20th-century French art developed out of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism that dominated French art at the end of the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century in France saw the even more revolutionary experiments of Cubism, Dada and Surrealism, artistic movements that would have a major impact on western, and eventually world, art. After World War II, while French artists explored such tendencies as Tachism, Fluxus and New realism, France's preeminence in the visual arts progressively became eclipsed by developments elsewhere (the United States in particular).
The early years of the twentieth century were dominated by Neo-Impressionism and Divisionism, experiments in colour and content that Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Symbolism had unleashed. The products of the far east also brought new influences. Les Nabis explored a decorative art in flat plains with a Japanese print graphic approach. From 1904 Les Fauves exploded in color (much like German Expressionism).
The influence of African tribal masks led Pablo Picasso to his Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907. Picasso and Georges Braque (working independently) returned to and refined Cézanne's way of rationally understanding objects in a flat medium; but their experiments in cubism would also lead them to integrate all aspects of day-to-day life: newspapers, musical instruments, cigarettes, wine. Picasso and Braque exhibited their analytical Cubism under an exclusivity contract at the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, located on a quiet street behind La Madeleine in the 8th arrondissement of Paris. At the same time, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger exhibited alternate forms of Cubism at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne; massive exhibitions that brought Cubism to the attention of the general public. These artists had no intention of analyzing and describing mundane objects from daily life—a bowl of fruit, a pipe, violin or guitar—but chose subjects of vast proportion, of provocative social and cultural significance, expressing the dynamic qualities of modern urban life.[1] Cubism in all its phases and divers styles would dominate Europe and America for the next ten years.
World War I did not stop the dynamic creation of art in France. In 1916 a group of discontents met in a bar in Zurich (the Cabaret Voltaire) and create the most radical gesture possible: the anti-art of Dada. At the same time, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp were exploring similar notions. At an art show in New York in 1917 Duchamp presented a white porcelain urinal signed R. Mutt as work of art, becoming the father of the "readymade".
The killing fields of the war (nearly one-tenth of the French adult male population had been killed or wounded) had made many see the absurdity of existence. This was also the period when the Lost Generation took hold: rich Americans enjoying the liberties of Prohibition-free France in the 1920s and poor G.I.'s going abroad for the first time. Paris was also, for African-Americans, amazingly free of the racial restrictions found in America (James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker).
When Dada reached Paris, it was avidly embraced by a group of young artists and writers who were fascinated with the writings of Sigmund Freud, and particularly by the notion of the unconscious mind. The provocative spirit of Dada became linked to the exploration of the unconscious mind through the use of automatic writing, chance operations and, in some cases, altered states. The surrealists quickly turned to painting and sculpture. The shock of unexpected elements, the use of Frottage, collage and decalcomania, the rendering of mysterious landscapes and dreamscapes were to become the key techniques through the rest of the 1930s.
World War II ended the feast. Many surrealists like Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, André Breton and André Masson fled occupied France for New York and the States (Duchamp had already been in the U.S. since 1936), but the cohesion and vibrancy were lost in the American city.
For a chronological list of artists from the period, go here.
André Warnod, Les Berceau de la jeune peinture, sketch by Modigliani, L'École de Paris
The term "School of Paris" (French: École de Paris) denotes the French and émigré artists who were active in Paris during the first half of the 20th century. Rather than representing a singular art movement or institution, it underscores the significance of Paris as a hub for Western art during the early 1900s to 1940, attracting artists globally and emerging as a focal point for artistic endeavors. Coined by André Warnod, the School of Paris describes a loosely connected community, particularly non-French artists, congregating in the cafes, salons, shared workspaces, and galleries, especially of Montparnasse.[2][3] Many artists of Jewish descent played a notable role in the School of Paris, later exerting a substantial influence on art in Israel.
Between World War I and World War II, artists in Paris engaged in experimental styles such as Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism, and Dada. Both French and foreign artists participated in this creative milieu, including figures like Jean Arp, Joan Miró, Constantin Brâncuși, Raoul Dufy, Tsuguharu Foujita, Belarusian artists Michel Kikoine and Pinchus Kremegne, Lithuanian artists Jacques Lipchitz and Arbit Blatas, who extensively documented key figures of the School of Paris, as well as Polish artists Marek Szwarc and Morice Lipsi, and Russian-born prince Alexis Arapoff.[4][5] Many of the artists lived in La Ruche, meaning beehive in French, was a complex of studio apartments where several school of Paris artists lived when first arriving Paris.[4]
Jewish School of Paris
Artists of Jewish descent played a significant role in the École de Paris, drawn to the art capital of the world, Paris, from Eastern Europe to escape persecution and pogroms.[6]Montparnasse became a hub for many of these artists, including notable painters like Marc Chagall, Jules Pascin, Chaïm Soutine, Isaac Frenkel Frenel, Amedeo Modigliani, and Abraham Mintchine.[7][8][9] These artists often depicted Jewish themes, infusing their work with intense emotions.[10] Coined in 1925 by André Warnod, the term "l’École de Paris" aimed to counter xenophobia towards foreign artists, many of whom were Jewish Eastern Europeans.[6] The Nazi occupation led to the tragic loss of several prominent Jewish artists during the Holocaust, contributing to the decline of the Jewish School Of Paris, with some artists relocating to Israel or the US.[6][11][12][13]
At the same time, Jean Dubuffet dominated the early post-war years while exploring childlike drawings, graffiti and cartoons in a variety of media in what he called "Art Brut" (see Outsider art). Meanwhile, François Fiedler went searching for the perfect combination of color and texture amongst the multitudinous layers of paint that found its way onto his canvas.
In 1960, Pierre Restany and Yves Klein founded the New Realism movement (in French: Nouveau Réalisme), and a joint declaration was signed on October 27, 1960, by nine people: Yves Klein, Arman, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Jacques de la Villeglé; in 1961 these were joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gérard Deschamps. The artist Christo joined the group in 1963. The members of the group saw the world as an image, from which they would take parts and incorporate them into their works. They sought to bring life and art closer together, and has often been compared with Pop Art. Yves Klein had nude women roll around in blue paint and throw themselves at canvases; Niki de Saint-Phalle created bloated and vibrant plastic figures; Arman gathered together found objects in boxed or resin-coated assemblages; César Baldaccini produced a series of large compressed object-sculptures (similar to Chamberlain's crushed automobiles); Daniel Spoerri used meals and food as artistic material.
Associated in various ways with New Realism, the artists of the international Fluxus movement – named and loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931–78), a Lithuanian-born American artist – encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues. Outsourcing part of the creative process to commercial fabricators was not usually part of Fluxus practice. The most significant French Fluxus artist, Ben Vautier incorporated graffiti and found objects into his work.
Other artist in the period include Victor Vasarely who invented Op-Art by designing sophisticated optical patterns.
In May 1968, the radical youth movement, through their atelier populaire, produced a great deal of poster-art protesting the moribund policies of president Charles de Gaulle.
For a chronological list of artists from the period, go here.
Contemporary art in France
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2008)
Many contemporary artists continue to be haunted by the horrors of the war and the specter of the holocaust. Christian Boltanski's harrowing installations of the lost and the anonymous are particularly powerful.
The work of his wife Annette Messager, who represented France at the 2005 Venice Biennale, deals with issues of identity and feminism.
The photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist Sophie Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.
Pierre et Gilles (Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard), are gay French artistic and romantic partners. They produce highly stylized photographs, building their own sets and costumes as well as retouching the photographs. Their work often features images from popular culture, gay culture including porn (especially James Bidgood), and religion.
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related artistic movements in music, literature, and architecture. In Cubist works of art, the subjects are analysed, broken up, and reassembled in an abstract form—instead of depicting objects from a single perspective, the artist depicts the subject from multiple perspectives to represent the subject in a greater context. Cubism has been considered the most influential art movement of the 20th century. The term cubism is broadly associated with a variety of artworks produced in Paris or near Paris (Puteaux) during the 1910s and throughout the 1920s.
Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known for his pioneering photography, and was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. He is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Montparnasse is an area in the south of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail. It is split between the 6th, 14th, and 15th arrondissements of the city. Montparnasse has been part of Paris since 1669.
The Bateau-Lavoir is the nickname of a building in the Montmartre district of the 18th arrondissement of Paris that is famous in art history as the residence and meeting place for a group of outstanding early 20th-century artists, men of letters, theatre people, and art dealers. It is located at No. 13 Rue Ravignan at Place Emile Goudeau, just below the Place du Tertre.
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic of the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.
La Ruche was an artist's residence in the Montparnasse district of Paris. It now hosts around fifty artists and stages art exhibitions open to the public.
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti was a French Dadaist painter, collagist, sculptor, and draughtsman. Her work was significant to the development of Paris Dada and modernism and her drawings and collages explore fascinating gender dynamics. Due to the fact that she was a woman in the male prominent Dada movement, she was rarely considered an artist in her own right. She constantly lived in the shadows of her famous older brothers, who were also artists, or she was referred to as "the wife of." Her work in painting turns out to be significantly influential to the landscape of Dada in Paris and to the interests of women in Dada. She took a large role as an avant-garde artist, working through a career that spanned five decades, during a turbulent time of great societal change. She used her work to express certain subject matter such as personal concerns about modern society, her role as a modern woman artist, and the effects of the First World War. Her work often weaves painting, collage, and language together in complex ways.
Michel Kikoïne was a Lithuanian Jewish-French painter who belonged to the Ecole de Paris art movement.
The Musée National d'Art Moderne is the national museum for modern art of France. It is located in Paris and is housed in the Centre Pompidou in the 4th arrondissement of the city. In 2021 it ranked 10th in the list of most visited art museums in the world, with 1,501,040 visitors. It is one of the largest museums for modern and contemporary art.
Nouveau réalisme is an artistic movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany and the painter Yves Klein during the first collective exposition in the Apollinaire gallery in Milan. Pierre Restany wrote the original manifesto for the group, titled the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," in April 1960, proclaiming, "Nouveau Réalisme—new ways of perceiving the real." This joint declaration was signed on 27 October 1960, in Yves Klein's workshop, by nine people: Yves Klein, Arman, Martial Raysse, Pierre Restany, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and the Ultra-Lettrists, Francois Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villeglé; in 1961 these were joined by César, Mimmo Rotella, then Niki de Saint Phalle and Gérard Deschamps. The artist Christo showed with the group. It was dissolved in 1970.
The School of Paris refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century.
French art consists of the visual and plastic arts originating from the geographical area of France. Modern France was the main centre for the European art of the Upper Paleolithic, then left many megalithic monuments, and in the Iron Age many of the most impressive finds of early Celtic art. The Gallo-Roman period left a distinctive provincial style of sculpture, and the region around the modern Franco-German border led the empire in the mass production of finely decorated Ancient Roman pottery, which was exported to Italy and elsewhere on a large scale. With Merovingian art the story of French styles as a distinct and influential element in the wider development of the art of Christian Europe begins.
Pierre Restany, was an internationally known French art critic and cultural philosopher.
Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum (1900–1954) was a Polish painter forced to leave his native town in Poland in order to both flee persecution as a Jew and develop his art.
Académie de La Palette, also called Académie La Palette and La Palette,, was a private art school in Paris, France, active between 1888 and 1925, aimed at promoting 'conciliation entre la liberté et le respect de la tradition'.
For centuries, Paris has attracted artists from around the world, arriving in the city to educate themselves and to seek inspiration from its artistic resources and galleries. As a result, Paris has received a reputation as the "City of Art". Home to some of the world's most famous museums and galleries, including the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay, the city today remains home to a thriving community of artists. Paris is recognized globally for its public landmarks and masterpieces of architecture including the Arc de Triomphe and a symbol of France, the Eiffel Tower.
The Années folles was the decade of the 1920s in France. It was coined to describe the social, artistic, and cultural collaborations of the period. The same period is also referred to as the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age in the United States. In Germany, it is sometimes referred to as the Golden Twenties because of the economic boom that followed World War I.
André Warnod (1885–1960) was a French writer, goguettier, art critic, and illustrator, who witnessed the artistic scenes of Montmartre and Montparnasse during the 1910s-1930s.
↑ André Warnod, Les Berceaux de la jeune peinture: Montmartre, Montparnasse, l'École de Paris, Edition Albin Michel, 1925
↑ Alley, Ronald. "Ecole de Paris." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web.
1 2 Meisler, Stanley (2015). Shocking Paris: Soutine, Chagall and the Outsiders of Montparnasse. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN978-1-137-27880-7.
↑ Muratova, X. (1979). Paris. The Burlington Magazine, 121(912), 198-198. Retrieved May 4, 2021.
1 2 3 "The Jewish painters of l'École de Paris-from the Holocaust to today". Jews, Europe, the XXIst century. 2021-11-25. Retrieved 2023-11-19. " l'École de Paris is a term coined by the art critic André Warnod in 1925, in the magazine Comœdia, to define the group formed by foreign painters in Paris. The École de Paris does not designate a movement or a school in the academic sense of the term, but a historical fact. In Warnod's mind, this term was intended to counter a latent xenophobia rather than to establish a theoretical approach.
↑ Nieszawer, Nadine (2020). Histoire des Artistes Juifs de l'École de Paris: Stories of Jewish Artists of the School of Paris (in French). France. ISBN979-8633355567.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ "Alexandre FRENEL". Bureau d’art Ecole de Paris. 2019-01-02. Retrieved 2023-11-19.
↑ "Marc CHAGALL". Bureau d’art Ecole de Paris. 2019-01-02. Retrieved 2023-11-19.
↑ Barzel, Amnon (1974). Frenel Isaac Alexander. Israel: Masada. p.14.
↑ Nieszawer, Nadine (2020). Histoire des Artistes Juifs de l'École de Paris: Stories of Jewish Artists of the School of Paris (in French). France. ISBN979-8633355567.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
Bishop, Michael. Contemporary French Art 1: Eleven Studies (2008), covers Ben Vautier, Niki De Saint Phalle, François Morellet, Louise Bourgeois, Alexandre Hollan, Claude Viallat, Sophie Calle, Bernard Pagès, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Annette Messager, and Gérard Titus-Carmel
Bishop, Michael. Contemporary French Art 2: Gérard Garouste, Colette Deblé, Georges Rousse, Geneviève Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joël Kermarrec, Danièle Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud (Rodopi, 2011)
Leighten, Patricia. The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-guerre Paris (U of Chicago Press, 2013)
Perry, Gill, and Francis Frascina. Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (1993)
Silver, Kenneth E. Esprit de corps: the art of the Parisian avant-garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton University Press, 1989)
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