Death in many colors in Montparnasse

During the uneasy interlude between the two calamitous world wars, one of history’s most spectacular assemblies of immigrant Jewish artists gathered in the City of Light, Paris. They were called The School of Montparnasse: Modigliani, Chagall, Soutine, and Pascin [Julius Mordecai Pincas] were among the brightest stars in this new creative constellation.

Pages and pages of names, colors, and styles pour from Nadine Nieszawer’s book Peintres Juifs, a Paris listing of 151 painters who defied tradition and defined modernism. Many of these names mean little today, but these talented Jews were the avant-garde of a new generation of revolutionary artists who not only broke with the Mosaic injunctions about ‘graven images’ [interpreted by many Orthodox Jews as a prohibition about painting] but also shaped the contours of emerging new styles such as Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism and Dadaism in the roaring twenties.

Many commentators saw in their diverse works the renaissance of the spirit in the people of Israel, creating modern and Jewish plastic art in search of new forms, colors, and rhythms counterintuitively blending harmoniously with other art forms.  One has to spend a few hours at the Palais Garnier admiring the Chagall ceiling – where the deities of opera meld seamlessly into the neo-Baroque interiors – to appreciate the magic of the aesthetics of the confluence of opposites: the Montparnasse style and the ornate Second Empire Revival genre.

They had little in common: Modigliani’s portraits were poised and modeled; Pascin’s works were fluid and ephemeral; Soutine’s art was flamboyant yet fragile; Chagall dwelled nostalgically in the past when his creations were in limbo and otherworldly.

However, they all shared the angst of existential pessimism: Soutine’s raw meat and madness paintings [echoing Klimt’s The Scream] engendered a vision that was “singularly intense, tragic and painful,” according to art critic Waldemar George. Chagall, whose scenes of pogroms in his White Christ where Jesus on the cross was shrouded in the Jewish prayer shawl and surrounded with terrified Jewish figures flying around him during his Passion [even in his putatively joyous paintings, a melancholic mood prevails as discerned in his Midsummer Night’s Dream] revealed the power of the chains of remembrance. Pascin, in his inwardly lifeless nudes bearing enigmatic traces of wounded souls painted with the unbearable ambiguity of tone, always deliberated on the futility of life – eventually committed suicide. Modigliani’s penchant for the seedier side of life, for the decadent, the depressed, the failed, and the suffering appeared to have roots in his existential nihilism, which found expression in self-destruction in a cauldron of drugs and alcohol. His young wife, pregnant with his child, committed suicide as a symbolic epitaph for the painter who loved death more than life.

Death was their constant companion, shadowing their mental and emotional landscapes like a premonition of misfortunes yet to assail their lives. Indeed, what fate had in store for them was hinted when Camille Mauclair, respected Figaro journalist, in his book titled The Meteques Against French Art [meteques means ‘filthy foreigner’] foresaw, as a prelude to calamity, that the day would come when these ‘dirty Jews’ would be expelled from the soil of France. Alas, their stars shone all too brightly, very briefly, in a world on the verge of being swept away by the German behemoth with its furious metallic lash.

More than half of the 151 painters of The School of Montparnasse perished in the Holocaust. It was one of the most devastating mass murders of artists in history, with incalculable consequences for the future of modern European art.

The names roll from long lists of gifted artists who disappeared with their works: Emmanuel Mané-Katz, Adolphe Féder, Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel, Moïse Kisling, Maxa Nordau, Abraham Berlin, Otto Freundlich, Nathalie Kramer, Shimshon Holzman [………].

In his introduction to Nieszawer’s book, the late Claude Lanzmann shared an anthology of deaths, starting with surnames and ending with A. Jean Adler, deported in March 1942, Convoy No 1, was assassinated in Auschwitz. Bernard Altschuler was deported on 27 March 1944, Convoy No 70, killed in Auschwitz, and all his works have disappeared. Georges Ascher, Convoy No. 60, was assassinated in Auschwitz; all his paintings and sketches were destroyed in his workshop the day he was arrested [….]

These are the dead, known to a few nowadays. What remains of them is a sense of vague regret, which turns into the ephemeral dust of oblivion with every passing year. The debt the living owe to the dead should be immortalized in their surviving art.