School of Paris

The School of Paris (French: École de Paris, pronounced [ekɔl də paʁi]) refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. Never a single art movement or institution, the term "School of Paris" refers instead to the primacy of Paris as the centre of Western art between 1900 and 1940. Artists of Jewish origin always figured prominently in the School of Paris. Before 1917, Jews faced restrictions in mobility within the Pale of Settlement and strict quotas or outright bans from studying art in the Russian Empire's most illustrious art schools in St. Petersburg and Moscow. So many got their start in Odesa, Vilnius, Kyiv, and Munich before moving to Paris for reasons that included artistic ambition, a desire to escape the pogroms of the Russian Empire, and the hope that the exoneration of Dreyfus in 1906 was "a sign that eventually the state would in fact side with justice and inclusion." In the 1930s and 1940s, many of these artists immigrated to the United States and Israel where they went on to heavily influence modern art. Art critic André Warnod first coined École de Paris to describe the mainly Jewish group of immigrant artists that included Jules Pascin, Yitzhak Frenkel, Chaïm Soutine, Marc Chagall and others in 1925. But it was always an elastic classification, encompassing a loose community, particularly of non-French artists, centred in the cafes, salons and shared workspaces and galleries of Montparnasse.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “School of Paris”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

School of Paris is art movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 9 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶