To celebrate the museum’s recent acquisition of Soutine’s stunning painting La Soubrette, c. 1933, the exhibition, From Russia to Paris: Chaïm Soutine and his Contemporaries, recently unveiled 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, 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’) 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 Beaux-Arts and exhibited (like Chagall) at the progressive salon d’automne and 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’. Many stayed on (often applying for French citizenship) until the events of the Second World War forced them to flee or to hide and a much smaller number remained after the Liberation. 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 text-less, Jewish art journal produced in Paris in 1912 by a number of artists including Epstein and Lichtenstein, who spent much of his later life in the United States reviving the Machmadim Publishing House devoted to the production of artistic Yiddish books. 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 studied under Henri Matisse, Isaac Lichtenstein’s Blind Fiddler (1924), nostalgic in subject-matter but modern in execution, influenced by his Cubist contemporaries and Robert and Sonia Delaunay. Jankel Adler’s Ein Jude, was probably executed in 1926, when he visited Paris for the second time. Issachar Ber Ryback’s beautifully-painted 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 Juifes 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, South of France landscapes of Zygmund Landau and Zygmund Shreter, was also deported and killed in Auschwitz in 1944. Ben Uri’s celebrated discovery and acquisition of Chagall’s important and lost Jewish crucifixion, Apocalypse en Lilas, Capricio, was probably the first work he created after emerging from mourning for his late wife, Bella who had died suddenly in September 1944. It was most likely painted in April 1945, in direct response to the Holocaust as the shocking news unfolded through press reports and newsreels. Post-war work includes colourful works by pioneering painter Sonia Delaunay, who exhibited (like Soutine) at the Galerie Bing, and whose original designs for her 1964 exhibition are exhibited for the first time together with another recent accession, a little-shown work on paper by sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. The exhibition explains the friendships of these émigré artists in Paris. At the age of 13, Soutine secretly drew a portrait head of the local rabbi breaking the Jewish 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 his friend Kikoïne set off for Vilna, where they enrolled at the art school and met Krémègne, becoming known later as the ‘Expressionist trio’. Krémègne settled first in La Ruche in 1912 and Soutine and Kikoïne soon joined him. Chagall (who had been tutored in St Petersburg by Bakst, also included in the exhibition) had been there since 1910. 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, Pollock, Dubuffet and Bacon has been much discussed in recent decades. Most recently, Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunnow in Soutine / Bacon (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, Auerbach and Kossoff, a subject further explored in Martin Hammer’s insightful essay, ‘Soutine Mania in Post-war British Art’. This influence is also touched upon in the exhibition with a set of fine figurative works on paper from the collection by contemporary British masters Auerbach and Kossoff. The exhibition first showed to British audiences in London in 2012 and travels to Manchester in June 2013. Chagall’s Apocalypse can be seen in the Jewish Museum New York exhibition from September 2013. This exhibition is available to tour to the USA from 2014 and Ben Uri also plans to bring to America its recent exhibitions on Nazi Looted Art (Auktion 392), Ludwig Blum Painting Jerusalem, Judy Chicago expansive 120 master-works from it’s celebrated British and European collection. More about Ben Uri and its 1300 strong collection of primarily Jewish artists from 35 countries can be found on www.benuri.org.uk <http://www.benuri.org.uk/> We very much hope museums in Florida will bring these exhibitions here. u

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