Patrick Bade
Jewish Artists at The Ecole de Paris, Part 2

Patrick Bade | Jewish Artists at The Ecole de Paris, Part 2 | 06.26.22

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- So, as you can see, we’re back in Paris, in between the wars. This view I showed you last week is of the Right Bank just to be more precise. We’re going to be concentrating on the Left Bank, the 14th Arrondissement, Montparnasse. And between the wars, it was the most extraordinarily cosmopolitan community. It was multiethnic, multilingual, would’ve heard such a variety of languages sitting in any cafe in Montparnasse. And it was such a hotbed of creativity, this incredible concentration of artists. Now, it’s a, Wendy and I have just been bemoaning the state of the world. And one of the things that really scares me in France and in Britain, and I don’t know so much about the states, is this anti-immigration movement, which is so exploited by cynical politicians who really want to play to the gallery. I don’t, in my circle of friends, I don’t very often come across people who say that kind of thing. But I, you know, casual meeting, I do. And I always say to them, “Well, just think of Montparnasse. Just think of the École de Paris. It was the immigrants who brought glory to France, who brought glory to Paris, who made it the artistic centre of the world.”

And just get bit tub-thumping here. I mean, any, if you, any country that turns in on itself, that rejects immigration is making a terrible mistake, you, it’s a country that’s going to go into economic and artistic decline. Immigration has always been the lifeblood of economies and cultures. And the École de Paris is a spectacular example of that. I’m concentrating today very, very largely on, ‘cause this was conceived of part of our Russian series. So I am putting emphasis on artists who were born in the former Russian Empire from Russia itself, from Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and so on. My first artist I’m going to talk about is, in some ways an exception. This is Max Jacob, because although he came from an Ashkenazi background, he was actually born in France. He’s one of the few key figures of the École de Paris who was born in France, Quimper in Brittany. He’s also a slight exception in that he, throughout most of this period, he actually remained in Montmartre, but he certainly spent a lot of time schmoozing in the cafes of Montparnasse. So he went from the top north end of Paris over the river to South Paris. You can do that very easily today. I do it all the time actually on a number 38 bus. That’s a wonderful route to take, there’s a bed in the tourist bus actually. And he, as I said, he schmoozed in his cafes. He was best friends with everybody you can think of. He was obviously a very lovable man. He was Picasso’s first great friend, first great French friend when Picasso arrived in 1901.

For a while, in 1902, the two of them were in extreme poverty. They’re actually sharing a tiny room with one bed and they had to alternate sleeping in the bed. A couple of years later when Picasso moved up to Montmartre Le Bateau-Lavoir, Max Jacob followed him. So in these two photographs, you can see Max Jacob seated, reading a little book with Modigliani standing behind him. And on the right, you see him behind Picasso. Picasso was remained a lifelong friend. So as I said, he came from a Jewish background. I don’t think his upbringing was particularly religious. And in 1909, he went to a kind of religious mystical crisis, and he converted to a very ardent form of Catholicism. It’s a mystery to me. I can’t quite understand why someone from a Jewish background and a man who was homosexual would want to embrace the Catholic faith. And the question arises, was there some element of self-hatred? Was very wary at that term, which I think he’s often abused when discussing Jews, but maybe there could have been an element of that with him. As I said, he was a very lovable man. Everybody, and he was just, just look at his face, what an interesting face he has. You can see why so many artists in Paris up to 1940 wanted to paint him. Here are two portraits of Max Jacob by Modigliani.

Last week, somebody in the questions that he sent and said, “Why not Modigliani?” Well, Modigliani could, he can be a whole lecture on another occasion in another series. He doesn’t quite belong in this series. As I said, he was of Sephardi Italian background. But one of his first great supporters was Max Jacob. This is a one of many portraits of Jacob that was made by Picasso, this dating to 1908 when they were both living in Le Bateau-Lavoir. So immediately after Picasso had painted the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. A later portrait of Max Jacob on the left in Picasso’s Neoclassical phase, his anger phase, he’s looking back at those exquisite rather tightly linear pencil drawings of anger. So that’s Picasso, Max Jacob on the left. And on the right is a portrait of Picasso by Max Jacob. Now, here on the left, that’s the English artist, Christopher Wood, short-lived artist, committed suicide. That was briefly in Paris and part of the diag entourage. And on the right, rather more conventional portrait of him by Jacques Emile Blanche, who was an artist who knew everybody and painted everybody. So a lot of, so Jacob, Max Jacob earned his living as a visual artist. He’s much more famous, of course, much more important as a philosopher, as a critic, and as a very original and very influential poet.

That didn’t earn him any money. He, money, he scraped a living through doing things. This, I mean, it’s very pleasant, but it could be by anybody really. And you could, it’s, I think watercolour drawings like this by Max Jacob were really for the tourists. And this one too. But he could be more interesting. This is, I love this drawing. It’s in his room with me as I speak. I’m very thrilled to have it. I bought it couple of years ago from the dealer, Hervé Peron, E R O N. If anybody wants drawings by Max Jacob, they’re not expensive. I imagine most of you could afford one quite, quite, quite easily. And this at the Peron Gallery, Hervé Peron Gallery. They usually have some for sale. There is Max Jacob in his studio on the left. This drawing, it’s dated 1904, so at the height of his early friendship with Picasso. And it has something in common, I think with the, all those lowlife pictures that Picasso did in his Blue Period. And it’s just in, I don’t know who the subject is, but it’s inscribed, Belgian actor. And there are other pictures he did. I’m not claiming that this is a great work of art, but it’s a very delightful image of a Brazilian theatre. So he, as I said, he’s a key figure in École de Paris. In the 1930s, he took his religion very, very seriously. And in 1936, he entered a monastery as a lay monk. Of course there were plenty of Jews who converted in the 1930s, thinking falsely, of course, that it might offer them some protection. I don’t think that is the case at all with Jacob. It’s much more, his conversion was something more profound than that. And unfortunately, it didn’t save him.

In 1943, he was living in a monastery and the gestapo came, and they insisted that he should wear a yellow star. And then in February, 1944, he was arrested and he was sent to this terrible place, Drancy. Drancy is a suburb of Paris. In fact, I just went through it in a train on the way from the airport of Charles de Gaulle back into Paris last weekend. One of those, it’s a bit like Dachau in Munich. You know, you look at a local railway map, we see that name, and you can’t help feeling a certain shudder. This was an enormous working class housing estate under, it was still under construction when war begun, it wasn’t finished. And the Germans commandeered it. And they turned it, first of all, into a camp to, well, I think it may even be before the Germans. It arrived that it was used for interns, but under the Germans, it rapidly became a transit camp. And of the 80,000 or so Jews in France who were transported to death camps, the vast bulk of them went through this building. So, it was Hell’s waiting room, they called it. But if you are in Drancy, if you had the right connections, you could be got out. For instance, Collette’s husband who is Jewish, she had, she is very, she had all the right social and cultural connection. She went to everybody.

Usually, the go-to people were Sacha Guitry, and the great film star, Lexy. Of course, because they had an inn with the German occupiers. Every time they did a favour like this, of course they were compromised. And both of them were in very severe trouble at the end of the war. But often their schmoozing with the Nazis had actually a positive motivation. They were trying to help people. And Max Jacob, because he also had friends in high places. And amongst the people, that a petition was got up, various people signed it. Amongst the, Jean Cocteau was very keen to help him. Another person who was somewhat compromised by so-called collaboration, singer, also signed it, the artist, Marie Laurencin, composer Aresoge. So a lot of people who were really wanted to save his life and it’s possible they might have succeeded. Apparently, he was due to go on a train. It was once you were on that train, that was it. Nobody could save you. But he died 30 hours ahead of the train that you, the departure of the train you were supposed to go on. He was in very frail health. And the conditions were absolutely appalling. This is the interior of the camp at Drancy.

Now, it’s just this, the subject of compromise, the subject of collaboration, I know it’s coming to many of my lectures and I’m sure it’s coming to many Judy’s lectures as well. I had little discussion about it recently with somebody who said she didn’t want to hear music conducted by somebody accused of collaboration. But again, I really want to stress how extremely complicated this issue is. I have read quite sharp criticism of Picasso that he didn’t sign the petition to get Max Jacob released, but elsewhere, I’ve also read that Picasso really wanted to help, but he was actually asked not to, 'cause he was considered too controversial, with the Nazis, of course, they hated Picasso, absolutely hated him. And I think friends of Max Jacob thought that if Picasso intervenes, it would be a direct provocation to the Nazis. But he certainly retained an affectionate memory of him. You can see this portrait, it’s a portrait from memory by Picasso of Max Jacob dated 1943, nearly a decade after he died. Now, the next artist I want to talk about is Jules Pascin. He’s born in Bulgaria in 1885 to quite a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. His birth name was Julius Mordecai Pincas. Certainly, his family were not religious. I think his father even converted to Christianity. And it may be that he changed his name partly to distance himself from his Jewish background. He received his, a very international education. He studied art in Vienna, in Budapest, and Berlin, turned up in Munich at the beginning of the 20th century.

Here, he is again on the left and a very characteristic drawing by him, watercolour drawing by him on the right-hand side. So in Munich, he worked for the satirical magazine, Simplicissimus. This is a typical illustration by him for Simplicissimus. Quite a savage, harsh caricatural style. And in fact, he continued, he produced great many of these images for Simplicissimus, even after he left for Paris in 1905. This is a painting of 1907. The title is Turkish Family. So you can see already he, this is a, in its painterly qualities, it’s not a million miles from Soutine, it’s not a million miles from Modigliani. You can see him adapting very well to the École de Paris. He certainly enjoyed the good life, or you could say the bad life, spent a lot of time in Brussels and produced enormous number of erotic, satirical, erotic drawings like this. I personally, not by it particularly erotic, but of life in Brussels, these were very much in demand. They sold very well. And in fact, he was altogether an artist who was in demand and earned very comfortably. He was also in demand as a portraitist. And you can, again, it’s a, you look at this, and it’s very École de Paris, isn’t it? You can see a bit of Matisse in it. It’s got five elements in it. It’s really kind of French expressionism and it’s absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous, still life with fast. So it’s got those typically French painterly, coloristic qualities that we all enjoy so much. And he, I think he’s a wonderful portraitist of children. We get unsentimental touching images of children, nothing icky or sentimental at all. This is his wife, Hermine David.

And he, in fact, he had to leave Paris from 1917 to 18 because he was an enemy alien. He went to America. When he came back 1980, he married this woman, Hermine David, who was also an artist. And I’ll show you her work in a minute. And this is another portrait by Pascin of Hermine David. And this interestingly shows his wife, Hermine David, and his mistress, who is called Lucy Krohg. She was a French woman who was actually the wife of the Norwegian painter, Per Krohg. So he ran these two relationships over a long period of time. Well, of course, you know what Jimmy Goldsmith said. He said that a man should never marry his mistress because he creates a job vacancy. And certainly I think traditionally in France, you know, any man of self-respect thinks he should be able to run a double life with a wife and a mistress. I’m not sure if that’s still the case, but it was the case in the past. Pascin has been called the King of Montparnasse. He was famous for his sociability. Hemingway, in his memoir, A Moveable Feast, there is a chapter with the title, “With Pascin at the Dome.” And he was famous for his generosity. Anybody who walked into the cafe would be invited to a drink or invited to a meal. And he was also famous for his generosity with waiters. He was a big tipper. So tremendously successful. In 1930, he had a sellout, very successful exhibition in Paris. But on the eve of the opening of the exhibition, he committed suicide. He slashed his wrists and he, in his blood across the studio walls, he wrote, “Farewell, Lucy.” His last message was actually to his mistress, not to his wife. And that didn’t finish him off. So he finished himself off by hanging himself.

But the exhibition went ahead and as I said, it was a tremendous success. And his funeral became famous. It was a day when it became impossible to get a drink in a cafe in Montparnasse because all the waiters, you know, they had such an affectionate memory for him and his generosity that they all wanted to attend the funeral and follow the funeral carriage through the streets of Montparnasse. This is his tomb in the cemetery of Montparnasse. That it’s a really amazing place to go. It’s so full of interesting people. Dreyfus is there, for instance, and many artists, and many, many musicians. I showed it to you 'cause last week when I showed you the tomb of Soutine. And previously when I showed you the tomb of Chagall, there were comments about the fact that they had Christian symbols on them. Here you can see, I think very consciously, there are no religious symbols at all. This is, again boastfully, I’m showing you a drawing from my collection. This is by Jules Pascin, at least I’m pretty sure it is. I actually found it at the flea market and it didn’t really cost very much money. But, and I say I’m fairly sure it’s by him and to me, I’ve seen a lot of drawings by him. And it looks right.

He’s a difficult artist to buy because as I said, he was so popular that these kind of drawings were very widely faked in the inter war period. But this drawing has a studio stamp on it, that’s normal in France. Any works on paper that are left in an artist’s studio when he dies will have the studio stamp put on them. But even that is not an absolute guarantee in Pascin’s case of authenticity, because his widow, Hermine David, she had, of course, control of all of this. And apparently, she used the studio stamp to herself, fake drawings by her late husband, which fetched more than her own word. Well, I’m not too bothered about this. I’m not interested in selling it in any case. And I’m also a huge admirer of Hermine David. So if this drawing turns out to be by her instead of by him, that’s okay with me. She was, I would say a typical second rank artist of the École de Paris. But I really, I like her work a lot more than some of the really major figures. She did a lot of Paris views that such typical view here out of a window with the, you know, the core that you find in every building in Paris because the windows go right down to floor level. Another typical Paris view with the Houseman building, this is by Hermine David. And this gorgeous picture, this is just been bought by an alumnus of Lockdown, Ron Bornstein, who I met him a couple of years ago through Lockdown. And we’ve met up several times since in London and Paris and become very good friends. And he’s a very passionate collector. And I’m very happy for him that he found this wonderful picture, also actually in the Galerie Hervé Peron.

I think this is such a joyous picture. I think this slightly less focused image gives you a better idea of the freshness of the colour of the canvas. It, yes, I think it’s a joyful, even the clouds and the trees, they seem to dance. It’s in the patterns of the brush world. So Ron, I mean there are many reasons why he loves the picture and I understand that, it’s a gorgeous picture. But you can see it’s dated 1939 and that has a personal meaning for him because his parents were married in 1939. And for me, it gives an added poignance to this delightful picture painted in the last summer of peace before the outbreak of the Second World War. And the image I show you on the right, it’s from, it’s a fashion shoot also made in the summer of 1939. It’s an image I’ve used very often in lectures. To make that point, it was a gorgeous summer and people were very relaxed, but they were, of course, Hermine David and this very brave model on the Eiffel Tower. My god, I wouldn’t want to have her job. They were, with hindsight, we can see of course they were dancing on the edge of the volcano. So we move on to Moïse Kisling, who’s Polish and from Kraków and he’s born in 1891, and he arrived in Paris actually during the First World War in 1916. He also becomes a very key men member of the École de Paris, friendly with everybody.

The insert here is a portrait of Moïse Kisling by Modigliani. And here you can see him sitting probably I think in Laverton with Picasso. Here is a photograph of him on the left. And as I said, Modigliani, I had to leave him out, but I thought I’d get him into this lecture anyway, because he did so many portraits of other artists of the École de Paris. And this is another portrait he made of Moïse Kisling. Kisling in the studio. Obviously loved women, loved women’s beauty, painted many nudes. And this nude by Kisling top-right, references this whole tradition of the reclining nude in western art going back to quite specifically I think to the journey dress in Venus. What’s in left, you can see it’s a fusion really, isn’t it? Of your journey and Matisse. And I put in a Matisse, still like Matisse, he’s a kind of a father figure really to the École de Paris, actually more influential, almost the artists I’m talking about today than Picasso was. Two more paintings by Moïse Kisling. And you, he is affected in the 1920s by what Copter called, the return to order after the wild experimentation of Cubism, reverting to a more figurative and a more classical staff with a very strong sense of line. On the left is his portrait of the great film star as we know her, Arletty. That’s one of my proudest folks. When I meet new French people, I usually try and drop into the conversation that I once spent a day with Arletty. You can see she signed a picture for me. They’re always impressed by that. That’s a very good calling card with French people of a certain generation.

But she started off her career as a fashion model and an artist model. So there are great many portraits by her, they called her École de Paris artist at Donlan and so on. It was only quite late. She was well into her forties before she made the great movies. Hôtel du Nord was the first huge success for her in 1938. And then of course, Les Visiteurs du Soir, amongst the greatest French films ever made. Now these two pictures, I’d like to call 'em both École de Paris. And they are in the entranceway to my Paris flat. The one on the right-hand side was the very first painting that I ever bought. And I can, I bought it on the 31st of August, 1963. I can tell you that 'cause it was my 12th birthday and it cost the equivalent of three pounds. And it, yeah, I went up to more, I was on my first big visit to Paris with my mother. And we did all the tourist things. We went up to Montmartre in the plaster Tatra 'cause it’s full of artists painting local scenes. And I went around, I wanted to buy a picture and I went around and this was the painting that pleased me most. And it’s by an artist called Alma Dahlia, born in 1924. If you look him up or on the internet, he’s described as the last bohemian of Montparnasse. Look, he had a beard and a berry and he looked the perfect French artist. The painting was, he was actually painting it when I bought it from him. So that it was very difficult to get back in those days. Of course on a boat with rather thick wet paint, it embarrasses me slightly that, can you see the geraniums in the window on the left-hand side?

Well, those were added at the insistence of my mother. She said to him, “I want geraniums in this picture.” And he very obligingly got out his little tube of red paint and he put a couple of red splodges in the picture. And it wasn’t such a bad buy actually because most of the stuff you see in the plastic is, was and is absolute rubbish. But he is an artist of certain reputation and his paintings come up for sale at auction. So that’s the absolute last gasp you could say of the École de Paris. I just caught it in my childhood. But on the left-hand side is a portrait of a Polish woman who married an Englishman. I dunno what her maiden name was. She was younger good fellow when I knew her and I met her, I would’ve been in my mid-teens, I think. My mother met her husband when they were doing pottery classes at Guildford Art School. And I went to visit them and I actually, I forgot all about it till about 20 years later, she bumped into my mother and she said, “I’ve always remembered your little boy. And I remember he liked a painting by my husband and I’d like him to have it.” So I went down to visit her in Guildford of all places. She was a very exotic, remarkable person to be living in a little bungalow on the edge of Guildford. And she had been, she was born in Poland. Her father was a member of the bond, he was very, very left wing and very anti-religious. And she was rather proud of the fact that she would’ve been born about 1900, I suppose, that in her generation 'cause it was, everybody had some kind of religious education. But because she was officially Jewish, she was excused from Christian education in school and not given any at home either.

So she got into her eighties with an absolute total ignorance of either the Jewish Bible or the Christian Bible. But she was certainly not ignorant in any other way. She was sharp as a ping. She was also very left wing and proud of the fact that she was a member of the Communist Party. She could whip out a party membership guard, dunno how well that went down in a suburb of Guildford. Anyway, I went to see her. By this time, her husband was still alive. He was in his nineties, but he had very advanced dementia, couldn’t even recognise his work anymore. And I, which I just, she was such a wonderful personality, I really loved her. But she, you know, it was a tough time for her looking after her husband. He died. She was mentally totally alert but very frail. And there is a sort of happy end to this story because I introduced her to a Lebanese friend, Harda El Altrash. And she, who was at the time a picture dealer and an antique dealer. And we drove down there in her big Mercedes car to Guildford. And I introduced her to younger, very, again, an unexpected extraordinary friendship between a Polish Jewish communist and an Arab princess. But they took one look at each other and it was love at first sight and they just adored each other. And my friend, Lada, she loaded up her car as to the brim with paintings and watercolours. We did this, I dunno how many times. And the money that she was gave to Yanker for all these pictures enabled Yanker to remain in her house to the end of her life. It enabled her to pay for medical care. So that’s a, I think a nice positive story.

This is the painting that I apparently praised and liked. And I actually, I still think it’s a terrific painting. And it’s, you may be saying, well, why is he talking about this artist in the context of the École de Paris? Well, they lived in Paris in the late 1920s and he, they completely or absorbed the atmosphere of Montparnasse. Now if you, anybody looking at this painting or indeed the portrait, the last painting, they wouldn’t say it was by an English artist. They’d say it was by an artist of the École de Paris, you know, there are, there’s a bit of Matisse there, there’s a bit of, and it’s very, very like of all those Eastern European artists working in Paris at the time. And this also, this is, I have this in my hallway, drawing of great verb and charm for me. Of course this is 14th Arrondissement, this is the Jardin du Luxembourg, again by the artist Goodfellow, Geoff Goodfellow. He’s, I mean she was very worried because they had no children and the house was absolutely full of his work. He was completely unknown and she just thought that when she died, the house would be cleared and everything would go on a skip. But partly thanks to my friend, Lada, and partly thanks to a couple of dealers, I went to various dealers in London taking his work around. And he, they took his work and there a couple of exhibitions and he is at, you can research on the internet, he’s now a known quantity, a minor English artist of the École de Paris.

So, now we move on to, back to artists of Eastern European origin. This is Ossip Zadkine, who was born in Vitebsk. So he, what would it be? I dunno if he actually knew Chagall, but they come from the same kind of background. Probably not actually, 'cause I think his family were more wealthy than Chagall’s. Chagall’s background was very humble. But they were typical of these Eastern European Jews who wanted, they wanted to assimilate, they wanted to better themselves. They wanted to be part of European civilization. So his father sent him to England to learn English. And as he put it, to learn good manners. I’m not sure if the English manners are so much better than anybody else’s, but there you are. And he then developed his vocation for art. And he started to study art in London because he quickly realised he wasn’t going to go anywhere, get anywhere with a, in London you had to go to Paris. Paris is the mecca, Paris is where you had to be. And so he arrives in Paris, in Montparnasse, of course. He moves into La Ruche, the beehive artist studios that I talked about last week. So he’s mixing with all these École de Paris artists and he picks up Cubism. He’s usually defined as a cubic sculpture.

Although I think that doesn’t, I don’t think he could be totally pigeonholed like that. There is I would say a rather expressionist element in his work of exaggeration and distortion that’s different from Cubism. And these murals, these are ceramic murals. They’re in a post office, just which are a made a little pilgrimage, the post office. And it’s still in use as a post office. People queue up for their stamps for their paperwork. And I know it’s not many people are giving these wonderful ceramic murals a second look in the post office. But they’re, so how they, to me, these link more to serialism than they do either to Cubism or expressionism. Later in life, he was able to afford a studio, still in the 14th Arrondissement, very close to the job and it looks simple. That studio still exists and you can visit it. I’m really looking forward to when Wendy comes to Paris. I hope she’ll be able to spend a few days. 'Cause there are so many interesting sculptors studios to visit. There’s the Bourdelle studio, there’s the Brancusi studio, there’s the Delmondo studio. And this delightful small studio of Zadkine, there is the garden. And in the garden you see a version of what is his best known sculpture, which is called The Destroyed City, and it’s in Rotterdam. And it commemorates the almost total destruction by the Germans of the historic centre of Rotterdam in 1940 to a terrible piece. Zadkine, himself, and the path in, the artist I’m talking about tonight is if they had a certain international reputation, particularly a reputation in North America, they were able to escape.

And he went to, he spent, he sat out, sat World War and in New York, came back to Paris after the war. And this is his tomb, again in, you could do an artist tomb tour of the cemetery of Montparnasse. And you can see it’s in a section which is clearly a Christian section 'cause a cross on the tomb next door. But his tomb is completely without any kind of denomination or religious symbols. The story is a bit different with Jacques Lipchitz. Here again, a portrait of him. He was another resident of La Ruche. And this is a portrait of him by Modigliani with his first wife about, and he’s again, a sculptor who could be described as a, I think more completely described as a cubist than Zadkine. He’s born in Lithuania in 1891. He achieves considerable success in Paris. He’s taken up by the dealer Léonce Rosenberg. He too manages to escape to America during the Second World War. But it’s interesting, like Picasso, he can switch styles. You know, Picasso in the 1920s, he’s doing works which are really quite abstracted and quite advanced. Synthetic cubism, chopped up images, but also working in a kind of Neoclassical style. And as I said, the man who gave the label to that style was Copter. He called it the return to order. And so here is an, here are two examples of the style.

There’s a Picasso portrait of Copter, and a very classical looking marble bust of Copter by Lipchitz. Also made this extremely beautiful bust of the young Raymond Radiguet. He was a very, he was on off lover of cocktail. A brilliant, brilliant young man died of typhoid at the age of 21, having written two novels, the Le Diable au corps and the Le Bal du comte d'Orgel, which are considered among the great French novels of the 20th century. Yes, so Lipchitz, I mean many of these artists, they were assimilated. They certainly, they may have been influenced, they certainly were influenced by their religious background, but in some ways they had rejected and they’d moved on from it. Somebody was asking me, I think it was last week or maybe the week before, “Why it was you suddenly get so many important Jewish artists?” And I think this process of assimilation, maybe it was a necessary process, was some of the artists, musicians like Schoenberg, then returned to their religious faith as in is a protest against the Nazis and persecution of the Jews. And that was the case with Lipchitz. And he seems to actually, he’s taken his reconversion to Judaism really quite seriously. And he is actually buried, not in the sing chair or Montparnasse, but in Jerusalem.

An artist who doesn’t totally belong in this lecture because he’s not from the former Russian Empire. He’s from the Austria-Hungarian Empire. And I want to put him in 'cause I like his work very much. This is Alfréd Réth, he’s Hungarian. And he arrived early in his career in Paris and spent nearly all his life. I think he, I think he went, actually went back to Hungary during the Second World War. But otherwise, he lived and worked in Paris. Alfréd Réth, R E T H. He was also, he was from a Jewish background. He changed his name from, he was, his real name was Roth, R O T H. And my guess is that he changed the name to make it sound less immediately recognisable as Jewish. And you think, well why would he want to do that? Well, it might have saved his life because he, with a much more Hungarian and less obviously Jewish name, who’s less likely to be picked up during the Holocaust. He’s considered to be the most important Hungarian cubist artists. Quite prolific. You can find drawings by him quite easily in Paris, this one I bought. I love it. It’s very, very, very cubist. I love the sort of sense of energy and dynamism and the steam engine and so on. I bought this from my favourite dealers in Paris Gallery in a quorum.

Now, we get to Hannah or Chana Orloff, and I’m going to call her Chana 'cause that’s what her grand, she called herself. And her granddaughter calls her that. She was born in Ukraine. And in 1905, her family house was burnt down in a programme and her family decided to move to Palestine and they were quite poor. And she was earning a living as a cutter, cutting material for clothes. And she was obviously gifted at this. And the family thought they would invest in her education. They decided if they sent her to Paris and she could get a kind of professional qualification that she could then come back to Palestine, she could earn a living. Well she came to Paris in 1910, wasn’t it? Incredibly exciting, amazing time to come to Paris. And she worked for the fashion house of Paquin. But she started to take art lessons and one day she was in an art sculptor studio and he threw a ball of clay at her and she caught the ball of clay and she started kneading the clay. And that was her epiphany. That was her moment of, that’s what she wanted to do. She wants to be a sculptor. She also was a friend of Modigliani and this is a drawing that Modigliani made of her. And it was she who introduced Modigliani to the great love of his life, Jeanne Hébuterne.

You see her painted by Modigliani here on the left and a sculptor of her. She has a rather Madonna-like face. That’s by Chana Orloff and a photograph of her on the right. I think she’s an underrated sculptor. I think she’s really extraordinary, very original. The nude on the left is in ciment fondu. And it’s claimed, I dunno how you prove this, that she is the first major sculptor to work in the medium of ciment fondu. There is a sort of art deco element to her work. Also, she’s very much influenced by the doctrine of direct carving. This was very big in the early 20th century. There was a reaction really against Rhoda in particular. And the tradition of making sculptures by modelling the figure first. And then the carving in stone or wood is actually a copy of the sculpture that’s been made by building up, by modelling because you probably know that Rhoda hardly touched any of his stone sculptures. He had assistants who cut them for him. But as you can see here in this photograph, here she is in her studio directly carving a piece of wood and there is a wood carving by her on the right-hand side. And so other artists who are, that was at this point, early in his career, Henry Moore is interested in direct carving too. And a certain kind of primitivism. They’re rejecting the classical tradition. So that’s Henry Moore on the left and Chana Orloff on the right. She was very successful between the wars and particularly successful as a portraitist.

I think she’s just super amazing portraitist. And if you go to her studio, you can, you go to her studio and you can see it’s walk into a room like they see all these faces, they’re all alive, they’re all human, they’re all individuals. It’s like going to a party in Montparnasse in 1930 when you see all these different figures. One on the right-hand side, that’s oh, this is Anaïs Nin, who is a neighbour, a next door neighbour of Chana Orloff in Montparnasse. This was a Jewish poet, what’s his name? I actually can’t remember his name. But he was apparently very important for writing in poetry in Hebrew. There’s a slightly caricature element in her work that might remind you a little bit of the artist of the Noah’s athlete kit in Germany. Like Otto Dix, drawn on the left-hand side. But I, there’s never a thinking. There’s no cruelty in her caricature, in her figures. I think that there’s always a sense of empathy and sympathy for her subjects. She was briefly married, her husband died soon after the birth of her son, had one child. And she was very interested in all her career in the theme of maternity, of course the theme of maternity, which is so important in western art because of the theme of Madonna and Madonna and Charles.

So there is Chana Orloff on the left-hand side, a mother if you want it to be, or a Madonna if you want it to be. And a Renaissance Madonna and child for comparison on the right. And so, as I said, it’s a very big theme of her work. I think the baby here is probably her son, Ellie. She also fits into a French tradition of making sculptures of animals, sculptures who specialise in animals in France, they’re called Animaliers. Wonderful, again, funny, affectionate, clever, witty depictions of animals by Chana Orloff. This is a studio, it was a modernist studio built by the great modernist architect, Auguste Perret, and it’s in a street of modernist studios. And next door, but one or two, it was Soutine. There was Henry Miller and then must have been very interesting place to live. Here is her studio today. So there she’s with her son and a sculpture she made of him, which is currently the subject of a legal dispute. Her studio, she had to flee during second World War and her studio was pillaged. This sculpture was stolen from her. It’s turned up on the art market in New York. And her granddaughter was trying to get it back. I’m shocked that it wasn’t, shouldn’t, it should be black and white. It’s evident that it belongs, this is a sculpture of her father by her grandmother. And it was stolen from them, absolutely clear that it should go back to her.

Now, I wanted to, yes, tell you a little bit about how I got time, a couple of minutes, about what happened to her during the Second World War. She was really at the height of her career. She had very successful exhibitions in the 19, late 1930s. But of course, the German occupation was a disaster. She was saved by her, the man who cast her bronzes, he’s a bronze casting called Alexis Rudier. He was the, they were the most famous bronze casters in France. They’d cast all the bronzes for Rhoda. And this, I want to tell you the story 'cause again, it emphasises how complicated the issue of collaboration is. When the Germans arrived, they said to him, “You can collaborate with us and you can help us make armaments or we will just take over your bronze foundry.” So he decided to collaborate. I think one reason probably was that if the Germans had just taken over, there would’ve been no protection for his workers. Another factor was, it was, he saved all the work of Chana Orloff. I mean the work in her studio was either pillaged or a lot of it was deliberately destroyed. But he had all the cast of her bronzes and he carefully kept them. I mean, that is a gesture of hope, if nothing else. That if he really thought the Germans were going to win the war, there was no point in keeping the cast for sculptures, 'cause they would never be used. But he kept them. And also through his contacts with the Germans, he heard a rumour that she was about to be arrested and he, I presume a great risk to himself.

He warned her and she and her son escaped. And they managed to get across the border into Switzerland and survived the war there, came back after the war, very disillusioned, but she renewed her contacts with the new state of Israel. She made this bust of Hungarian, which you can see on the right-hand side. And she was commissioned to make various memorials in Israel. Now, moving on very quick, oh, this is a man who was her partner briefly called George Grosz. And he fled with her to Switzerland. And they were going to come back together in 1945. But he heard that his family had all been murdered and it was too much for him. And he couldn’t face going back to Paris. And he threw himself out of the window of the hotel and killed himself. I’m going to skip on because I’m running out of time and I want just to have one section really on the artists who did not survive. So this is May the 10th of 1940. German armies pouring into Belgium and France. Panic in Montparnasse, you can imagine with such a large Jewish population, here are the people desperate to escape from Paris at the station of Montparnasse Paris, emptied of its population.

I was going to talk about Irène Némirovsky, but no time. If you want to know about this moment in Parisian history, you should read Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française, very great novel written at the time about what was happening. The beginning of the German occupation. This is Otto Freundlich. He spent most of his career in Paris. He was, again, a neighbour of Picasso, Le Bateau-Lavoir, who’s important pioneer of abstraction. He’s probably the most notable artist to have been murdered in the Holocaust. The photograph on the right shows him, on the left with Kandinsky’s, another great pioneer of abstraction. There were efforts to save him. And this time, Picasso did intervene and tried to protest, but to, you know, works by Otto Freundlich and this very beautiful mosaic, which he’s, it’s called Homage to People of Colour. And that was made just before the war. You can have surprised it survived. I wouldn’t have thought that was a subject that would appeal very much the Nazis. This is the cover of an exhibition at the old Museum Montparnasse. And you can see the title is Déporté Montparnasse. Every image you see on the cover is of an artist, a Jewish artist in Montparnasse who was deported and who died in the death camps. I’m just going to go very briefly through some of these artists.

This is an artist called Ari Epstein, who’s born in Russia, lived in La Ruche, went into hiding during war, was denounced. And he died in Auschwitz in 1944. This is Jan Rupcha, born in Poland in 1884. He was caught up in a gestapo, raid in 1942 when the roundups began and he died in Auschwitz. And there, I think I probably need to move on just to, these are all artists who died in the Holocaust. And just think what, is an incredible, tragic way. Of course the human tragedy is the big thing. But also, I mean, their work in many, many cases, you know, when when they were taken, their life’s work was trashed and destroyed as well. And the last person I’ve just mentioned very briefly is Arbit Blatas. He’s a belated memory. He didn’t, he got to Paris in 1929, so he never met Modigliani, but he did meet Soutine and this is his statue to Soutine in Montparnasse on the left-hand side.

There he is on the right-hand side in his studio and he took it. He came back to Paris, he went, he was American, he went back to America. He married the wonderful singer, Regina Resnik, who was a steward to the metropolitan, many who may have heard her. He came back to Paris after the one, he took it upon himself to memorialise the life of the École de Paris in Montparnasse, the cafes and artists and so on. And he donated all of this to their, he again, I would say possibly a minor artist of the École de Paris. But I find it very interesting that he devoted himself to this task. And he painted scenes that he could not have seen himself, like people being loaded into trucks and so on. And he gave all these pictures to the museum of the 1930s in Paris, which I strongly, strongly recommend you. One of my favourite museums in Paris, Museum of 1930s is a whole floor devoted to the École de Paris. So if you’re interested in these artists, that is the place to go. And rather breathlessly, I’m going to open up the questions.

Q&A and Comments

Fried is print edition of New York Times article about, you mean wondering, I think, yes. I dunno when I’m going to fit Wandery in, and it doesn’t fit in the near future. Yes, dreadful. And so we’re all worried. I think about the political situation at the moment. Yes, Drancy, just the name of course itself is very chilly.

Q: Why didn’t Picasso get Max Jacob? A: I, how could he? I think, I don’t think he could have done, but he, I mean Max Jacob was in a monastery. Max Jacob thought he was perfectly safe. It never occurred to anybody that the Nazis would drag somebody out on a monastery to send them to a concentration.

Pascin, Jules, yes, yes. I mean, the parallel with Julius and Pascin is their celebration of the brothels and the nightlife of Paris.

Q: Why did he kill himself? A: I don’t know really. He must have, who’s to know what demons he had? As I said, he was immensely successful at the time. He was on a wave of success.

Thank you. Hervé Peron that you’ve got the name correct. It’s in the Passage Verdeau. And he’s a gallery, that’s a gallery that specialises in paintings and drawings of the École de Paris, and prices are not very, very high. If you come to price, it’s definitely worth. Well Margaret, but Guilford Technical College as the art school. You might have met Goodfellow, you might have met my mother. Oh, Quentin Crisp of course. I remember sharing a taxi with him once after a party. Delightful man. With the post office, it’s just the other side of the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. I think it’s the 19th Arrondissement. It’s about a half hour walk from my flat through the cemetery of Père-Lachaise. I think it’s 19th. I’ll check for you that it’s really worth a visit. They’re absolutely amazing.

Yanker Goodfellow’s husband, his name was, well we all called him Geoff, but it seems that his birth name was Reginald. The gallery that I know that has them, has drawings by him, is the Paul Liss Gallery, L I double S. If you Google, if you contact the Paul Liss Gallery and say that you’re interested in work by Goodfellow, I’m sure they’ll be able to help you. Reginald Francis Goodfellow. Yes, that’s why you haven’t found it, because I probably said Geoff 'cause that’s what we call them. And he’s actually Reginald’s. Jacques Lipchitz embraces Judaism later in life. He designed a pen for the state of Israel bonds and so on. Yes, thank you.

Q: What do you think of Camille Claudel? A: I don’t think I know Camille Claudel.

Yes, yes, you’re right. It’s called Hebrew inscription on, yeah, well anyway, she, Shanna is what she called herself and I’m not going to argue about that with you. Did she? Yes, she did go back to Israel. She died in Israel actually. I mean, she deliberately died in Israel. She died on a trip to Israel. Peter from Linda Chagall, Zadkine met him in 1900 in Penn’s art class in St. Peter’s School. Chagall was intimidated by his wealth and Zadkine. Oh, that’s interesting. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes.

Q: Do I know of any tours of sculpture studios in Paris? A: I don’t know if they’re any organised. If you want to see Anna Orks studio, you have to apply to the Jewish Museum and you can do it with her granddaughter, which is very, very, very moving. I’ve done that to her twice. But she only speaks French. But they will also organise an English speaking tour.

Was there any value to DL acts collaborations and Nazis going to, well, it certainly gotten into big trouble at the end of the war. It was that 1941 trip, Goodwill trip in Averted Commerce. They were, mind you, even that is so much more complicated than people think. They didn’t, not all those people went on those trips, show out of any sympathy for the Nazis. Some were not, some of them were blackmailed into going. Some did so to try and, you know, your people said, well if you’ll save so-and-so and get them out of prison or out of a detainment camp, I’ll come to, on the trip. So it’s very, even that is very, very complicated. A certain resemblance to Eric Gill of Sanho work. Yes, I see that. Excellent TV series on Nazis of collaboration of French Village. I won’t be repeating the electron suit team, but I think you can. Well if you ask, if you ask Judy or Lauren very nicely, I’m sure they’ll send it to you. The post office, I will check on that for you and give it to you next time. For English, very similar in feeling to Delano’s. They would certainly have met, they would’ve known each other well over a period of time, A whole session. God, that would be so depressing though on Artist Guild by the Nazis. Can we stand it?

Thank you. Thank you. Many nice comments. I really appreciate them. It’s very encouraging. Museum of 1930s. Oh God, it’s so wonderful. And nobody goes there, you know. Yeah, I’ve been, I go there all the time. It’s a favourite museum and you never go there when there are more visitors than guards. And it covers everything. It’s decorative arts, architecture, design, fashion, really great museum. And not to be missed. There’s a small man by all of outside the, of the Israel Museum. Perfect for the kids. Thank you. Please post the name of the book on practising occupation. Yes, that is Suite Française. Suite Française is also a film made of it, which I haven’t seen. And there needs to be a whole talk on that. Maybe David could do that. Irène Némirovsky. It’s such an incredible story of how she wrote that book and how the book survived. So I think I probably need to come to it and end. We’re running out of time. Thank you all very, very much. And it’s on to Keen Morris off on Wednesday.

• [Participant] That’s fine.