Nowhere is the unprecedented flowering of Jewish talent in the visual arts more striking than in early twentieth century Paris. For the Jewish artists, most of them of Russian or eastern European origin, the city represented not only artistic freedom, but religious and political freedom too. Not for nothing did Marc Chagall describe the light of the city as lumière-liberté.

It would be wrong however, to say that all these artists came from 'artless' environments or straight from the ghetto. Soutine and Mané-Katz, for example, had already studied in Kiev and Vilna. Others, like Kisling and Halicka, came from cultured Cracow families; while Pascin came from Bulgaria (via Vienna and Munich), and Modigliani from Italy. Even Chagall's hometown of Vitebsk where he claimed "But a word as fantastic, as literary, as otherworldly as the word 'artist' - well I might have heard of it, but it had never been uttered by anyone in our town", was by no means the cultural desert the artist liked to make out.

Most of the artists lived and worked in La Ruche (The Beehive), on the borders of Montparnasse, where Chagall once commented, "one died or came out famous". Local cafés provided favourite gathering points. French was barely heard, Yiddish and Russian being the dominant languages among the émigrés. Differences notwithstanding, these artists formed a cohesive enough unit, at least to the outside world, to enable the concept of a 'Jewish School of Paris' to gain common currency - a cause for celebration to some, for suspicion to others. That explicitly Jewish subject-matter rarely featured in their artwork is ironical but hardly surprising, given that the freedoms mentioned above meant that they could now become citizens of the world. This did not, however, prevent some commentators from identifying a Jewish style, which was seen as an essentially expressionistic one, or at any rate nostalgia-ridden. Soutine's art, for example, was described (by critic Maurice Raynal) as "an expression of a kind of Jewish mysticism through appallingly violent marks of colour".

Always a loner, Chagall held himself somewhat aloof from all this. In the startlingly original work he produced during his first stay in Paris between 1910 & 1914, the references to the world of his childhood, while much in evidence, were oblique and often tantalising. In contrast, much of the work he produced in France in the 1920s after his return from Russia, like the Lovers and Flowers exhibited here, reveals an assimilatory impulse; although with the political developments of the 1930s his Jewishness - and Russianness - began to reassert themselves. It was in the early 1930s too that he was first commissioned by pioneering dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate the Old Testament, a subject that would continue to inspire him throughout the rest of his long and prolific career.

Monica Bohm-Duchen
May 2005

For more information about Chagall, Ben Uri is selling Monica Bohm-Duchen's Chagall biography (published by Phaidon Press Ltd) for the reduced price of £10 (rrp £12.95)

Image credits

Bela Kadar, The Musicians, 1930, Tempera on paper laid on board, 55 x 61 cm, signed, Private Collection

Mané - Katz, Paysage Ukraine, Oil on canvas, 82 x 102cm, signed, painted in 1957, Private Collection

Marc Chagall, Rabbi Akiva (from the Last Resistance by Joseph Opatoshu), pen and Indian ink over pencil on paper, 51 x 61 cm, signed, executed in 1947, Private Collection

Abraham Mintchine, Monmartre, Paris, oil on canvas, 61 x 76 cm, signed c. 1920, Private Collection