Artists from Belarus: The School of Paris

Ul. Symaniec, BINIM



Marc Chagall - Mariés au Village (Paris, 1950)


Introduction
    There is no single definition of the term Ecole de Paris, or School of Paris. It has varied with years in accordance with the writers who used it. Everybody seems to agree, however, that in the first decades of the 20th century, the name was used to describe a group of young adepts of modern art, of various styles and beliefs, who came from all over the world to live and work in Paris. A number of historians of art go further and limit the group to a score of renowned figures such as Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, Jacques Lipchitz, Modigliani, all foreigners, all Jews, and all born between 1880 and 1900. But what strikes us as Belarusians  is the great number of members of the School of Paris who came from Belarus.
 
    In his book dedicated to Soutine, French author Raymond Cogniat attributes the revolution which took place in the arts at the turn of the century to the technological and social changes of the time. While at the end of the 19th century, fine arts were still the prerogative of the middle class, at the beginning of the 20th century we see more and more painters originating from the working class. Cogniat wonders whether Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, or Futurism would have been possible without the input of all those newcomers for whom the building of a new society was much more meaningful than good taste which characterized their predecessors.
 
    Soutine remained unaffected by the new ideas. But while the French painters of the time like Matisse, Derain, and Leger respect a certain order and are aware of artist convention even at the peak of their rebellion, Soutine makes no effort to control his dramatic spontaneity and his improvisations. Obviously, the elements which make up his art not the same as those, which dictate the creative activities of the French painters. According to Cogniat, the reasons for these differences are to be found in the events which took place in central Europe at that time, and  more specifically, those events which affected the creative activity of the Jewish artists. Because many writers reject the very idea of a Jewish element in art, this issue has never been given the attention it deserves. And indeed, there was no Jewish art in the 19th century. The religious taboos to which Jews were subjected did not allow them to participate in the creative trends of the century. With the 19th century, however, things began to change. The input of the many Jews artists who came to Paris from Central Europe and the Russian Empire (the Empire proper as opposed to Russia) at the beginning of the century is of a very special nature. They brought with them all pathos and hopelessness of their people. Unwilling to adjust to the prevailing rules, they expressed their feelings on their canvasses by the boldness of their strokes and colors. Cogniat considers this a manifestation of the freedom they were experiencing for the first time after having been unable for so long to express themselves in their respective countries, either because of hostile regimes or because of the constraints of their own ghetto milieux.
 
    A question many writers have asked themselves over and over again is: Why did the artists from Central Europe choose Paris? Once there, few of them studied art at the numerous art schools of the French capital, and they did not even endorse existing trends. Their only concern seemed to be to put to good use whatever they had brought with them from the old country. So why did they come?
 
    In the case of the Jews of the Russian Empire the question should rather be: Why did they leave?
 
    It seems that economic reasons very important, but these were perhaps not quite the ones we tend to imagine. Those who left did so not because they were extremely poor but because they were relatively well off. However, as of June 23, 1874, Jews were prohibited from moving into the Russian gubernias and the big cities of the Empire. Thus, Jewish artists could simply not obtain a higher education in the arts since all the art schools were in the big cities.
 

The Art Schools of Belarus
    In Belarus there were only three secondary schools of art. The Vilnia School of Drawing was founded in 1886, its aim being to prepare commercial artists for industry. Some of its most famous students were Kikoine, Mane-Katz and Soutine. The Mensk School of Drawing was founded in 1904 by Jankel Kruger. Soutine and Kikoine also studied there. In Vitsebsk, the painter Pen taught art in the school he opened in his studio in 1892. One of his most famous students was Marc Chagall. These are the three of art which, during the relatively prosperous pre-war period, attracted all the potential artists of the country. But while the more wealthy Christian graduates of the schools could complete their studies in the art schools of the larger cities of the Empire (Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev), Jews either to face racial discrimination in Russia or to emigrate to the west. Thus, a great number chose Paris, where they found freedom of expression and fame.
 

Paris
    Once in Paris, they joined one of the two groups of artists then existing in the French capital: the Monmartre group, with their head office, so to speak, in an old hotel called Bateau Lavoir, and the Montparnasse group around La Ruche. Each of the groups had its own critics and trendsetters. The world -famous poet and writer Guillaume Appollinaire was the trendsetter of the Montmartre group. (He was, by the way, of Belarusian descent and belonged to the same old family, the Kastravitzkys, as the Belarusian poet Karus Kahaniec). He played a prominent role in the cultural life of the French capital and named several of the new artists trends which developed there. The terms Surrealism and Orphism, for example, are two of his creations. 
 
    A central figure of the Montparnasse group is the Polish art dealer L. Zborowski. Besides finding a market for group, he sent several of its members, among them Chaim Soutine, to the south of France in search of inspiration and helped them to achieve recognition.
 
    The life of the newcomers in Paris was not an easy one. Marc Chagall recalls that all the canvasses in his studio were made out of his tablecloths, his bedlinen, and even his shirts. These artists took all kinds of jobs in order to survive. Although they had come to Paris because of the role the French capital played in the world of art, when they joined an art school, they did not stay there for more than two or three months. The art schools of Paris were, they realized, as conservative and academic as the ones they had known at home. They preferred to choose their own masters at the Louvre. Each of them can, in fact, be considered a school himself, a school, however, whose roots in each case can be traced to their common origin.
 
    Seven of the great names of the School of Paris were associated with Belarus.
 

Marc Chagall
    Marc Chagall is, with Pablo Picasso, the best known of the members of the School of Paris. Born on July 7, 1887, in a suburb of Vitsebsk called Piashchanik, Marc was the son of a small grocery-store owner. The religious spirit which prevailed in his family and his love for the city of Vitsebsk are the two constant elements of his art. After studying with Pen, whose teaching he did not like, and after trying the Imperial School of Art in St. Petersburg, where his art was not appreciated, Chagall entered a private school and was offered a scholarship to go to Paris. There he spent four years before returned to Vitsebsk and marrying his childhood sweetheart, Bela Rosenfeld. Together with his wife, he traveled throughout the Vitsebsk area painting. After the Revolution, he became People's Commisar for Culture in Vitsebsk, and Pen's art school was turned into a public College of Arts and he became its first director. A conflict with the other revolutionaries of art such as Kazimir Malevich, however, led him to discover the true face of the Revolution. In 1923, he decided to leave the country.
 
    We do not intend to speak to Chagall's successful career outside Belarus. We all know his world-famous paintings, tapestries, and murals which decorate the Paris Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Parliament Buildings of Israel, the walls of his own museum in Nice, France, and a number of other public buildings all over the world. 
 
    It should be stressed, however, that unlike many of his coreligionists, Chagall never forgot his homeland and his home town of Vitsebsk. In recent interviews, he clearly states that Belarus is the country he comes from and that Vitsebsk is as dear to his heart as Paris.
 
    Moreover, all his work bears witness to this.
 

Chaim Soutine
    Chaim Soutine, the next member of the School of Paris from Belarus, is regarded by some critics as an artist of the caliber of Goya and Rembrandt.
 
    Chaim Soutine was born in 1894 in the small township of Smilavichy, 20 miles east of Mensk, the tenth son of a tailor. To the dismay of his parents and the neighborhood, he soon showed a disturbing inclination towards  painting. Finding the local rabbi's face most interesting, he asked permission to paint his portrait. This was considered a deep insult by the sons of the rabbi, who beat the young boy to the point that he had to be taken to the hospital. But all's well that end's well: in order to avoid a court action, the rabbi gave the boy the substantial amount of 25 rubles, which allowed him to leave Smilavichy and register at Jankel Kruger's School of Drawing in Mensk. There he met another young enthusiast of the arts, Michel Kikoine, and they both went to Vilnia to study at the School of Drawing and Commercial Art of that city. In order to survive, Chaim worked at a photographer's until a physician discovered his talent and sent him to Paris.
 
    In Paris, Chaim Soutine met, among others, Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, Jacque Lipschitz, and Guillame Apollinaire. He entered l'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, which in itself indicates the high quality of the training he received in Mensk and Vilnia. He read poets and philosophers, and admired the works of Rembrandt, Courbet, Bonnard, Ensor, and some of the German Expressionists. In 1919, Zborowski, the art dealer, paid for his trip to Ceret, in Southern France, where Soutine spent three years and painted two hundred paintings. From then on, he became more and more famous until his death in 1941.
 
    Chaim Soutine was a painter almost by ''divine right''. Authenticity was his main characteristic. Unaffected by the new fashions and trends in the arts, he deliberately ignored every rule and technique of painting. Instead, he poured his whole self onto the canvas. And in this sincerity and in the integrity of his art - he would buy his own paintings to destroy them whenever he thought they were not true to him - we recognize the ''young Belarus'', whom Michel Rahon speaks about in his article dedicated to Soutine in Jardin des Arts, No. 164-165.
 

Michel Kikoine
    While speaking of Soutine, we have mentioned the name of another member of the School of Paris from Belarus, Michel Kikoine. Born in Rechytsa, near Homel, in 1892, Kikoine was 15th years old when he first met Soutine at Kruger's School of Drawing in Mensk. One year later, they were both studying art in Vilnia, and in 1911, we find Kikoine in Paris. There, he too was admitted to l'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux--Arts and moved into La Ruche, where he met the other members of the School of Paris. In 1914, he married Rosa Bunimovich, a girl from Vilnia. They had two children, one of whom, Jankel Jacques, became a painter in his own right and still lives and works in Paris.
 
    In spite of the similarity of the paths they followed in life, Kikoine was as calm and balanced as Soutine was violent spontaneous. After his first exhibition in Paris in 1919, Kikoine exhibited regularly at the Salon d'automne and spent every summer painting in his summer residence in Central France. This middle-class mentality is noticeable even in his paintings: although his strokes are as bold as Soutine's, his composition is more elaborate, and his colors more subdued and more subtle.
 
    In October 1973, a retrospective of Kikoine's works, including 94 paintings, was organized in Paris in the ''Galerie de Paris''. It so happened that is was inaugurated less than three weeks after an exhibition of works by Soutine at the same Parisian gallery. Thus, five years after the death of Kikoine and 32 after Soutine's, the paths of the two friends once again came very close to crossing.
 

Pinchus Kremegne
    Pinchus Kremegne, a native of Zhaludak near Lida, was a friend of both Soutine and Kikoine. After studying sculpture at the Vilnia School of Drawing, he left for Paris in 1912. In Paris, Kremegne joined the group of painters of Montparnasse and soon became one of the respected residents of La Ruche. In 1915, he gave up sculpture in order to dedicate himself to painting.
 
    Pinchus Kremegne is today one of the great names of contemporary painting. As a human being, however, he has lost none of the modesty and gentles he brought with him from Belarus in 1912, traits which we can certainly consider part of his Belarus heritage.
 

Simon Segal
    Simon Segal, born in Bielastok in 1898, left Belarus in 1918 as an engineer and became a famous painter after arriving in France in 1925. His first one-man exhibition, in  1935, was a tremendous success. Shortly after, however, he entirely revised his style. He achieved his full potential in the early 59th.
 

Sculptors Ossip Zadkine & Jacque Lipschitz
    While speaking of the members of the School of Paris who were born in Belarus, we cannot omit the illustrious sculptors Ossip Zadkine, from Smalensk, and Jacque Lipschitz, from Druzhieninki. They both arrived in Paris in  1909, and had the honor of being the first artists to adapt Cubism to sculpture. We all know of Lipschitz, since he has spent many years of his life in the US and has been widely publicized. As for Zadkine, who, in the School of Paris, distinguished himself by the human and poetic dimensions of his art, he is today considered the greatest sculptor Central and Eastern Europe ever produced. In his autobiography Le Maillet et le ciseau, published in Paris in 1968, he affectionately and nostalgically narrates his childhood in Smalensk and Vitsebsk.
 

Conclusion
    These considerations and facts enable us to say that is was Belarus that produced Chagall, Kremegne, Soutine, Kikoine, Segal, Zadkine, and Lipchitz, who were the founding members of the School of Paris and who made such an essential contribution to the world treasury of art. They were born, brought up, and even trained in Belarus. This training was not given to them in famous art schools, of course, because the Belarus people were then experiencing one of the darkest periods of national destination in their history and were deprived of any kind of higher educational institutions. Belarus did, however, give them everything she was able to offer under these conditions.
 
    If any nations can lay claim to them, these nations are Belarus and France. From Belarus they brought with them the substance of their art. And France gave them the environment which enabled them to achieve fame and recognition. The assertion by some writers that these artists are Russian has no foundation whatsoever.


Zapisy, BINIM, No. 17, 1983. 


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