Pre-World War II School of Paris

The artists, many born abroad, who made Paris the international centre of modern art from the early 1900s to the Second World War.

647 works · 10 related artists

About

From about 1900 artists from abroad settled in Paris in great numbers, drawn by its academies, museums and freedoms. Many came from Jewish communities in the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe. They worked in cheap studio buildings such as La Ruche, a round former pavilion from the 1900 world's fair, and met in the cafés of Montparnasse. In the mid-1920s critics began calling this foreign-born community the School of Paris, a name later stretched to almost all modern art made there.

No single style unites it. Marc Chagall floated memories of his Belarusian home town in I and the Village (1911); Amedeo Modigliani painted elongated nudes and portraits; Chaïm Soutine painted flayed carcasses and bent landscapes in thick, convulsive strokes; Tsuguharu Foujita drew fine ink lines on luminous white grounds. The German Occupation ended the era: Soutine died in hiding in 1943, and Otto Freundlich was deported and murdered.