 2259_Uri_cat_Soutine_Sep12_COVERS_front.indd 1

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Chaïm Soutine with hanging fowl ©Rue des Archives/RDA

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Chaïm Soutine

and his contemporaries from Russia to Paris

Ben Uri • London • 4 to 28 October 2012

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This catalogue is produced to coincide with the exhibition Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries: from Russia to Paris at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art, 4 – 28 October 2012

Chagall® / © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Any copy of this book issued by the publisher as a paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including these words being imposed on a subsequent purchaser. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-900157-40-0 Edited by Sarah MacDougall and Lauren Barnes Catalogue designed by Alan Slingsby, editionperiodicals.co.uk

Acknowledgments Special thanks are due to: the Art Fund, the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Elisa Bailey, Lauren Barnes, Miriam & Richard Borchard, Sir Harry & Lady Djanogly, Patsy & David Franks, Ariane Frenel, Deborah Garel, Jonathan Garel, Morven & Michael Heller, Joan & Lawrence Kaye (USA), Laura & Lewis Kruger (USA), Agnes & Edward Lee, David Mazower, Annika McSeveny, Huw Molseed, Nadine Nieszawer, Justin Piperger, Simon Posen (USA), The Marc Rich Foundation (Switzerland ), Anthony Rosenfelder & family, Alan Slingsby, Jayne Cohen & Howard Spiegler (USA), Rachel Stratton, Eliane Strosberg, Caroline Trotman and Judit & Georg Weisz

Jankel Adler © DACS 2012 Frank Auerbach © The Artist Lazar Berson © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 David Bomberg © DACS, London 2012

Sonia Delaunay © L & M SERVICES B. V. The Hague 2012092 Isaac Dobrinsky © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Henri Epstein © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Jacob Epstein © The estate of Sir Jacob Epstein Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel © The estate of the artist Henri Hayden © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Michel Kikoïne © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Leon Kossoff © The Artist Ra’anan Levy © The Artist Jacques Lipchitz © The Estate of Jacques Lipchitz, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York Ossip Lubitch © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Emmanuel Mané-Katz © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Grégoire Michonze © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012 Elie Nadelman © Elie Nadelman Estate Chaïm Soutine © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Ongoing efforts are being made to seek formal permission from the estates of the artists currently untraced. The museum thanks all those who have granted permissions and apologies to those where we have been unsuccessful in making contact.

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Contents La Soubrette: Auction and Gallery sales provenance Ben Uri acquires important works for the nation Chairman’s foreword

Soutine and his contemporaries: From Russia to Paris

6 8 9

Sarah MacDougall, Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists

Soutine: La Soubrette, c.1933

Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow

Biographies École de Paris Jankel Adler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Léon Bakst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Lazar Berson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Maurice Blond . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Marc Chagall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Sonia Delaunay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Isaac Dobrinksy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Henri Epstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Henri Hayden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Michel Kikoïne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Chana Kowalska . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Zygmund Landau . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Isaac Lichtenstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Jacques Lipchitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Ossip Lubitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Emmanuel Mané-Katz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Grégoire Michonze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Abraham Mintchine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Elie Nadelman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Issachar Ber Ryback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 Zygmund Schreter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Chaïm Soutine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

Soutine mania in post-war British art

Select bibliography

Chaïm Soutine: Selected Exhibitions

Ben Uri: Mission and vision 44 Patrons

International advisory board 46 École de Paris timeline

Martin Hammer, Professor of History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent

Biographies School of London Frank Auerbach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Leon Kossoff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Artists’ biographies compiled by Lauren Barnes Caroline Trotman Sarah MacDougall and Deborah Garel Soutine and his contemporaries 3

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Supporting British museums

Ben Uri acquires important works for the nation David Bomberg (1890–1957) Racehorses, 1913 Black chalk and wash on paper 42 x 67 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Acquired with the assistance of the Art Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the MLA/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, The Julius Silman Charitable Trust, Daniel and Pauline Auerbach, Michael and Morven Heller and those donors who wish to remain anonymous, 2004 © DACS 2012

The Art Fund For over 100 years The Art Fund has been instrumental in helping museums to build and develop their public collections by supporting the acquisition of art in all forms and media, from Old Masters to the contemporary, for everyone to enjoy. We do this by mobilising art lovers throughout the UK, whose contributions, large and small, provide our income. Today, our 92,000 members and 600 volunteers all over the country continue the philanthropic spirit of our founders, who believed that by coming together, individuals can achieve great things. But helping a museum buy a work of art is only part of the story. We also help museums show collections, by supporting projects like the Artist Rooms tour of post-war and contemporary art, reaching all corners of the UK. We also support museums in many other ways. We are investing in the training and development of curators to ensure that art expertise is properly cultivated, and we campaign on behalf of museums and their visitors. We pressed behind the scenes for free entry to national museums, and more recently for tax incentives to encourage philanthropy. We also celebrate the very best through the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year. Through the Art Guide we publicise hundreds of museums’ activities and help the public to make the most of the UK’s enthralling collections. It also

highlights where you can make the most of your National Art Pass, a card that gives free entry to over 200 museums, galleries and historic houses, and 50% off entry to major exhibitions. Income from sales of the National Art Pass and other donations from our members and supporters provides our funding. Thanks to Art Fund members, significant works of Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) Jacob Kramer, 1921 Bronze 64 x 49 x 25 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Acquired with the assistance of the Art Fund, V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Daniel and Pauline Auerbach, Michael and Morven Heller and those donors who wish to remain anonymous, 2003 © The estate of Sir Jacob Epstein

art such as Titian’s Diana and Callisto at the National Galleries of Scotland, Rachel Whiteread’s exquisite Tree of Life on the façade of the Whitechapel Gallery, the glittering Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard in Birmingham and Soutine’s La Soubrette at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art can be seen by all.

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The Heritage Lottery Fund Using money raised through the National Lottery, the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) sustains and transforms a wide range of heritage for present and future generations to take part in, learn from and enjoy. From museums, parks and historic places to archaeology, the natural environment and cultural traditions, we invest in every part of our diverse heritage. We are the largest dedicated funder of the UK ’s heritage. Since 1994 HLF has not only revitalised hundreds of our historic sites, it has also given new meaning to heritage itself: by getting people from every walk of life and from all age groups the chance to get involved with the heritage that inspires them, making

choices about what they want to preserve and share from the past. HLF is delighted to help enhance the Ben Uri’s collections through the acquisition of this important painting and support activities that will open up the collections to the wider public, including the ‘Art in the Open’ education programme accessible by 25,000 schools nationally. By awarding this grant of £193,000 to the Ben Uri for the acquisition of Soutine’s La Soubrette (Waiting Maid), we are helping to bring an internationally important work of art to London audiences of all ages and beyond. Website: www.hlf.org.uk

V&A Purchase Grant Fund The V&A Purchase Grant Fund is a public fund which helps regional museums, archives and specialist libraries to acquire objects for their permanent collections. Established at the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum, in 1881, it is a significant part of the V&A’s nationwide activity. Engaging with some 130 organisations each year, its work has always been a conduit for V&A advice, sharing expertise and building relationships throughout England and Wales in addition to giving financial support.

The management of the Purchase Grant Fund is financed by the V&A and the annual grants budget, currently £750,000, is provided by Arts Council England. Each year up to 200 applications are considered and awards enable acquisitions to the value of some £3million to go ahead. Many types of objects relating to the arts in its widest sense are supported, from Iron Age weapons and 18th century ceramics to literary manuscripts and digital art. All kinds of organisation may apply, whether a small, new independent or a large, longestablished local authority museum or a university library but must be well run, care for its collections well and make them available to the public, for whose benefit the Purchase Grant Fund exists. www.vam.ac.uk/ purchasegrantfund Ra’anan Levy (b. 1954), Yellow Light, 2010, Tempera and oil on paper, 68.5 x 99cm, Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art, acquired in May 2012 through the generous support of the Art Fund, the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, the artist, the Crane Kalman Gallery and other philanthropic supporters © The Artist

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Chairman’s Foreword In January 2011, Helena Newman, the Chairman of Sotheby’s Modern and Impressionist paintings in Europe, called me and asked whether the museum would be interested in acquiring a classic portrait by the Russian-born artist Chaïm Soutine, and whether we had the resources to acquire it. I replied ‘Yes’ to the first question and ‘No’ to the second, but added that that had never stopped Ben Uri acquiring great works over the past ten years, and that if the painting and price were both compelling we would raise the funds. Eighteen long months later contracts were exchanged, and this wonderful and important painting, La Soubrette (Waiting Maid), was saved for the nation through the vision of Sotheby’s and their Tax and Heritage department, and the mission and partnership of the Heritage Lottery Fund, Art Fund, Arts Council England, V&A Purchase Grant Fund and many philanthropic individuals and Foundations across the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States of America. We, and the general public from home and abroad, are all in their debt since this work is only the fifth example by Soutine in a public collection in London (alongside three landscapes at Tate and another portrait of a young woman at the Courtauld). This exhibition, From Russia to Paris, is a short extract from a major École de Paris survey (currently being curated for 2016) and reveals the depth of our 1,300-strong collection, showing over 40 works by more than 20 artists form this important group. A further dynamic emerges in the narrative of those who escaped and exchanged the restrictive regimes of countries within the Russian Pale of Settlement (where Jews were allowed to settle), for the freedoms of Paris. Many of these works have never been exhibited before. The importance of Soutine is well-known to the international art community, but his importance to British Post-war Modernism, particularly in the work of Francis Bacon, is not yet equally as well-known. We hope this exhibition will go some way in addressing this, as we also dedicate space to showing a small selection of works by Auerbach and Kossoff, both of whom follow in the line of those influenced by Bacon and Soutine, again from the museum’s own collection. We are hugely grateful to scholars and Soutine experts Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman for their assessment of the painting itself and to leading scholar Martin Hammer for allowing his essay for the recent Soutine/Bacon exhibition at the Helly Nahmad Gallery in New York to be reproduced here. Space does not allow much more to be said on this occasion but let us share with you some fascinating initial results from our research to date. The painting, now known as La Soubrette, was sold at auction in Paris on the 28th October 1937 titled Jeune servant by the artist ‘Charles’

Soutine. Perhaps Soutine’s dealer or the auction house presented him as ‘Charles’, rather than the obviously Jewish ‘Chaïm’, so as not to narrow his commercial appeal? The title of the painting, when catalogued and sold at the Lefevre Galleries in King Street SW1 in June 1938, changed to La Soubrette and was dated as ‘painted around 1925’. The new title stuck but the date of the work has since been revised twice – first to 1928 and then in the current catalogue raisonné by Dunow and Tuchman to 1933. The distinguished provenance and intriguing trail of this wonderful painting will form part of a wide-ranging schools learning programme in the years to come, which will make art as a subject as fun as it is creative. The importance of this acquisition for Ben Uri is highly significant. It is only two short years since we recognised and acquired Chagall’s lost early 1945 response to the Holocaust ‘Apocalypse en Lilas. Capriccio’, and, more recently, George Grosz’s large, telling work, Nazi Interrogation, illustrating the sheer brutality of war. This acquisition strengthens our focus on Art, Identity and Migration and widens the local and international appeal and familiarity of our collection. W hen set against the background of our near 100-year-old history and our wide range of enlightened programming, this also strengthens yet further our case and need for a large Central London building, close to other great national galleries and museums, to add our distinctive voice to London’s unique cluster of world-class institutions and visitor experiences. I thank and congratulate Sarah MacDougall, our Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists, for curating this exhibition and for bringing new works, artists and stories to engage our growing audiences in London and beyond.

David J Glasser Chairman (Executive)

art identity migration

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Soutine and his contemporaries: From Russia to Paris: To celebrate the museum’s recent acquisition of Soutine’s La Soubrette, c. 1933, the exhibition, Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries: from Russia to Paris, unveils this important portrait together with a small selection of work from the Ben Uri collection by a number of Soutine’s peers: all either born (like Chagall) within Russia, or (like Soutine himself) in countries then within the Russian Pale of Settlement (see map overleaf). In flight from the poverty, persecution and restrictions of their native lands, they converged on Paris, the ‘City of Light’, in search of personal and artistic freedom, mostly (though not exclusively) in the first two decades of the twentieth-century. There they formed part of the loose association of émigré artists known collectively as the École de Paris, the majority (among them Chagall, Dobrinksy, Henri Epstein, Kikoïne, Isaac Lichtenstein, Lipchitz and Soutine) living and working together in the collection of studios known as La Ruche (‘the Beehive’, below) near the old Vaugirard slaughterhouses of Montparnasse. Many (probably including Ben Uri’s founder Lazar Berson) also studied under Professor Cormon at the École des BeauxArts and exhibited (like Chagall) at the progressive Salon

d’Automne; together they had a profound influence on twentieth-century figurative art. As Avram Kampf has observed ‘Jewish artists, because of their common language and common background, tended to meet frequently. Some historians speak about an enclave of Jewish artists, others about a Jewish School of Paris. The gathering of a relatively large number of Jewish artists in Paris is a fact of twentieth-century art and of Jewish social and cultural history’.1 Many stayed on (often applying for French citizenship) until the events of the Second World War forced them to flee or to hide; a much smaller number remained after the Liberation. Nonetheless, the importance of this group (beyond the influence of leading figures Soutine and Chagall) is perhaps best demonstrated by the second wave of the Ecole de Paris (outside the scope of this exhibition), which rose up in the aftermath of the Second World War. Although Soutine was seen as a leader among his Jewish contemporaries (one of the themes that will be explored in our forthcoming large survey exhibition on the École 1 A. Kampf From Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in Twentieth-Century Art, (London: Lund Humphries/Barbican Art Gallery, 1990)

La Ruche by Night

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de Paris in 2016), this small preparatory show instead invokes a broader narrative, seeking simply to present work by a selection of these artists across a wide range of dates, themes and subject matter, while highlighting a number of interesting associations and juxtapositions. For example, female portraits, painted in highly individual manner are seen by four artists from three decades: the heavy monumentality of Adler’s Portrait of a Woman gives way to the weary submissiveness of Soutine’s maid, who, in turn, contrasts with the confrontational stare of Dobrinsky’s tight-lipped Head of a Girl, anticipating his post-war series of portraits of orphaned children in the Limousin home. Finally, Kikoïne’s smiling Israeli Girl, probably painted in the 1950s, radiates the optimism of a new age and perhaps of the new state. A number of the featured artists illustrated books: Lazar Berson’s three fine, intricate designs for the Ben Uri (which he founded in London in 1915, after several years in Paris), were probably influenced by the Machmadim (Precious Ones), a textless, Jewish art journal produced in Paris in 1912 by a number of artists including Epstein and Lichtenstein. The latter spent much of his later life in the United States reviving the Machmadim Publishing House devoted to the production of artistic Yiddish books. In 1927 the dealer Ambroise Vollard invited Chagall to produce a series of etchings (to which Le Cheval et l’âne (The Horse and the Donkey) belongs) to illustrate the seventeenth-century French poet La Fontaine’s famous Fables. The commission caused much controversy, as commentators asked why a Russian Jew, a foreigner to French culture, should be selected to illustrate a classic of French literature. Vollard responded that Chagall’s aesthetic had something akin to La Fontaine’s: it was ‘at once sound and delicate, realistic and fantastic’. A number of works deal with Jewish subject matter including three rare and delightful Cubist interpretations of traditional Jewish ceremonies carried out in Paris in 1920 by Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel (who had studied under Henri Matisse) and Isaac Lichtenstein’s Blind Fiddler (1924), nostalgic in subject-matter but modern in execution, influenced perhaps by Chagall, but even more by his Cubist contemporaries, particularly the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Jankel Adler’s Ein Jude, was probably executed in 1926, when he visited Paris for the second time. It was also a period during which he deliberated the question of ‘new Jewish art’, announcing ‘there are still regrettably few Jewish artists’ (though he numbered Chagall among these few). 2 Issachar Ber Ryback’s beautifullypainted still life, The Cock (1920), is a staple of the French painting tradition, but also recalls the work of Chagall and Soutine, and may also evoke the Jewish tradition of kapparot, where the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to the fowl. Chana Kowalska’s deceptively naïve paintings evoke the fast-disappearing Shtetl, from which many of the École de Paris juives originated. It is a tragic irony that not only this way of life but the artist herself and her husband were shortly afterwards wiped out by the Holocaust. Epstein, whose enclosed, northern

forest contrasts with the open, light-filled, Southern France landscapes of Zygmund Landau and Zygmund Schreter, was also deported and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Maurice Blond’s Parisian street scene records the resumption of everyday life after the Liberation of the city. Although Soutine did not respond directly to politics or issues of his own ethnicity and never painted specifically Jewish subject matter, it is interesting to note that La Soubrette was painted around 1933, the year in which Hitler rose to power in Germany leading to the forced emigration of many European artists, including Jankel Adler, as a result of cultural, religious or political persecution in their native lands. Moreover, Soutine’s highly individual but anguished Expressionistic style has also been recognized as creating ‘a new vision, toward which many other Jewish artists in Paris gravitated. Soutine, who had torn himself from his surroundings and his past, created an art which was filled with nervousness, anxiety and fear – the life experience of others who were less articulate in the medium. His work was believed to mirror the situation in which they and all European Jewry found themselves in the period between the two World Wars. It was later seen to prefigure the Holocaust.’3 Chagall’s important Jewish crucifixion, Apocalypse en Lilas, Cappricio, probably the first work he created after emerging from mourning for his late wife, Bella (who had died suddenly in September 1944), was painted, most likely in April 1945, in direct response to the Holocaust as the shocking news unfolded through press reports and newsreels. His complex imagery includes a clock, its minute and hour hands missing, to commemorate the moment of apocalypse. Post-war work includes colourful, original graphics by pioneering painter, graphic artist and designer Sonia Delaunay, who exhibited (like Soutine) at the Galerie Bing, and whose original designs for her 1964 exhibition are seen here for the first time together with a little-shown work on paper by sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The exhibition also throws light on a number of relationships between these École de Paris artists. Soutine’s early friendship with Kikoïne dated back to the time of their early unhappy apprenticeships. At the age of 13, Soutine secretly drew a portrait head of the local rabbi breaking the prohibition on drawing the human face. As a result he was so badly beaten by the rabbi’s son that he spent a fortnight at the hospital. With 25 roubles in damages Soutine and Kikoïne then set off for Vilna, where they enrolled at the art school and met Pinchus Krémègne, becoming known later as the ‘Expressionist trio’. Krémègne settled first in La Ruche in 1912 (he later recalled he knew only the address: Passage Dantzig when he arrived), but Soutine and Kikoïne soon joined him. Chagall (who had been tutored in St Petersburg by Bakst) had been there since 1910 (his figure can be seen faintly at La Ruche by night, previous page). Epstein and Landau had also met as students; while Hayden later became friendly with Sonia and Robert Delaunay when taking refuge in Southern France during the German Occupation. Soutine’s influence on artists as various as de Kooning,

2 Ulrich Krempel and Karin Thomas, Jankel Adler 1895-1949 (Köln: DuMont Verlag, 1985), pp. 24-5.

3 A. Kampf, op. cit., pp. 75-81.

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Pale of Settlement, reproduced with the kind permission of Eliane Strosberg from Human Expressionism: The Human Figure and the Jewish Experience (Pointoise: Musée Tavet-Delacour, 2008)

Pollock, Dubuffet and Bacon has been much discussed in recent decades.4 Most recently, Maurice Tuchman and Elli Dunow in Soutine/Bacon (Helly Nahmad Gallery, New York, 2011) demonstrated Soutine’s substantial influence in Britain on the later ‘School of London’ group, particularly Bacon, as well as Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, a subject further explored in Martin Hammer’s insightful essay, ‘Soutine Mania in Post-war British Art’, for which we thank him for supporting our reproducing it here. This influence is also touched upon in the last room of 4 Maurice Tuchman, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon, 2011

the exhibition with a set of fine figurative works on paper from the collection by contemporary British masters Auerbach and Kossoff. In conclusion, this exhibition highlights a number of subjects and themes to be revisited in greater depth in our forthcoming École de Paris survey, for which we hope this will serve as both an introduction and an appetizer. Sarah MacDougall, Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the Study of Émigré Artists Soutine and his contemporaries 11

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Soutine: La Soubrette, c.1933 Working as he does, directly from life, Soutine’s interaction with his motif is fluid and dynamic. He not only receives sensation from the outside world but he also aggressively projects his internal experience upon it. The back-and-forth volley of sensation transmitted between painter and motif becomes extreme in the portrait situation in which Soutine confronts another human being face to face. Soutine generally chooses anonymous figures as models. But as much as his characters may become types, they never give up their identities. Soutine’s insistence on the physical particularity of his subject, together with this move towards more anonymous sitters, demonstrates his resistance to completely losing himself in the subjective aspects of the portrait experience. The resistance to a complete union between painter and model is also felt in the way Soutine’s figures “pose” before him and us, open to our penetrating scrutiny, but somehow indifferent to the artist’s presence. It is the tension between their seeming detachment, on the one hand, and an awareness of Soutine’s personal involvement with them, on the other, that heightens the expressive charge of these figures. The figure paintings of the later years – from the early 1930s on – are marked by a structural solidity and a change in mood and speed of the image. The tempo is slowed down, giving way to a more meditative and quiet expression. The faces and gestures are calmer and more withdrawn, displaying a kind of lethargy and resignation that is touched with sadness. The figures often appear engrossed in themselves, their thoughts and moods. The uniformed figures of the nightclubs and hotels, the pastry cooks and choir boys, are replaced by uniformed domestic servants – maids, cleaning girls, house cooks. The costumed effect gives way to more everyday clothing. The dramatic and exaggerated nature of the paint,

stroke, and subject in the earlier paintings is replaced by a drier paint, a more deliberate stroke, and a more anonymous subject. But still, the modest apron of La Soubrette, as in the pastry cook paintings of the mid-1920s, displays Soutine’s virtuoso ability to extract amazing color from his whites. Inflected in her luminous white apron are yellows, greens, blues, purples. The more elastic contours of earlier figures yield to still more self-contained units. The proportions are more naturalistic. The figure retreats from the edges; it is more centrally located and set further back in space … no longer pressed up to the surface nor embedded in it. The most important influence on Soutine’s figural work in the 1930s was exerted by the Old Masters. Although there might have been some influence of Chardin in Soutine’s pictures of domestic working people, or of Corot’s figures in the meditative stillness of certain images, the major influences of these years are Rembrandt, his contemporaries, and Courbet. While Soutine may study certain specific compositional schemes, or certain dramatic effects of light and dark spotlighting, what he ultimately grasps from these masters is a sense of the rightness of scale, the inevitability of an object in space, the interrelationship between image and surface, and the expressive potency that such a focus and order bestow. La Soubrette is a perfect example of the 1930s figure paintings. These are quiet images, of people with inner lives, revealing and shy at the same time. The understated power of these images lies in the simple gestures, minimal actions, which permit the paint and stroke to communicate emotion and weight. Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow

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Biographies

École de Paris

Jankel Adler (1895–1949) Ein Jude, c. 1926 Jankel Adler (1895–1949) Portrait of a Woman Acrylic on paper 54.5 x 37.5 cm Signed (ll) ‘Adler’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by Chinita Abrahams-Curiel 1994 in memory of her husband Conrad

Etching on paper 44.5 x 34.7 cm Inscribed (ll) in Hebrew Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased 2008 © DACS 2012

Jankel Adler (1895–1949) Jankel Adler was born in 1895 in Tuszyn, near Łódź, Poland, into a large, orthodox Jewish family. He studied engraving in Belgrade in 1912, then art in Barmen (now Wuppertal) and Düsseldorf until 1914. He returned to Poland in 1918, becoming a founder-member of Young Yiddish (a Łódź-based avant-garde artistic group, centred on the modernist poet Moshe Broderzon). During the First World War he was conscripted into the Russian army, but returned to Germany in 1920 and visited Berlin, where he met Chagall, before returning to Barmen. In 1922 he moved to Düsseldorf, joined the Young Rhineland circle, became

friendly with Otto Dix and helped found Die Kommune and the International Exhibition of revolutionary artists in Berlin. His Planetarium frescos in 1925 were highly successful and he exhibited widely. In 1931, at the Düsseldorf Academy, he formed an important friendship with Paul Klee, who had a profound influence on his style. In 1933, at the height of his success, Adler fled Nazi Germany for Paris after his work was declared ‘degenerate’ (he was later included in the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition in 1937). He travelled widely from 1933–40. He returned to Paris in 1937, working with the printmaker Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, and meeting Picasso, who became the second major influence on his style. He joined the Polish Army upon the

outbreak of the Second World War and was evacuated to Scotland in 1940, where he was demobilized owing to poor health. In Glasgow, together with Josef Herman, he became a member of the Glasgow New Art club founded by J D Fergusson. He moved to London in 1943, sharing a house with ‘the two Roberts’, the painters Colquhoun and MacBryde. He died at Aldbourne in Wiltshire in 1949. Adler’s arrival in Paris in 1933 can be seen as part of a ‘second wave’ of artists from Russia who were drawn west to Germany, then to France. His etching, Ein Jude, brings a modernist technique to a traditional subject. In his later Portrait of a Woman, he employs a sombre palette and a bold, expressive style showing the influence of Picasso.

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Léon Bakst (1866–1924)

Léon Bakst (1866–1924) La Péri, 1911 Lithograph on paper 55 x 38 cm Inscribed (ur) Péri/Trouhanova, (ll) 48/50 and (r) ‘Bakst’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Fred Davidson 1948

Léon Bakst was born in 1866 in Grodno (now Hrodna in Belarus) and studied at the St. Petersburg Academy and then in Paris at the Académie Julian, beginning his career as a magazine illustrator. After travelling through Europe, he returned to St Petersburg, where his portraits and book designs brought him early success. In 1898, together with Alexandre Benois and Serge Diaghilev, he founded the World of Art group. In 1906 Bakst became a teacher of drawing in Yelizaveta Zvantseva’s private art school where, among other students, he taught Chagall. Rebelling against the dull and literal stage realism of the previous century, Bakst and Benois turned their painting skills to theatre design and in 1909 Bakst began his collaboration with Diaghilev, which resulted in the founding of the revolutionary Ballets Russes, of which he became artistic director. His stage designs quickly brought him international fame. Most notable are his costume designs for The Firebird and Sheherazade (both 1910) and L’Après-midi d’un Faune (1912). In 1910 Bakst was exiled from St Petersburg (as a Jew without a residence permit) and settled in Paris, where he also worked for Ida Rubinstein’s ballet company. He died in Paris in 1924. Bakst’s La Péri was commissioned by Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes in 1911. Paul Dukas composed the ballet, insisting that his mistress, Natasha Trouhanova, perform the main role, but the production was cancelled because Diaghilev did not consider Trouhanova skilled enough to partner Nijinsky. Trouhanova’s name appears in the top right corner of the work, but it has been said that there was little resemblance between Bakst’s delicate Persian elf and Trouhanova’s more robust figure. Bakst’s considered use of line evokes a sense of rhythmic movement enhanced by the delightful exoticism of his decorative costume.

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Lazar Berson (1882–1954) Design with Deer, 1915 Pen and coloured ink on paper 21.6 x 29.2 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Celia Spencer 1993 in memory of her parents Judah and Dinah Beach, Founder Members of the Society © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Lazar Berson (1882–1954) Circular Design for Ben Uri Art Society, 1915 44 x 44 cm Pen and coloured inks on paper Inscribed (verso) ‘D. Simkovitz’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Lazar Berson (1882–1954) Design for Ben Uri Art Society, c. 1915 Pen and ink on paper 26.7 x 22 cm Signed (br) in Yiddish ‘Berson’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Celia Spencer 1993 in memory of her parents Judah and Dinah Beach, Founder Members of the Society © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Lazar Berson (1882–1954) Lazar Berson was born in 1882 in the village of Skopichky, Russia (now in Lithuania). Little is known about his early life, though he probably spoke Yiddish at home and received a traditional Jewish religious education. At the turn of the century, he studied painting in St Petersburg, where he was influenced by the Jewish cultural renaissance, and the renewed interest in Russian and Jewish folk art and craft. Berson took these ideas to Paris, where he continued his studies, probably as a student under Professor Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts. Later, Berson recalled that he studied ‘together with a prayer quorum of Jewish children’, referring to the large number of mostly EasternEuropean Jewish artists then

working in Paris. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne alongside Chagall, Bakst, Kisling and Pascin in 1911 and 1912, and lived at the same address as Lipchitz. In contrast to other École de Paris artists who embraced modernist styles, Berson maintained the decorative approach of traditional folk art and sought to develop a specifically Jewish type of art. Following the outbreak of the First World War Berson moved to London, where he set up a portrait studio and wrote articles for Jewish newspapers, espousing his uncompromising Jewish nationalist, Zionist and fierce anti-assimilationist views. In 1915, he realised his long-held ambition of forming a society for Jewish art when he founded ‘The Jewish-National Decorative Art Association (London) “Ben Ouri”’, at Gradel’s Restaurant in Whitechapel. In ‘the Ben Uri

studio’ he brought together a number of East End artisans, who together with the jeweller Mosheh Oved worked on a series of decorative ‘Jewish’ designs on wooden plates and bowls. In addition, Berson produced the Ben Uri Album, ‘one of the worlds’ first Yiddish art albums’, published in 1916 by the Ukrainian-born Hebraist Israel Narodiczky. By 1916, the Society had over 100 members and had organised many events and classes, but in September of that year, Berson without warning left for America, only resurfacing much later in life in Nice, where he continued to work as a painter, and died in 1954. These three fine designs for the Ben Uri were possibly influenced by the Machmadim Jewish art journal produced in Paris in 1912, and reveal the precise, intricate pattern-making that characterised Berson’s style.

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Maurice Blond (1899–1974) Artist’s Palette Oil on board 37.5 x 45 cm Signed (ul) ‘M. Blond’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art

Maurice Blond (1899–1974) Parisian Scene, 1945

Maurice Blond (Maurice Blumenkrantz, 1899–1974) Maurice Blond was born in 1899 in Łódź, Poland. His father was a Russian merchant and an art lover. In 1911, following a school examination, one of Blond’s watercolours attracted notice and was subsequently exhibited at the Kiev Museum. In 1922 he joined the Natural Sciences Department of Warsaw University, but also took classes at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, supporting himself by teaching Mathematics until 1923. That year, he left Poland for Berlin where he may have met Mintchine. Blond arrived in Paris in 1924, and settled at the artist’s colony La Cité Falguière, where he formed friendships with a group of Russian artists including Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Jean Pougny, Pinchus Krémègne and Kostia Terechkovitch, with whom he shared a room in Montparnasse. In 1930 he became the organizer and artistic adviser

Pencil on paper 31.1 x 40.6 cm Signed (ll) ‘M. Blond 1945’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from J. Spreiregen

of the Russian magazine Tchisla (Numbers), through which he organized exhibitions. He volunteered for the French army in 1939 but was soon demobilized and sent to the Avignon region, where he found refuge, working for two years in the home of a local peasant. After the war, Blond settled in Grenoble and dedicated his time exclusively to painting. He died in 1974 in Clamart, near Paris.

Blond was inspired by the city and regularly depicted it in his work. This sketch, Parisian Scene, made the year after the Liberation, shows a typical Parisian street scene and the continuity of everyday life following this period of turmoil. In Artist’s palette Blond uses a predominantly brown, dull palette and free brushstrokes to conjure up this archetypal symbol of creativity and the artist’s working life. Soutine and his contemporaries 17

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Marc Chagall (1887–1985) Chagall was born in 1887 in the town of Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus). He attended a traditional Jewish school and a Russian high school, moving to St Petersburg in 1907, where he studied at the Imperial School for the Protection of the Fine Arts, and later at the Zvantseva School, led by Léon Bakst. In 1910, Chagall arrived in Paris, where he settled at La Ruche and met other Jewish artists including Modigliani, alongside key figures in French modernism including Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay. Chagall’s first solo exhibition took place at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, in 1914. That same year, he returned to Russia to visit his family. While he was there, the First World War broke out, preventing his return to Paris. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Chagall was appointed Fine Arts Commissar

for the province of Vitebsk, but in 1922 left again for Berlin, where his work was published by the periodical Der Sturm. He returned to Paris in 1923, where he stayed until 1940, becoming a French citizen in 1937. In 1927 the dealer Ambroise Vollard invited Chagall to produce a series of etchings to illustrate the seventeenthcentury French poet La Fontaine’s famous Fables, to which Le Cheval et l’âne (The Horse and the Donkey) belongs. The commission caused much controversy, as commentators asked why a Russian Jew, a foreigner to French culture, should be selected to illustrate a classic of French literature. Vollard responded that Chagall’s aesthetic had something akin to La Fontaine’s: it was “at once sound and delicate, realistic and fantastic”. Chagall frequently used animals for symbolic purposes in his dream-like paintings that brought together aspects of French tradition with Russian folklore.

Chagall sought refuge in New York during the Second World War, where a major retrospective of his work was held at The Museum of Modern Art in 1946. He stayed in America until 1948, then returned to France, settling in the south-eastern town of SaintPaul-de-Vence in 1952. In later life, Chagall produced stained-glass schemes for churches, including the chapel at Tudeley, Kent. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1985. Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio was most likely executed in April 1945 when Chagall was in exile in New York. It was probably the first work he produced after coming out of mourning for his late wife, Bella (who had died suddenly in September 1944), and was created in direct response to seeing the horrors of the concentration camps revealed through newspapers and Pathé newsreels. Previously, Chagall’s crucifixions had symbolised the Nazi’s Jewish victims in order to remind Christians that Christ was a Jew and they should stop persecuting his brothers. However, here Chagall incorporates factual information about the Holocaust for the first time. The clock in the top right of the study is missing its minute and hour hands, casting this moment in history as the end of time – the apocalypse. Below, a series of complex and horrific scenes uncover the extent of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust, among them another crucifixion, a hanging and a boatload of refugees.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) Le Cheval et l’âne (The Horse and the Donkey), c. 1927 Etching on Montval paper 29.5 x 23.5 cm Signed (ll) ‘Chagall’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Ralph N. Emanuel 1987

Chagall®/© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

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Marc Chagall (1887–1985) Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio, 1945–7 gouache on paper 51 x 35.5 cm Signed (ll) ‘Chagall’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Acquired in 2010 with the help of Art Fund, Lionel Pissarro, New York and Paris, and Miriam and Richard Borchard, Morven and Michael Heller and other donors who wish to remain anonymous Chagall®/©ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

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Sonia Delaunay (née Sarah Stern) (1885–1979)

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) Invitation Card for Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Galerie Bing, Paris, 1964 Poster paint and adhesive lettering on paper 14.7 x 12 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art © L & M SERVICES B. V. The Hague 2012092

Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) Illustration to Rhythmes et Couleurs: an artist’s book by Jacques Damase with illustrations by Sonia Delaunay, 1966 Lithograph on paper 53.2 x 38.2 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by Robert Lewin 1993

Sonia Delaunay was born Sarah Stern in 1885 in Gradizhsk, Russia (now in Ukraine) and was adopted by her maternal uncle at the age of five, taking his name (Terk). She grew up in St Petersburg exposed to music and art, and learned several foreign languages. She moved to Germany to study drawing in 1903. In 1905, she travelled to Paris, studying at the Académie de la Palette, and discovering the work of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, as well as Matisse and Derain. In 1908 she married the German collector and art dealer, Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), whose Montparnasse Galerie Notre-Dame des Champs showed her first solo exhibition. Through Uhde, Sonia encountered many painters, including Picasso, Georges Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Robert Delaunay (1885– 1941). In 1910, Sonia divorced Uhde by mutual agreement and married Delaunay with whom she had a son in 1911. Together Sonia and Robert Delaunay pursued the use of abstract colour in painting and textile design. One of her first large-scale works was the painting of the Bal Bullier (1912–1913), a popular Parisian dance-hall. The Delaunays were ardent promoters of abstract art, became members of the Abstraction-Création group in 1931 and organized the first Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in 1939. In 1953 the Galerie Bing mounted a solo show, and her work was also included in exhibitions in Paris and Rome. In 1964 (following her donation of 117 works by herself and her husband), Delaunay became the first living female artist to have a retrospective at the Louvre. She also held her second solo show at the Galerie Bing, for which she designed this striking poster and invitation card employing bold, graphic forms. In 1964 Delaunay formed a close friendship with the poet Jacques Damase and in July 1965 they collaborated on the book, Rhythmes et Couleurs, which brings together Delaunay’s abstract visual ‘poetry’, using circle and square motifs, with Damase’s verbal rhymes. Throughout her career Delaunay used colour as an expressive language bringing about new ‘poetic’ combinations in abstract paintings and textile designs. She died in Paris in 1979.

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Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) Poster for Sonia Delaunay exhibition at Galerie Bing, Paris, 1964 Poster paint and adhesive lettering on paper 42 x 30.9 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art © L & M SERVICES B. V. The Hague 2012092

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Isaac Dobrinsky (1891–1973) Isaac Dobrinsky was born in 1891 in Makarov, Russia (now in Ukraine). After studying in a Talmudic school, he moved to Kiev for six years, where he began to model figures in clay. Afterwards he studied at Sabatovski art school while working for a tin-can maker. Dobrinsky arrived in Paris in 1912 and was welcomed warmly by the sculptor Marek Szwarc. He settled at La Ruche alongside Kikoïne and Pinchus Krémègne, and briefly shared his studio with Soutine. In 1914, Dobrinsky joined the French Foreign Legion, but was quickly exempted for medical reasons. He returned to Paris and studied at the Colarossi Academy and met Vera Kremer, who he married in 1926, and who is the subject of many of his paintings.

Isaac Dobrinksy (1891–1973) Head of a Girl Gouache on canvas 33 x 27 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Signed (lr) ‘Dobrinsky’ Gift from Mrs Goldstein 1945

After living at La Ruche for 27 years, Dobrinsky moved to Rue d’Odessa in 1934. In 1942, he left Paris for Bergerac, where he found refuge and met Hersch Fenster (who befriended many painters) and his family. He returned to Paris after the Liberation. In the 1950s Dobrinsky worked at the Chateau de Chabannes, Limousin, a home set up by Serge and Rachel Pludermacher to care for around 200 children orphaned by the Nazis, where he painted numerous portraits of the staff and children. Dobrinsky died in Paris in 1973. In Head of a Girl, Dobrinsky portrays a young girl, perhaps an orphan, whose tight-lipped mouth, fixed stare and adult expression appear to express disenchantment perhaps with the harshness of life. In contrast to her dark expression and bare surroundings, the painter uses a light, luminous, warm palette and lively brushstrokes.

Henri Epstein (1891–1944) Forest of Rambouillet, c.1931 Oil on canvas 53 x 71.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Signed (ll) ‘H. Epstein’

Henri Epstein (1891–1944) Henri Epstein was born in 1891 in Łódź, Poland. His father died when he was three and he was raised by his mother who encouraged his interest in painting. He studied at Jakub Kacenbogen’s drawing school at Łódź, then the School of Fine Arts in Munich. Epstein visited Paris in 1912 before serving in the Polish army, then returned to Paris and settled at La Ruche from 1913 – 38, studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Although Epstein’s early art work was influenced by fauvism, he then adopted an expressionist technique. He exhibited both at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. He illustrated Gustave Coquiot’s Vagabondages (1921) and Pierre Bonardi’s Les Rois du Maquis (1926), as well as contributing to the first Jewish artistic journal Machmadim. Epstein bought a farm near Epernon, which became his refuge during the Occupation, until on 23 February 1944 he was arrested by Gestapo agents. Despite appeals by his wife (the daughter

of painter Georges Dorignac) and his friends, Epstein was sent to Drancy camp on 21 February 1944. He was deported on 7 March in convoy number 69 and killed in Auschwitz. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Paris in 1946. The title of the painting, Forest of Rambouillet, refers to a forest located west of Paris, near where the artist used to live. Epstein uses a predominantly green palette, free brushstrokes and generously applied paint to create a textured and vivid surface typical of his later expressive style.

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Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel (1899–1981) Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel was born in Odessa, Russia (now in Ukraine) in 1899, the great-grandson of the famous Hasidic Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berdichev. In 1917, he studied under Alexandra Exter at the Art Academy of Odessa. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1919 as part of the first wave of settlers of the Third Aliyah. In 1920, he established an artists’ cooperative in Jaffa and an artists’ studio in Herzliya and participated in the first art exhibition in Israel. Later that year he travelled to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, as well as sculpture at the studios of Antoine Bourdelle, and painting under Henri Matisse. Frenkel-Frenel exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and regularly frequented the café Le Dome at Montparnasse. He returned to Palestine in 1925 and opened the Masad and Eged studios of art and established and directed the painting studio of the Histradut School in Tel Aviv. His students included Shimshon Holzman, Mordechai Levanon, David Hendler, Joseph Kossonogi, and Ziona Tajar. He was also a mentor to Bezalel Academy of Art and Design students Avigdor Steimatsky, Yehezkel Streichman, Moshe Castel, and Arieh Aroch. Frenkel-Frenel made Safed his home in 1934, and was one of the founders of the Artists’ Colony there in 1949. In 1973, a museum of his work was opened at his house. In 1979, he had a solo exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. He died in Tel Aviv in 1981 and was buried in Safed. Frenkel-Frenel’s paintings reveal the abstract, cubist influences he adopted during his years in Paris, rather than the orientalist trends then popular in Israel. In these three fine works (rare both from this period and in terms of style), Shabbat Blessing and the two studies, Man with Torah, he reinterprets traditional Jewish subject matter in a Cubist manner.

Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel (1899–1981) Shabbat Blessing, 1920 Watercolour, pen and ink on paper 23.5 x 17.6 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Signed (lr) in Hebrew ‘Paris – 20 – Y. Frenkel’ © The estate of the artist

Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel (1899–1981) Man with Torah I, 1920 Watercolour, pen and ink on paper 23.5 x 17.6 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Signed (r) in Hebrew ‘Paris – 20 – Y. Frenkel’ © The estate of the artist

Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel (1899–1981) Man with Torah II, 1920 Watercolour, pen and ink on paper 23.5 x 17.6 cm Signed and dated (lr) ‘I. Frenkel Paris 20’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art © The estate of the artist

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Henri Hayden (1883–1970) Still Life (Black Vase, Potiche Noir), 1968 Lithograph on paper 34 x 50 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by Stern Art Dealers 1993 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Henri Hayden (1883–1970) Henri Hayden was born in Warsaw in 1883. He was baptised a Protestant but was of Jewish extraction. In 1902, owing to parental pressure, he registered as an engineer in the Warsaw Polytechnic, but at the same time also enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy, where his talent was quickly recognised. With financial help from his father, he went to Paris to study for a year in 1907 and never returned to Poland. Initially, Hayden worked independently in a studio on Boulevard Saint-Michel, isolated from his peers; studying briefly at the Palette art school in 1908, and discovering Gauguin. In Montparnasse, he met and became friendly with the key

artists of the cubist movement including Juan Gris, Picasso, Lipchitz and Jean Metzinger. Hayden showed his work regularly, holding his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1911 and signing a contract in 1914 with the dealer Léonce Rosenberg and then with Charles Malpel. Hayden reacted against Cubism in 1922 and returned to the direct study of nature; his landscapes from this period have affinities with the work of the school of Pont-Aven. During the German Occupation he took refuge in the South of France, meeting Robert and Sonia Delaunay in Mougins, then moving to Rousillon d’Apt, where he was involved in the French Resistance movement and became friendly with the writer Samuel Beckett (with whom he shared a love of

chess, as well as of painting). In 1944, he discovered that his Paris studio had been plundered. After a long period of neglect following his rejection of Cubism, his work began to win increasing recognition again from about 1952 and was shown in Paris, Dublin, Caen, Amiens and Aix-enProvence. He bought a country house in 1962 near La Fertésous-Jouarre, and painted many landscapes of the surrounding area. He died in Paris in 1970. Hayden was mainly a still-life and landscape painter. Influenced by Gauguin, Cézanne and then Cubism, he later moved towards more figurative works following the Second World War. This abstract still life depicts a vase and a book on a table, animated by a tricolour palette of red, blue and black.

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Michel Kikoïne (1892–1968)

Michel Kikoïne (1892–1968) Israeli Girl Watercolour on paper 41 x 25 cm Signed (l) ‘Michel Kikoïne’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from J. Spreiregen 1952 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Michel Kikoïne was born in 1892 in Gomel, Russia (now in Belarus). Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to Rejitsa, near Vitebsk, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father worked in a bank. In 1904, the Kikoïne family moved to Minsk, where Michel studied business for three years, meeting Soutine who was then working as an apprentice tailor. In 1908, Soutine and Kikoïne attended Kruger’s Art Academy and then the School of Fine Arts in Vilnius, where they met Pinchus Krémègne, later becoming known as the ‘Expressionist trio’. Kikoïne moved to Paris in 1912, enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Cormon and in 1914 married Rosa Bunimovitz. Kikoïne settled at La Ruche, where Chagall and Krémègne were already living and Modigliani drew his portrait, c. 1917. He mainly painted landscapes, still life, portraits, and expressive nudes. He participated in Salon exhibitions from 1914. His first solo exhibition took place after the war in 1919 at the Chéron Gallery. Between 1922 and 1923, after a trip to Céret and Cagnes-sur-Mer with Soutine, Kikoïne painted expressionist landscapes. In 1927, he left La Ruche and settled in Montrouge but returned to Montparnasse in 1933. In 1939, Kikoïne was mobilized to serve at the Réserve near Soissons, where he painted gouaches of garrison life. In 1942, he and his family found refuge in the Toulouse area. After the war, he returned to Paris and in the last ten years of his life, frequently visited the Mediterranean Coast where he produced seascapes. Kikoïne died in his studio in Paris in 1968. Kikoïne visited Israel three times: in 1950–51, 1953–54 and in 1965, so his smiling Israeli Girl, which employs a luminous palette and fluid use of watercolour, must have been painted on one of these visits.

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Chana Kowalska (1907–1941) Shtetl, 1934 Oil on canvas 45 x 60 cm Ben Uri, The London Museum of Art Gift from Moshe Oved

Chana Kowalska (1907–1941) Chana Kowalska was born in 1907 in Włocławek, Poland. Her father, a rabbi and Zionist, made their home a meeting point for intellectuals and Sholem Asch wrote his first book there. Kowalska began drawing at the age of 16 but became a school teacher at 18. In 1922, she moved to Berlin, where she met her future husband, the writer Baruch Winogora. Kowalska later moved to Paris and settled in Montparnasse, borrowing the studios of her friends to paint. She was actively involved in the Paris branch of the Yiddish cultural organisation KulturLige and in Jewish communist circles, and also worked as a journalist and wrote about painting in Yiddish journals including Presse Nouvelle and Le Journal de Paris. She was the Secretary of the Jewish Painters and Sculptors Association and participated in the 1937 Jewish Cultural Congress. During the Second World War she was involved in the French Resistance with her husband; arrested by the Gestapo, they were deported in 1941 and murdered in the Holocaust. The strong lines, bold colours and simplified figures in The

Bridge reflect Kowalska’s naïve style of painting, disguising a more complex message in which a series of contrasting images are linked literally and symbolically by the bridge. As a happy couple in the foreground celebrate, the young woman behind them, signals across the water, apparently in distress. Beyond the bridge we glimpse an idyllic pastoral scene, but a horsedrawn cart swallowed up by the narrowing perspective suggests a narrowing of opportunities or a disappearing way of life. In Shtetl (the traditional Jewish small town with its tightly-knit community common throughout Eastern Europe before the Holocaust), Kowalska conjures up an archetypal shtetl with neighbours gathering round the water pump at its centre. Nevertheless, the horse-drawn cart winding up a street lined with traditional, single-story houses again warns of a fast-disappearing way of life. Pavements and streetlights signal approaching modernisation and a church in the distance underlines the presence of the wider community. Many of Kowalska’s paintings recall her homeland and their folk-like quality, bright palette and unnatural perspective have affinities with the work of Chagall.

Chana Kowalska (1907–1941) The Bridge, 1934 Oil on canvas 58.5 x 47 cm Signed (lr) ‘Kowalska 1934’ Ben Uri, The London Museum of Art Gift from Moshe Oved

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Zygmund Landau (1898–1962) Zygmund Landau was born into a family of rabbis in 1898 in Łódź, later studying with Henri Epstein at Jakub Kacenbogen’s drawing school before enrolling in the studio of Stanislaw Lentz at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. By the time he was 18, he was already teaching painting. He arrived in Paris in 1920 and settled at La Ruche, attending the Grande Chaumière, the Colarossi Academy and befriending Moïse Kisling. In 1928, he returned to Poland to exhibit in Warsaw and Łódź. His work was also known in the UK and the USA, owing to his friendship with the influential British painter and critic Roger Fry, with whom he later shared a flat in Saint-Tropez. In the late 1930s Landau illustrated Edmond Fleg’s Ecoute Israel (Listen Israel) published by La Cigogne editions. Upon the outbreak of war in September 1939, Landau fled to Saint-Tropez, where he remained afterwards, also living in Nice and Paris, where he exhibited regularly, as well as in London and

Zygmund Landau (1898–1962) Landscape, France, 1936 Oil on canvas 52.8 x 64.4 cm

in Stockholm. Towards the end of the 1950s, he settled in Israel. In 1962, he produced stained-glass windows for the little chapel of the YMCA in Tiberias, Israel. He

Signed and dated (lr) ‘Landau 1936’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Moshe Oved

died in Israel later the same year. Landau’s two vibrant French landscapes, both probably dating to the 1930s, show his admiration for Cézanne.

Zygmund Landau (1898–1962) French Landscape Oil on canvas 53.2 x 70.5 cm Signed (ll) ‘Landau’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased 1937

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Isaac Lichtenstein (1888–1981) Isaac Lichtenstein was born in 1888 in Plonsk, Poland and spent his childhood in Warsaw and then in Łódź. He studied painting in Cracow, Rome, Florence and Munich. In 1908 he joined the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and in 1911, he moved to Paris. Alongside Krémègne, Henri Epstein, Leo Koenig, Marek Schwarz and Joseph Tchaikov, Lichtenstein was one of the Jewish painters at La Ruche behind the publication of Machmadim (Precious Ones), a textless journal of Jewish art that was first published in 1912. During the First World War, Lichtenstein lived in the United States. In 1918 he volunteered to join the Jewish Legion and served in Palestine. After the war, he moved between London, Poland, Paris, and the United States, where he spent most of his life, reviving the Machmadim Publishing House devoted to the production of artistic Yiddish books. His painting, The Blind Fiddler, combines traditional folk iconography with an angular style clearly influenced by Cubism, revealing the importance of Lichtenstein’s experience as part of the École de Paris. The fiddler (a popular motif in the work of Chagall), accompanied by a child, stands in front of a colourful urban cityscape, which recalls the Orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay.

Isaac Lichtenstein (1888–1981) The Blind Fiddler, 1924 Oil on canvas 89 x 63 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased 1925

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Jacques (Chaïm Jakob) Lipchitz (1891–1973) Born in 1891, in the spa town of Druskininkai in present-day Lithuania, Jacques Lipchitz was the son of French-American parents. He studied in Vilna (now Vilnius) from 1906, moving to Paris in 1909, where he became a pupil at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. In Paris, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Rivera and Picasso, and was inspired to produce the first Cubist sculptures, a style he pursued from 1913. In 1920 he had his first solo exhibition at the gallery of the dealer Léonce Rosenberg. The first retrospective of Lipchitz’s work took place at the Galerie de la Renaissance in 1930. In the following years, Lipchitz’s work developed in an unconstrained, increasingly organic style. He produced the monumental Prometheus for the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, for which he was awarded a gold medal. In 1940, Lipchitz fled occupied Paris for Toulouse, before departing for the USA, where he settled in New York. There, his work was soon regularly shown at the Buchholz Gallery (later the Curt Valentin Gallery). In 1947 he moved to Hastingson-Hudson in New York State. In later life, he exhibited widely in America, with retrospectives in New York and Minneapolis in 1954. Lipchitz took part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, twice in 1959 and 1964. Lipchitz’s second wife Yulla came from an orthodox Jewish background, inspiring his later interest in the political fate of Israel and the conventions of Jewish orthodoxy. From 1962, he received numerous important public commissions in the USA and Israel, including two variations of the theme of Between Heaven and Earth between 1967 and 1969, which he produced for the NelsonAtkins Museum in Kansas City and the Los Angeles County Music Center. The Study for Between Heaven and Earth comes from a later period of exploration of this theme. Lipchitz died on holiday in Capri in 1973, and was buried in Israel.

Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) Study for Between Heaven and Earth, 1971–2 Ink and wash on paper 43 x 31 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by Hanno D. Mott NYC

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Ossip Lubitch (1896–1990) Standing Clown

Ossip Lubitch (1896–1990) Born into a family of blacksmiths in Grodno, Russia (now in Belarus) in 1896, Ossip Lubitch spent his teenage years in Odessa where he studied at the Fine Art Academy for four years. In 1919, he moved to Berlin with a group of Russian artists including Pavel Tchelitchev, Jean Pougny and Lazare Meerson, with whom he produced theatre and cinema sets. In 1923, after accepting a contract to decorate a Montmartre cabaret, he moved to Paris, where he studied the art of masters including Rembrandt, Goya and Degas, and was encouraged by the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle to pursue a career as a painter. In 1925 he was accepted into the Salon des Tuileries. In Montparnasse, Lubitch befriended Zygmund Schreter and the sculptors Irène Codreano and Léon Indenbaum, and composers and musicians from the music group Triton. During the Second World War, Lubitch failed to register as a Jew with the police and continued painting in his studio Rue d’Odessa in Montmartre. However, in 1944 he was denounced and arrested by the Gestapo, who sent him to Drancy internment camp. He managed to avoid the last convoy to Auschwitz, surviving the Holocaust and settling in Paris after the war. He bequeathed the drawings he produced in Drancy to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem in memory of the victims of the Holocaust and the Righteous among the Nations. After the Liberation, he met and married the painter Suzanne Boulboire, with whom he had a daughter. He died in Paris in 1990. Lubitch’s etchings of a seated and standing clown may belong to his 1934 album entitled Cirque, comprising ten etchings and aquatints of circus scenes with a poem preface by Georges Rouault.

Etching on paper 19.5 x 13 cm Signed (lr) ‘Lubitch’, inscribed (ll) 3/20 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Ossip Lubitch (1896–1990) Seated Clown Etching on paper 16.5 x 12.5 cm Signed (lr) ‘Lubitch’, inscribed (ll) 2/20 Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

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Emmanuel Mané-Katz (1894–1962) Seascape, 1934 Oil on canvas 70.5 x 90.5 cm Signed and dated (ll) ‘Mané-Katz 34’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from the artist © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

Emmanuel Mané-Katz (1894–1962) Emmanuel Mané-Katz was born in 1894 in Kremenchug (now in Ukraine). After studying in the Kiev and Vilnius schools of Fine Arts, he moved to Paris in 1913 with only 25 roubles. He studied in the studio of Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts with Soutine, Krémègne and Kikoïne. In Paris, Mané-Katz met other important artists including Chagall and Picasso. He discovered the works of Rembrandt and also became influenced by the Fauves, especially Derain, and briefly by Cubism. In 1914, unable to join the French Foreign Legion (due to his short stature), he returned

to Russia after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1917, after a trip to London, Mané-Katz was appointed professor at the Kharkiv Fine Art School. In 1919, he held solo exhibitions in Kharkiv, Rostovon-Don and Tiflis (today Tbilisi). In 1921, he returned to Paris where he started to collect many Jewish art objects and gained French citizenship in 1927. In Paris he painted many works on the subject of life in the ghettos of Eastern Europe: rabbis and Talmudic students, fiddlers and drummers, comedians and beggars. He also painted a number of landscapes and flower studies. Between 1928 and 1937, he travelled to Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Lithuania. During the Second

World War, he was arrested at Royan but managed to escape via Marseille to New York, where he remained for the rest of the war. Afterwards he settled in Paris and continued travelling during the last ten years of his life. He visited Israel, and travelled widely, returning to Paris in 1960. He died in Israel (which he viewed as his spiritual home) in 1962. He bequeathed his paintings and a large collection of Judaica to the city of Haifa, where they are now on display in the Mané Katz Museum. In this atmospheric seascape the artist employs loosely-handled paint and sweeping brush strokes to conjure up the drama and movement of a small boat tossed by the waves. Soutine and his contemporaries 31

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Grégoire Michonze (1902–1982) Grégoire Michonze was born in 1902 in Kishinev, Russia (now Chișinău, Moldova), and studied at the local art school, where he learned to paint traditional icons in tempera, before going on to study at the Academy in Bucharest. In 1922 he travelled to Paris via Greece, Istanbul and Marseilles, a journey which strongly influenced his later landscape painting. In Paris he entered the École des Beaux-Arts, and met Max Ernst who later introduced him to the Surrealists, notably André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Louis Aragon, though he gradually moved away from their influence to pursue his own personal path as a landscape and figurative artist. In 1924 he met Soutine with whom he developed a strong friendship. Between 1934 and 1936, Michonze exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants, creating elaborate compositions, which he later described as ‘Surreal naturalism’. In 1937 he spent some time in New York and Massachusetts, marrying the Scottish artist Una Maclean on his return to France. During the Second World War he was captured and then freed in 1942, afterwards returning to Paris. The Arcade Gallery in London gave him his first UK show in 1946 and, while living in England and Scotland in 1948, he also exhibited in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He showed in Britain again, as well as the USA and Israel after his first Paris exhibition in 1953. In 1970 he travelled to Venice and Rome on a painting tour. He died in Paris in 1982. The Musée d’Art moderne in Troyes held a major retrospective of his work in 1985. Village People draws on both surrealistic and realistic elements as two nude women are depicted mixing casually with their apparently indifferent but soberlydressed neighbours in a rural setting painted with a heightened sense of colour. In a 1959 letter to the British art critic Peter Stone, Michonze wrote: ‘My subjects have no subject. They exist only for a poetic end. If the poetry is there, the canvas is complete. No histories. Only pure poetry, preferably untitled.’

Grégoire Michonze (1902–1982) Village People, 1952 Oil on canvas 24.5 x 20 cm Signed (lr) ‘Michonze’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by J. C. Gilbert 1979

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Abraham Mintchine (1898–1931) Landscape Watercolour and pencil on paper 20 x 31 cm Signed (lr) ‘A. Mintchine’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from Gimpel Fils 1956

Abraham Mintchine (1898–1931) Abraham Mintchine was born in Kiev (now in Ukraine) in 1898. He was an apprentice engraver at the age of thirteen and afterwards studied painting at the art college in Kiev from 1914. He was active in Moscow until 1923. In 1922 he exhibited in the First Russian

Art Exhibition in Berlin, where he lived between 1923 and 1926, exhibiting a number of Cubistinfluenced paintings in 1925, and designing sets and costumes for the Jewish theatre in Palestine. In 1926, penniless, he moved to Paris, mixing with the École de Paris circle including Soutine, Krémègne, Kikoïne and others. The work Mintchine produced before his arrival in Paris has

Elie (Eliasz) Nadelman (1882–1946)

Elie Nadelman (1882–1946) The Swan Pencil and wash on paper 21.5 x 19 cm Signed (lr) ‘E. Nadelman’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift © Elie Nadelman Estate

Elie Nadelman was born in Warsaw in 1882. He studied at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts, before moving to Munich, where he won second prize in a drawing competition; the prize money allowing him to move to Paris in 1904, where he remained until 1914, taking a studio in Montparnasse. He studied at the Académie Colorossi, and exhibited at the Salon d’Automne (1905, 1906 and 1912) and the Salon des Indépendants (1907 and 1913). In Paris, Nadelman met Leo and Gertrude Stein, Picasso and Brancusi; he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Druet in 1909. He co-founded the Society of Polish Artists in 1912 (dissolved 1924). At the onset of the First

all disappeared so that all his surviving work, including this loosely-handled watercolour landscape, dates from his last six years (1926–31). His first oneman exhibition took place at the Galerie Alice Manteau, Paris, in 1929. He worked frequently in Provence, especially from 1929 onwards, in contact with Othon Friesz. He died at La Garde, near Toulon, in 1931.

World War in 1914, Nadelman left for New York, where he exhibited widely – his first solo show at Stieglitz’s gallery in 1915 was highly successful – and took on American nationality in 1927. Nadelman was ruined financially by the 1929 stock market crash and his work became more personal as a result, although much of it was accidentally destroyed in 1935. By this time, he lived as a virtual recluse, though he taught ceramics and modelling during the Second World War. He developed a heart condition in 1945 and committed suicide in 1946. A major exhibition of his work was held at MoMA, New York, in 1948. This undated drawing may be a study for an unrealised or lost sculpture.

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Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935) Issachar Ber Ryback was born into a Hasidic family in Kirovohrad (Elisavetgrad), Russia (now in Ukraine), and studied art in Moscow. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, he was part of a significant national Jewish art movement based on ghetto folkart, Jewish popular traditions and humour. His fellow members included El Lissitzky, Natan Altman and Chagall. In 1916, Ryback and El Lissitzky were commissioned by the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society to travel around the small towns of present day Ukraine and Belarus, copying paintings in wooden synagogues and carved gravestones in Jewish cemeteries. This trip was the beginning of Ryback’s sustained interest in Jewish folk art, and he continued to collect and appropriate this iconography in his work. In 1921 Ryback’s experiments with Cubism and Expressionism attracted acclaim in Berlin. He participated in the ‘Der Sturm’ group and completed an important series of lithographs depicting imaginary scenes of Jewish shtetl life. He later returned to Russia to design for the Moscow Theatre before settling in Paris, where his style became more romantic and nostalgic. Ryback died in Paris in 1935. In The Cock, Ryback’s cockerel bears comparison both with the romantic folkloric imagery of artists such as Chagall, and the expressionistic realism of Soutine’s closely-observed studies. The cockerel, a staple of the French still-life, may be a symbol of his adopted French home, but also evokes the Jewish tradition of kapparot, where the sins of a person are symbolically transferred to a fowl. Le Repos, Ryback’s sensitivelyobserved study of a horse at rest by is animated by a vivid palette and the beautifully rendered landscape which surrounds it.

Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935) Le Repos (Resting) Oil on canvas 48 x 59 cm Signed (lr) ‘I. Ryback’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased 1935

Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935) The Cock, 1920 Watercolour on paper 33.5 x 50 cm Signed (ll) ‘I. Ryback’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased 1935

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Zygmund Schreter (1886–1977) Landscape Oil on board 22 x 29 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1955

Zygmund Schreter (1886–1977) Zygmund Schreter was born in 1886 in Łódź, Poland, where his father was a textile manufacturer. He studied at a Russian school, and was taught to play the violin by his mother. In 1914 he set out

for Karlsbad in Germany, but was imprisoned as a Russian civilian prisoner during the First World War. From 1923, Schreter studied in Berlin, and largely earned his living as a violinist, playing with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra and at the Max Reinhart theatre. In 1929, he exhibited in Berlin at an exhibition organised by Käthe Köllwitz.

Schreter arrived in France in 1934, settling first in Cannes before moving to Paris. During the Occupation, Schreter remained in his Paris studio, protected by his neighbours. He died in Paris in 1977. His colourful, freely-handled landscape shows the influence of French painting.

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Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) Chaïm Soutine was probably born in 1893 (though his friends believed the date to be 1894), the tenth of eleven children, in the shtetl of Smilovichy, Russia (now in Lithuania) to a poor Jewish family. He began drawing at an early age but was discouraged by his family. As a young teenager, Soutine flouted the prohibition on drawing faces, and when he drew the local Rabbi, was so badly beaten by the rabbi’s son that he received sufficient damages to go to Minsk. He was accompanied by Kikoïne, and in 1910 they enrolled at the School of Fine Arts Vilna (now Vilnius), where they met Krémègne. Soutine proved an exceptional student, concentrating largely on tragic themes. Soutine and Kikoïne arrived in Paris in 1913, joining Krémègne (who had arrived in 1912) at La Ruche, where they lived in conditions of extreme poverty; his neighbours included Chagall, Zadkine, Kisling, Laurens, Archipenko, Dobrinksy and others. He studied in the Atelier Cormon at the École des Beaux-Arts, also visiting the Louvre and admiring work by the masters including Rembrandt and Goya. In 1915 he was introduced by Lipchitz to Amedeo Modigliani with whom he developed a strong friendship. Modigliani made four portraits of Soutine and also introduced him to the dealer Léopold Zborowski. During the First World War Soutine enlisted in the work brigades but was soon dismissed on health grounds, having developed the stomach problems which would later kill him. He moved to the artists’ colony at Cité Falguière, where his neighbours included Lipchitz and Modigliani. In 1918 he made his first visit to Cagnes, followed by Céret in 1919, where he worked predominantly for the next three years, producing densely-painted, visceral landscapes, which are among his most celebrated works and anticipate the later work of COBRA and the Abstract Expressionists. In the mid-1920s, Soutine made an important series of paintings of beef carcasses executed in an expressionistic style, influenced by Rembrandt and the Old Masters, painted direct from decaying animal carcasses hung in his studio, which were later to influence Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Characterized by his signature heavy, ‘convulsive’ brushwork, portraiture also occupies an important place within Soutine’s oeuvre from the 1920s onwards. His powerful character studies, which include pastry cooks, choirboys, boot boys, bell-boys and maids, dressed in the uniforms of their trade and often depicted in exaggerated poses ranging from awkwardness to arrogance, which distinctly evoke the individual personalities of their sitters. In his early years Soutine endured poverty, illhealth and depression, which sometimes led him to destroy his work. In 1922, however, the American collector Alfred C. Barnes discovered Soutine’s work on a trip to Paris; his first purchase was The Pastry Cook, and he went on to acquire 52 paintings for prices between $15 and $30. This was the start of Soutine’s commercial success as an artist and by

Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) La Soubrette (Waiting Maid), c. 1933 Oil on canvas 46.7 x 41 cm Signed (lr) ‘Soutine’ Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased with assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund, the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Miriam & Richard Borchard, Sir Harry & Lady Djanogly, Patsy & David Franks, Morven & Michael Heller, Joan & Lawrence Kaye (USA), Laura & Lewis Kruger (USA), Agnes & Edward Lee, Simon Posen (USA), The Marc Rich Foundation (Switzerland ), Anthony Rosenfelder & family in honour of Marilyn, Jayne Cohen & Howard Spiegler (USA), and Judit & Georg Weisz © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2012

1926 prices for his work had risen steeply. Soutine’s paintings were shown in New York from 1927 and he also exhibited in various group shows across Europe, enjoying commercial and critical success in the 1930s. From 1923-25 he mainly worked in Paris and Cagnes; he held first solo exhibition at Galerie Bing in 1927. In 1928 Waldemar George published the first monograph on Soutine as part of ‘les artistes juifs’ series, followed by Elie Faure’s monograph in 1929. From now on Soutine worked mainly in Paris, spending the summers at Lèves, near Chartres, the home of Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing, who become his patrons after Zborowski’s death in 1932. From 1941, using a false identity card, Soutine sought refuge from occupied Paris in the village of Champigny-sur-Veuldre in Touraine. In 1943, suffering from a rapid decline in his health, Soutine travelled to Paris with his companion Marie-Berthe Aurenche, and died on 9 August 1943 during an operation for perforated stomach ulcers. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery.

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Soutine mania in post-war British art Martin Hammer By 1959, one artist’s reputation seemed clear-cut: “No painter of the years between the wars has had so widespread an influence on post-war painting,” was how David Sylvester put it.1 The artist who had now outstripped the likes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Piet Mondrian was, strange to say, Chaïm Soutine. Before 1939, such a view would have seemed absurd. Soutine was then a successful but relatively marginal figure who had found his niche alongside the likes of Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, and Maurice de Vlaminck within the “School of Paris,” a middlebrow antidote to the extremities of Surrealism and abstraction. Moreover the artist himself had come to loathe the most outlandish and experimental phase of his work, and had tried to destroy as many of the radical early Céret landscapes as he could lay his hands on. A good few of these visceral, densely worked have survived, but it was not until the period after his death, in 1943 that these paintings in particular became objects of widespread veneration, and their maker a talisman to the international avant-garde. In the 1950s, Soutine was indeed the artist who mattered, as Cézanne mattered in the decade before 1914, or Warhol in the 1980s. The story of Soutine’s effect on artists in Paris and the United States is now relatively well known. It received detailed consideration in the excellent catalogue for An Expressionist in Paris, a 1998 exhibition at the Jewish Museum.2 And it has long been recognized in the literature on Abstract Expressionism: the 1950 Soutine retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art was a key stimulus for many artists, particularly Willem de Kooning, who was already a huge admirer of Soutine. The illustrated catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, edited by Monroe Wheeler, became a staple of artists’ studios in the 1950s and was widely circulated outside America.3 But if one leaves aside two wide-ranging shows organized by Esti Dunow and Maurice Tuchman, 4 Soutine’s influence on British art has been less often told5 – this in spite of the fact that it was no less than the great critic and Englishman Sylvester who talked so soaringly of Soutine’s importance, an assessment, moreover, that 1 David Sylvester, “Soutine Reconsidered in Paris Exhibitions,” The New York Times, 6 September 1959, p. 16. 2 Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver (eds), Chaïm Soutine: An Expressionist in Paris (Munich and New York: Prestel Publications and Jewish Museum of New York, 1998). 3 Monroe Wheeler, Soutine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1950). 4 The Impact of Chaïm Soutine: de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon (2001) and The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art (2006) at Galerie Gmurzynska in Cologne and Cheim & Read in New York. 5 For a more detailed account, see my “Found in Translation: Chaïm Soutine and English Art,” Modernist Cultures (Edinburgh), November 2010, pp. 218–242.

doubtless reflected studio talk among the painters whom he befriended and supported, the core members of what would soon be known as the “School of London”: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Indeed, a fervent interest in the art of Soutine is as good a place as any to start if one wanted to find meaningful common ground between these disparate figurative painters. The London School’s engagement with Soutine was clearly sustained not just by reproductions, which give an especially poor sense of what Soutine’s pictures look like, but also by original works, whose current availability in London presupposed his earlier collectability. An earlier vogue among British collectors had underpinned several one-man shows in commercial galleries during the late 1930s.6 The constricted circumstances of the war years meant that such works remained in British collections. After 1945, they began to resurface, notably in the 1947 Soutine show staged by the Gimpel Fils gallery, which specialized in modern French art and work by progressive British contemporaries. It was an unusual opportunity to see a cluster of Soutine’s works: “His pictures are now rare on the market.…The present exhibition is not likely to be followed in London by another,” wrote Maurice Collis in an accompanying catalogue. “Let us look at Soutine while we can.”7 And indeed, there were no further solo shows of Soutine until the major exhibition that Sylvester curated in 1963 for the Edinburgh Festival and the Tate Gallery. Four pictures were shown in the major L’Ecole de Paris 19001950 exhibition staged at the Royal Academy in 1951.8 Otherwise it was group shows in galleries that provided the occasional opportunity to run into his work. In the case of Bacon, it has often been noted that Painting (1946) is descended from a tradition of butchery images epitomized by Rembrandt’s Carcass of Beef (1655) and by Soutine’s many variations on the theme. Bacon could certainly have known the latter works, in which a suspended crucifix-like carcass is rendered with Soutine’s characteristic heightened palette and painterly touch. One such piece had been in Britain for several years, and was in fact included in the Lefevre Gallery’s School of Paris (Picasso and his Contemporaries) exhibition that immediately followed the legendary group show of April 1945 that had launched Bacon himself, thanks to its inclusion of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) and Figure 6 See exhibitions listing in Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow, and Klaus Perls, Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943): Catalogue Raisonné (Cologne: Bendikt Taschen Verlag, 2001), p. 88. 7 Maurice Collis, “Haim Soutine,” Chaïm Soutine (London: Gimpel Fils, 23 April–17 May 1947), n.p. 8 L’Ecole de Paris 1900–1950 (London: Royal Academy, 13 January to 7 March 1951), nos. 85–88.

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Frank Auerbach (1931) Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004 Oil on board 51.1 x 51.1 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Acquired with the assistance of The Art Fund, MLA/ V&A Purchase Grant Fund, Daniel and Pauline Auerbach, Frank Auerbach and Marlborough Fine Art, London, 2007 © The Artist

in a Landscape (1945) alongside pictures by Sutherland and others.9 Here Soutine lingered on the rich coloration, textures and intricate structure of a slab of meat. Memories of the picture may well have informed Bacon’s own ribs of beef, suspended to such compelling expressive effect on the tubular metal podium in front of his generic Fascist dictator. Interestingly, when Sylvester published his first critical response to Bacon, he related him to “Soutine’s écorché ” as

well as “Picasso’s Surrealist period.”10 Sylvester later recalled that in the 1950s, “Soutine was one of the two twentiethcentury artists for whom Bacon expressed enormous admiration” (the other being Pierre Bonnard).11 Bacon’s copy of Wheeler’s MoMA catalogue survived among the detritus of his studio, and sketches were found inside its covers (thereby giving the lie to the notion that Bacon didn’t make

9 Tuchman, Dunow, and Perls, Chaïm Soutine, Still Lifes, no. 99. See also my “Francis Bacon and the Lefevre Gallery,” Burlington Magazine, 152, May 2010, pp. 307–312.

11 David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 87.

10 Cited in Gary Tinterow, “Bacon and his Critics,” in Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens (eds.), Francis Bacon (London, Tate Publishing, 2008), p. 31.

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preliminary sketches).12 The eschewal of preliminary studies and a reliance on improvising directly on the canvas featured as much in the mythology of Soutine as it did Bacon, as did a proclivity for destroying his own pictures in fits of dissatisfaction, a practice which critics were already talking about in the case of Bacon by the late 1940s. Bacon had plenty of opportunity to assimilate such stories about Soutine from friends who had spent time in Paris in the 1930s, to say nothing of the available publications, and one might wonder how far his entire sense of himself as an artist was shaped by an awareness of Soutine. Certainly his identification comes across in a 1958 TV interview with Daniel Farson, in which Bacon stated: Two of the very finest artists of our time – Picasso and Soutine – are two diametrically opposed types. Picasso is a man with enormous gifts who can do practically anything he wants. Soutine was a man with an enormous love of painting, who never drew, who painted his pictures directly, and had deliberately never developed his technique. And he didn’t develop his technique because he thought he would keep the thing cleaner and rawer by that method.13 It was in recent works such as Figure in a Mountain Landscape (1956, Kunsthaus, Zürich) and the series of Van Gogh variations exhibited in 1957 that Bacon’s interest in early Soutine manifested itself most directly. The oft noted affinity at this point with de Kooning may well reflect the parallel stimulus the two artists absorbed from Soutine, rather than any direct mutual awareness. Within Bacon’s School of London milieu, Lucian Freud was also an early Soutine fan. A close friend of Bacon’s from the early 1940s onwards, he was closely acquainted with Adrian Ryan, who owned Soutines and produced virtual pastiches in his own work.14 From the literature on Freud, one gathers that he also encountered works by Soutine during extended trips to Paris in 1946 and after, notably images of dead animals that made a great impression. The lasting impact of the dead animal pictures might explain the uncanny parallels between such Soutine paintings as the celebrated Flayed Rabbit and some of Freud’s later nudes, such as Naked Girl Asleep (1968) or Rose (1978–79), affinities which give a different edge to the frequent observation that Freud treats his naked sitters like so many slabs of meat.15 The close but elevated viewpoint, the placing of the figure against a white sheet, and the fondness for splayed legs might all be seen as echoes of a Soutine piece feeding into compositions that he painted so scrupulously from life. In the early 1950s, Soutine – along with Bacon and Freud – became significant points of inspiration for Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, who were at that time crystallizing their own pictorial languages as students at 12 Francis Bacon Studio Archive, Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. See Matthew Gale, Francis Bacon: Working on Paper (London: Tate Gallery, 1999). 13 Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 105.

the Royal College of Art. In 2006, Auerbach, speaking for both artists, remarked that his “interest in Soutine has never slackened.”16 If early Kossoff paintings manifest a heightened emotionality, Auerbach’s seem more analytical in their concerns. One senses that Soutine provided Auerbach with a certain ideal of surface physicality, into which he could then proceed to insert an increasingly exact description of the spatial construction and detailing of his subject, and an increasingly rigorous sense of geometric structure. In his 1992 monograph on Auerbach, Robert Hughes remarked that “one of the painters he most loved in the 1950s was Chaïm Soutine.” As much as anyone, Soutine epitomized the tragic, alienated notion of the artist projected by the French Existentialist writers – their sense of the work of art as an encounter with materials and the making process rather than an illustration of preconceived ideas. In Britain, artists were probably less affected by Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical writings than by his novel La Nausée, published in France in 1938 and appearing in English translation as Nausea in 1949. In one episode the narrator is sitting in the park and becomes overwhelmed by the sheer materiality of things in the world: “The root of the chestnut tree plunged into the ground just underneath my bench. I no longer remembered that it was a root … Words had disappeared, and with them the meaning of things, the methods of using them, the feeble landmarks which men have traced on their surface.” That revelation provided “the key to Existence, the key to my Nausea, to my own life.”17 It is a short step to Sylvester’s eloquent reading of the Tate’s Landscape at Céret by Soutine – and to much of the art that he was to inspire: Here is a jungle of color, layer upon impenetrable layer, not murky but of a luxurious darkness in which light is held as in porphyry or basalt … Whether it is noon or dusk, whether it is raining or the wind is blowing, is of no concern. Nor is it really a matter of importance what things the shapes stand for – that this is a hill or a house or a tree … Our awareness cuts through objects. It responds to rhythms, to an interplay of forces … The picture is about action … it is Dionysian in that it works upon us in imagination like an intoxicant … Outside us everything merges, becomes fluid, fluid in its boundaries, fluid in identity … This is an art of pure sensation, an art in which the painter has bodied forth in paint his experience of the motif in front of him without giving thought to the names of the elements.18

16 Soutine and Modern Art: The New Landscape/The New Still Life: Soutine and Modern Art (New York: Cheim & Read, 2006), n.p.

14 See Julian Machin, Adrian Ryan: Rather A Rum Life (Bristol: Sansom & Company, 2009).

17 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, (London: John Lehmann, 1949, translated by Lloyd Alexander, thereafter Nausea), pp. 182 and 185. French edition published 1938.

15 Tuchman, Dunow, and Perls, Chaïm Soutine, Still Lifes, no. 45. Both Freuds in private collections.

18 Reprinted with minor changes as “Soutine,” in Sylvester, On Modern Art, pp. 119–121.

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Biographies

School of London Frank Auerbach (1931–) The painter Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin to Jewish parents. In 1939 he was sent to England, while his parents remained in Germany and perished in concentration camps. In 1947 he became a British citizen. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art between 1948 and 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 – 55, as well as at evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic under the inspirational teaching of David Bomberg, during which time he became friends with Leon Kossoff. Auerbach moved to his current student in North London in 1954 and had his first exhibition at the Beaux Arts Gallery, London, in 1956. His many subsequent exhibitions include an Arts Council retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1978 and a solo show at the Royal Academy in 2001; he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1986. Auerbach’s work is characterised by extremely thick applications of paint and he favours portraiture, particularly of friends and family (some of his models, particularly EOW and JYM have sat for decades) as well as the nude, townscapes and building sites, including a series of works recording the destruction and reconstruction of post-war London between 1952 and 1962. He lives and works in London. This series of lithographic portrait heads of familiar sitters (including the artist’s son, Jake) was executed between 1985 and 1990. The lithographic medium allows the artist to employ a similarly sculptural and expressive style to that used in his many charcoal portrait drawings.

Frank Auerbach (1931–) Geoffrey, 1990 Etching on paper 19.5 x 16.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

Frank Auerbach (1931–) Catherine, 1989 Etching on paper 20 x 16.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

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Frank Auerbach (1931–) Jym, 1985 Etching on paper 20 x 16.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

Frank Auerbach (1931–) Michael, 1990 Etching on paper 20 x 16.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

Frank Auerbach (1931–) Jake, 1990 Etching on paper 20 x 16.5 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

Frank Auerbach (1931–) David, 1989 Etching on paper 19.3 x 16.3 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

Frank Auerbach (1931–) Julia, 1989 etching on paper 19.5 x 16.5 c m Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Presented by the artist 1994 © The artist

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Leon Kossoff (1926–) Leon Kossoff was born in Islington to first generation Russian immigrant parents. As a child he lived in the East End of London, where his parents ran a bakery. He studied in London at St Martin’s School of Art from 1949–53, and at the Royal College of Art from 1953–6. Between 1950 and 1952 he also took evening classes at the Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg. With his fellow student Frank Auerbach, Kossoff developed a painterly style employing thickly applied layers of paint that are extensively reworked to reveal closely-observed portraits and cityscapes. His works are notable for their autobiographical content, representing close friends and family members, and very familiar parts of the areas of London in which he has lived: the familiarity of his subjects is crucial to Kossoff’s close looking. Recurring motifs in his work include Kilburn Underground station, Christ Church, Spitalfields and Willesden children’s swimming pool. His paintings can be seen as an extension of his primary practice of drawing. The same direct, heavily-worked style is evident in his drawing, Portrait of a Woman, which may depict his wife Rosalind. His etching, Two Seated Figures, takes the artist’s parents as its subjects, and is closely related to a painting of the same name in the Tate collection. A series of etchings produced in response to – and directly in front of – Old Master paintings, reveals Kossoff’s strong sense of artistic tradition. He produced different versions of a single painting in his closely worked, expressionistic linear style, working from Poussin, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt. Kossoff had six solo exhibitions at Beaux Arts Gallery, London, between 1957 and 1964, and a further one-man show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972. He lives and works in London.

Leon Kossoff (1926–) Portrait of a Woman Charcoal on paper 103 x 71 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Purchased © The artist

Leon Kossoff (1926–) Two Seated Figures, 1982 Etching on paper 40 x 37 cm Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Gift from the artist in 1982 © The artist

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Select Bibliography

Selected Exhibitions: Chaïm Soutine

Ziva Amishai-Maisels, ‘Facing the Facts: Marc Chagall’s Covert Reactions to the Holocaust’ in Apocalypse: Unveiling a Lost Masterpiece by Marc Chagall (London: Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art, 2010) A. Barnes, ed., Soutine (Les Arts à Paris, November, 1944) Stanley Baron and Jacques Damase, Sonia Delaunay: the life of an artist (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995) Léon Bakst, esquisses de décors et de costumes, arts graphiques, peintures (Leningrad: Éditions d’art Aurora, 1986) Monica Bohm-Duchen, Chagall (London: Phaidon Press, 1998) L. Carluccio, J. Leymarie, R. Negri, F. Russoli, Y. Brunhammer, École de Paris (Paris: Rive Gauche Productions, 1981) M. Castaing et J. Leymarie, eds. Soutine (Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1963) Esti Dunow, ed. Chaïm Soutine – Céret 1919–1922 (Céret: Musée d’art moderne de Céret, 2000) David Garfinkiel, preface by Nadine Nieszawer, École de Paris (Paris: Eska Editions, 2006) Ernst-Gerhard Güse, ed., Chaïm Soutine (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1981) Christopher Green, Art in France 1900–1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) Lydia Harambourg, L’École de Paris 1945-1965. Dictionnaire des peintres (Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 1993; Mise à jour, 2010) Avram Kampf, ed., Chagall to Kitaj: Jewish Experience in 20th Century Art (London: Lund Humphries/Barbican Art Gallery, 1990) Ariel Kyrou et al., Kikoïne, Les Pionniers de l’École de Paris (Thonon-lesBains: Fondation Kikoïne/ Éditions de l’Albaron, 1992) David Mazower, ‘Lazar Berson and the Origins of the Ben Uri Art Society’,The Ben Uri Story from Art Society to Museum and the influence of Anglo-Jewish Artists on the Modern British Movement (London: Ben Uri Gallery, 2001) Henri Meschonnic, Michonze, 1902–1982 (Troyes: Musée d’Art moderne, 1985) Nadine Nieszawer, Marie Boyé and Paul Fogel, Peintres juifs à Paris: 1905–1939 École de Paris, (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2000) Nadine Nieszawer, Modigliani Soutine et leurs amis de Montparnasse (Paris: Vince Editions, 2003) Alexander Schouvoff, Léon Bakst ( Paris: Éditions Scala, 1991) Suzanne Pagé et al., L’École de Paris 1904–1929: la part de l’Autre (Paris: Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2000) Marc Restellini, ed., Soutine (Paris: Pinacothèque, 2008) David Sylvester et al., Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1963) Maurice Tuchman, ed., Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943) (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968) Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, eds., The Impact of Chaïm Soutine (1893–1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon (Cologne: Hatje Cantz Publishers/ Galerie Gmurzynska, 2002) Kenneth Silver et. al., The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris (1905–1945) (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1985) Eliane Strosberg, ed., Human Expressionism: The Human Figure and the Jewish Experience (Pointoise: Musée Tavet-Delacour, 2008) Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, eds., Soutine / Bacon (New York: Helly Nahmad Gallery, 2011) Jeanine Warnod, ed., L’École de Paris (Paris: Arcadia Éditions, musée du Montparnasse, 2004)

Solo Exhibitions 1927 Galerie Bing, Paris 1935 Chicago Arts Club 1936 Valentine Gallery, New York Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan Gallery, New York 1937 Mrs Cornelius J. Sullivan Gallery, New York Leicester Galleries, London 1938 Redfern Gallery, London 1939 Valentine Gallery, New York 1940 Carol Carstairs Gallery, New York

Posthumous 1945 Galerie de France, Paris 1947 Gimpel Fils, London 1950-51 Soutine, Museum of Modern Art, Cleveland and Museum of Art, New York 1963 Chaïm Soutine 1893-1943, Tate Gallery, London 1968 Chaïm Soutine 1893-1943, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles Soutine, Israel Museum, Jerusalem 1973 Soutine, Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris 1981-82 Chaïm Soutine 1893-1943, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte and Kunsthalle Tübingen, Münster; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunstmuseum Luzern 1992-93 Chaïm Soutine Centenary Exhibition, Odakyu Museum and Nara Sogo Museum, Tokyo; Kasama Nichido Museum, Ibaraki; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Hokkaido 1995 Chaïm Soutine, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano

Selected Group Exhibitions 1921 Quarante-sept artistes exposant au Café du Parnasse, Café du Parnasse, Paris 1923 Peintres Russes, Paul Guillaume, Paris 1927 Paul Guillaume, Paris 1945 Chagall and Soutine, Institute of Modern Art, Boston 1946-47 Modigliani, Rouault, Utrillo, Soutine, Galerie Bing, Paris 1985 The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris (19051945), Jewish Museum, New York 1988 La Grande Adventure de Montparnasse, Musées Japonais 2012 Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries: from Russia to Paris Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art Works by Soutine in UK Collections Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art: 1 oil painting, La Soubrette (Waiting Maid), c. 1933 Tate: 3 oil paintings: Landscape at Céret (Paysage à Céret), 1920-21; Cagnes Landscape with Tree (Paysage de Cagnes), 1925-26; The Road up the Hill (La Route de la Colline), c. 1924 The Courtauld Gallery, London: 1 oil painting, Young Woman in a White Blouse, c. 1923 The National Galleries of Scotland: 1 oil painting: Le Mas Passe-Temps, Céret, 1920-21

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Short history

Mission and vision Art, Identity, Migration The museum was founded on the 1st July 1915 by the Russian émigré artist Lazar Berson at Gradel’s Restaurant, Whitechapel in the East End of London as ‘The Jewish National Decorative Art Association (London), “Ben Ouri”’. The name echoed that of legendary biblical craftsman Bezalel Ben Uri, the creator of the tabernacle in the Temple of Jerusalem. It also reflects a kinship with the ideals of the famous Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts founded in Jerusalem nine years earlier in 1906. Ben Uri is Europe’s only Jewish Museum of Art working in the centre of the mainstream and regularly in partnership with art galleries and museums in the UK and internationally. Ben Uri presents itself to its public as ‘The Art Museum for Everyone’ focussing on Art, Identity and Migration and engaging audiences from every community from home and abroad. The gallery and museum is dedicated to enhancing the quality of life of all whom it impacts. It embraces a new broad and fully inclusive role for museums in today’s society and addresses contemporary issues through art and social history. By fostering easy access, greater appreciation and both social and academic enjoyment of the visual arts, there is an ongoing opportunity to demonstrate its value as a robust and unique bridge between the cultural, religious, political differences and beliefs of our fellow citizens. Its purpose is to enable the largest possible audience, drawn from the widest possible communities from home and abroad, to explore for inspiration, learning and enjoyment, the work, lives and contribution of British and European artists of Jewish descent, placed where relevant alongside their non-Jewish contemporaries. Key and distinctive is the juxtapositions are within the artistic and social rather than religious context of the national heritage. All initiatives for school children including visits and activities at the museum along with our expanding and nationally available Web based learning modules are free of charge so there are no obstacles to positive engagement with younger audiences. Its principal route to achieving this is by enabling broad and easy physical and virtual access through location, publication, Internet and outreach to the following: THE PERMANENT COLLECTION: Comprising close to 1,300 works the collection is dominated by the work of first and second generation émigré artists supported by a growing emergence of young distinctive contemporary artists who will be a principal attraction in the generations to come. The largest collection of its kind in the world, it can be accessed physically or virtually via continued exhibition, research, conservation and acquisition.

TEMPORARY EXHIBITIONS: Curating, touring and hosting important internationally focused exhibitions of the widest artistic appeal which, without the museum’s focus, would not be seen in the UK or abroad. PUBLICATIONS : Commissioning new academic research on artists and their historical context to enhance the museum’s exhibitions and visitor experience and scholarly research in general. LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE : A resource dating from the turn of the 20th century, documenting and tracing in parallel the artistic and social development of Ben Uri and Jewish artists working or exhibiting in Britain as part of the evolving British historical landscape. EDUCATION & COMMUNITY LEARNING : For adults and students through symposia, lectures, curatorial tours, publications, library research; SCHOOLS : Ben Uri’s nationally available ‘Art in the Open’ programme through the ‘National Education Network’ and The London Grid for Learning’ is available on demand through to c25,000 schools across the United Kingdom, focus related visits, after school art club, family art days and competitions. Children always free at Ben Uri! ARTISTS : Regular artists’ peer group programmes, Ben Uri International Jewish Artists of the Year Awards competition, Second skills opportunities, Guidance and affiliation benefits. CARE IN THE COMMUNITY : A pioneering project, ‘Art and Wellbeing’ addresses the needs of the elderly, including those with dementia, led by practising artists. The initiative is soon to be expanded to assist in care programmes for the young who have behaviour and or addiction problems. WEBSITE : Provide an online educational and access tool, to function as a virtual gallery and artists’ reference resource for the general public, students, artists, collectors and scholars. The strength of the museum’s growing collection and the active engagement with our public – nationally and internationally – reinforces the need for Ben Uri to have a permanent museum and gallery in the heart of Central London alongside this country’s great national institutions. Only then will the museum fulfil its potential and impact the largest audiences from the widest communities from home and abroad.

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Patrons Annely Juda Fine Art Clare Amsel Gretha Arwas Pauline and Daniel Auerbach Esther and Simon Bentley Blick Rothenberg Miriam and Richard Borchard Brandler Galleries, Brentwood Barry Cann Marion and David Cohen Sheila and Dennis Cohen Charitable Trust Nikki and Mel Corin Suzanne and Henry Davis Rachel and Mike Dickson Peter Dineley Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Marion and Manfred Durst The Fidelio Charitable Trust H. W. Fisher and Company Wendy Fisher The Foyle Foundation Patsy and David Franks Franklin family Barbara and David Glass Sue and David Glasser Lindy and Geoffrey Goldkorn Goldmark Gallery, Rutland Madelaine and Craig Gottlieb Averil and Irving Grose Tresnia and Gideon Harbour Mym and Lawrence Harding Peter Held Morven and Michael Heller Joan Hurst Manya Igel Fine Arts Beverley and Tony Jackson Jacob Mendelson Scholarship Trust Jewish Memorial Council Sandra and John Joseph Neil Kitchener QC Tamar Kollek Hannah and David Latchman Agnes and Edward Lee

William and Judith Margulies Lady Hannah and Lord Parry Mitchell Robin and Edward Milstein Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco Hanno D Mott Diana and Allan Morgenthau MutualArt.com Olesia & Leonid Nevzlin Susan and Leo Noé Opera Gallery, London Osborne Samuel Gallery, London Susan and Martin Paisner Shoshana and Benjamin Perl Lélia Pissarro and David Stern Ingrid and Mike Posen Simon Posen Janis and Barry Prince Reed Smith LLP Ashley Rogoff Anthony Rosenfelder Shoresh Charitable Trust Ann Susman Jonathan Symons Esther and Romie Tager Myra Waiman Judit and George Weisz Cathy Wills Alma and Leslie Wolfson Sylvie and Saul Woodrow Matt Yeoman

International Advisory Board UK Prof. Brian Allen, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Dr Shulamith Behr, Courtauld Institute of Art Sir Anthony Caro, Sculptor Gill Hedley, Curator Prof. Griselda Pollock, University of Leeds Dr. Andrew Renton, Gallerist Sir Norman Rosenthal, Curator Sir Nicholas Serota Dr. Evelyn Silber, Glasgow University EUROPE Joel Cahen, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam Laurent Héricher, Jewish Museum Paris Dr. Leo Pavlat, Jewish Museum, Prague Dr Danielle Spera, Jewish Museum Vienna Edward van Voolen, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam NORTH AMERICA Prof. Bruce Boucher, University of Virginia Art Museum Tom L. Freudenheim, Curator and Writer Prof. Sander Gilman, Emory University Atlanta Derek Gillman, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Professor Jack Lohman, Royal BC Museum, Canada Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Jewish Museum, New York Daniel Libeskind, Architect ISRAEL Prof. Ziva Amishai-Maisels, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Shlomit Steinberg, Israel Museum Soutine and his contemporaries 45

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École de Paris timeline Date

Historical events

1863

Creation of the Salon des Refusés1

École de Paris artists

1866

Léon Bakst born in Grodno, Russian Empire (now Hrodna, Belarus)

1870 –71

Franco-Prussian War

1871

Paris Commune

1881

Tzar Alexander II, who gave Jews relative cultural and administrative freedom, murdered. Followed by the Anti-Semitic Nicholas II. Jews in Russia were the victims of three large-scale waves of pogroms2 between 1881 and 1921. As a result, millions of Jews emigrated to France and America.

1881 –1921

1882

Lazar Berson born in Skopichky, Russia Elie Nadelman born in Warsaw, Russian Empire (Poland)

1883

Henri Hayden born in Warsaw, Russian Empire (Poland)

1885

Sonia Delaunay born in Gradhizhsk, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

1887

Marc Chagall born in Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus)

1891

Isaac Dobrinsky born in Makarov, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) Henri Epstein born in Łódź, Russian Empire (now Poland) Jacques Lipchitz born in Druskininkai, Russian Empire (now Lithuania) Isaac Lichtenstein born in Plonsk, Russian Empire (now Poland)

1892

Michel Kikoïne born in Gomel, Russian Empire (now Belarus)

1893

Soutine

Establishment of laws against anarchism in France

Chaïm Soutine born in Smilovichy, near Minsk, Russian Empire (now Lithuania).

1894

Emmanuel Mané-Katz born in Kremenchug, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

1895

Jankel Adler born in Tuszyn, near Łódź, Russian Empire (now Poland)

1896

Ossip Lubitch born in Grodno, Russian Empire (now Hrodna, Belarus) Zygmund Schreter born in Łódź, Russian Empire (now Poland)

1897

Issachar Ber Ryback born in Yelisavetgrad, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

1898

Zygmund Landau born in Łódź, Russian Empire (now Poland) Abraham Mintchine born in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

1899

Maurice Blond born in Łódź, Russian Empire (now Poland) Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel born in Odessa, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)

1902

Grégoire Michonze born in Kishinev, Russian Empire (now Chișinău, Moldova)

1904

Elie Nadelman moves to Paris until 1914 3

1905

Bloody Sunday, St Petersburg, Russia Separation of Church and State in France.

1906

Alfred Dreyfus reinstated.4 Kichinev Massacre, anti-Jewish riot takes place in present-day Chișinău (Moldova)

Sonia Delaunay moves to Paris At 13 years old, Soutine secretly draws the portrait of the head rabbi of his township, thereby breaking the ban on drawing the human face. Thrashed by the rabbi’s son, he spends a fortnight at the hospital and his family gets 25 roubles of damages from the local court of justice. With this money, Chaïm decides to leave the shtetl.5

1907

Chana Kowalska born in Włocławek, Russian Empire (now Poland) Henri Hayden moves to Paris

1909

Jacques Lipchitz moves to Paris

1910

Léon Bakst moves to Paris Marc Chagall moves to Paris

Soutine enrols in a painting course in Minsk where he meets Kikoïne.

With Kikoïne, Soutine goes to Vilna. He is admitted to a three-year course at the School of Fine Arts, and meets Krémègne

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Date

Historical events

1911

Café de la Rotonde opens in Montparnasse It becomes a renowned meeting place for artists including Picasso and Modigliani.

École de Paris artists

1912

Isaac Dobrinsky moves to Paris Michel Kikoïne moves to Paris Marc Chagall paints The Violinist

1913

Henri Epstein moves to Paris

1914

Assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, the First World War begins

Soutine

Chaïm Soutine arrives in Paris and moves to La Ruche (The Beehive), a ramshackle building in Montparnasse filled with artists’ studios. The artist lives in poverty in his first years in Paris. Chaïm Soutine is exempted from military service due to ill health

1915

Lipchitz introduces Soutine to Amedeo Modigliani, thus beginning a close friendship

1916

The Battle of Verdun

1917

USA enters the First World War Bolsheviks seize power in the October Revolution in Russia The Balfour Declaration7

1918

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Armistice signed, ending the First World War

1919

Formation of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) Formation of the Fascist Party in Italy by Benito Mussolini Trotsky takes charge of the Red Army in Soviet Russia Treaty of Versailles signed Einstein proposes his general theory of relativity

1920

League of Nations founded French Communist Party (PCF) founded

1921

Modigliani paints Portrait of Soutine, and introduces Soutine to Léopold Zborowski, who becomes his dealer.6

Soutine signs an exclusive contract with Zborowski.

Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel moves to Paris Zygmund Landau moves to Paris

Death of Modigliani has major impact on Soutine, whose state of health deteriorates.

Emmanuel Mané-Katz moves to Paris

1922

USSR formed Mussolini gains power in Italy though the ‘March on Rome’

Grégoire Michonze moves to Paris

The American collector Albert C. Barnes buys many of Soutine’s works in December 1922, raising his profile and giving him financial stability for the first time

1923

Hitler makes a failed attempt to seize power in the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ in Munich Hitler is imprisoned and writes Mein Kampf

Ossip Lubitch moves to Paris

Albert C. Barnes purchases further works by Soutine, Modigliani, Utrillo, Kisling and Derain

1924

Death of Lenin

Léon Bakst dies in Paris Maurice Blond moves to Paris

Soutine rents an apartment and a studio where he paints his beef carcasses, numerous still lives of poultry and portraits of domestics and other house staff

1925 1926

First surrealist exhibition held at the Galerie Pierre in Paris Fascist regime in Italy

Abraham Mintchine moves to Paris Issachar Ber Ryback moves to Paris

1927

1929

Soutine’s first solo exhibition takes place in June 1927 at the Galerie Bing. Soutine enters into a disagreement with Zborowski over money issues. From this point, he is supported by Madeleine and Marcelin Castaing Wall Street Crash signals the beginning of the worldwide Great Depression

1931

Abraham Mintchine dies in La Garde, France

1933

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany USA commences “New Deal” policy

1934

Zygmund Schreter moves to Paris

1935

Anti-Semitic laws enacted in Germany

Jankel Adler visits Paris for the first time

Issachar Ber Ryback dies in Paris

Soutine holds his first major solo exhibition in the USA

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Date

Historical events

École de Paris artists

1936

Popular Front takes power in France Beginning of the Spanish Civil War

1937

Nazi exhibition of ‘degenerate’ art held in Munich8

1939

Hitler invades Poland, beginning the Second World War Nazi-Soviet Pact

1940

Germany invades Belgium and Holland, Nazi armies penetrate French borders Marshal Pétain appointed Premier of France Armistice between France and Germany splits France in two Charles de Gaulle makes the Appeal of 18 June, marking the beginning of the French Resistance

Many artists and writers leave France

1941

Attack on Pearl Harbour brings USA into Second World War Introduction of Anti-Semitic measures in France

Chana Kowalska dies following arrest by Gestapo

1942

Nazis make decision to carry out ‘Final Solution’ Jews are forced to wear a yellow star Germany occupies the zone “libre”

1943

German forces capitulate at Battle of Stalingrad Introduction of Obligatory Work Service (STO) in France

1944

Normandy landings Liberation of Paris Charles de Gaulle becomes provisional Prime Minister of France

Soutine

Jankel Adler returns to Paris

Soutine and Marie-Berthe Aurenche, ex-wife of Max Ernst, settle at Champigny-sur-Veude

Soutine dies on 9 August, 1943 in Paris

Henri Epstein dies at Auschwitz

1946

Elie Nadelman dies in New York

1949

Jankel Adler dies in Aldbourne, England

1954

Lazar Berson dies in Nice, France

1962

Zygmund Landau dies in Tel Aviv, Israel Emmanuel Mané-Katz dies in Haifa, Israel

1968

Michel Kikoïne dies in Paris

1970

Henri Hayden dies in Paris

1973

Isaac Dobrinsky dies in Paris Jacques Lipchitz dies in Capri, Italy

1974

Maurice Blond dies in Clamart, France

1977

Zygmund Schreter dies in Paris

1979

Sonia Delaunay dies in Paris

1981

Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel dies in Tel Aviv, Israel Isaac Lichtenstein dies

1982

Grégoire Michonze dies in Paris

1985

Marc Chagall dies in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France

1990

Ossip Lubitch dies in Paris

Footnotes

1 The Salon des Refusés was set up when the number of artists being excluded from the official Salon became so great that the government was forced to set up an alternative, to accommodate the refused artists. 2 The anti-Jewish riots, or “pogroms” of late 19th-century Russia had demographic implications for western countries – around 80% of today’s western Diaspora Jews are descendants of those Jews who left Russia and its environs during the period 1880–1910. 3 Bloody Sunday was a massacre on 22nd January 1905 in which peaceful demonstrating workers marching to present a petition to Tsar Alexander II at the Winter Palace were shot down by the Imperial Guard. It created widespread distrust of the Tsarist Regime and is considered one of the major contributing factors to the 1917 Revolution. 4 Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an innocent Jewish Officer in the French Army, was convicted on false evidence for a crime of high treason. He was stripped of his rank, publicly degraded and deported to the penal colony

of Devil’s Island to serve a sentence of life imprisonment. The fight to prove his innocence lasted 12 years (1894-1906). The affair had worldwide repercussions, unleashed racial violence and led to the publication of a call for justice ‘J’accuse’ addressed to the President of France by Emile Zola. 5 In Yiddish, ‘shtetl’ means small Jewish town, found throughout Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. 6 Zborowski pays for Soutine’s trips in the South of France: Céret, Cagnes and Vence, where he stays until 1922. It is in Céret, in 1920, that he learns of the death of Modigliani. 7 The Balfour Declaration was a letter sent from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild, a leader of the Jewish community in Britain, regarding the establishment of a home for Jews in Palestine: ‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being

clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’ 8 The years 1927–37 were critical for artists in Germany. In 1927, the National Socialist Society for German Culture was formed. The aim of this organization was to halt the “corruption of art” and inform the people about the relationship between race and art. By 1933, the terms “Jewish,” “Degenerate,” and “Bolshevik” were in common use to describe almost all modern art. In 1937 the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition opened in Munich and then travelled to 11 other cities in Germany and Austria. In each installation, the works were poorly hung and surrounded by graffiti and hand written labels mocking the artists and their creations.

48 Soutine and his contemporaries 2259_Uri_cat_Soutine_Sep12.indb 48

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Chaïm Soutine

and his contemporaries from Russia to Paris

art identity migration 2259_Uri_cat_Soutine_Sep12_COVERS_other.indd 4

Chaïm Soutine Jankel Adler Léon Bakst Lazar Berson Maurice Blond Marc Chagall Sonia Delaunay Isaac Dobrinksy Henri Epstein Yitshak Frenkel-Frenel Henri Hayden Michel Kikoïne Chana Kowalska Zygmund Landau Isaac Lichtenstein Jacques Lipchitz Ossip Lubitch Emmanuel Mané-Katz Grégoire Michonze Abraham Mintchine Elie Nadelman Issachar Ber Ryback Zygmund Schreter Frank Auerbach Leon Kossoff 26/09/2012 15:12