This book includes important work by Adler, Auerbach, Bakst, Berson, Chagall, Delaunay, Epstein, Hayden, Lipchitz, Mané-Katz, Nadelman, and Soutine.
To celebrate the museum’s acquisition of Soutine’s La Soubrette, c. 1933, the exhibition, from Russia to Paris: Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries, 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. 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, living and working together in the collection of studios known as La Ruche (‘the Beehive’).
