The School of Paris (, ) refers to the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the 20th century. 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. But it was always an elastic classification, encompassing a loose community, particularly of non-French artists, centered in the cafes, salons and shared workspaces and galleries of Montparnasse. Before World War I, it was also applied to artists involved in the many collaborations and overlapping new art movements, between Post-Impressionists and Pointillism and Orphism, Fauvism and Cubism in the well-established art scene in Montmartre.

In its broader sense, the group included artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian, and associated French artists, such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. In its more narrow sense, it described Chagall and Modigliani as prominent members of the early school, and Picasso and Matisse as its twin pre-war leaders (chefs d'école). By the 1920s, Montparnasse had become a centre of the avant-garde, so the name was also used to refer to that group. After World War II, the name was also applied to a group of abstract artists and a group of émigré classical composers. Built from materials dismantled from the Medoc Wine Pavilion from the 1900 Paris World's Fair, it comprised 50 modest studios with large windows that let in a lot of light, with nearby buildings providing 50 more studios for the overflow of artists.

La Ruche opened in 1902, with the blessing of the French government. It was often the first destination of émigré artists who arrived in Paris eager to join the art scene and find affordable housing. Artists who lived and worked in La Ruche include Amedeo Modigliani, Yitzhak Frenkel, Diego Rivera, Tsuguharu Foujita, Jacob, Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Moïse Kisling, Pinchus Krémègne, Ossip Zadkine, Jules Pascin, Marc Chagall, Amshey Nurenberg, Jacques Lipchitz, and more. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles, noted for coining the terms "Fauvism" and "Cubism" (also meant disparagingly), called immigrant artists unwashed "Slavs disguised as representatives of French art".

School of Paris artists were progressively marginalised. Beginning in 1935, articles about Chagall no longer appeared in art publications (apart from those published for Jewish audiences) and, by June 1940, when the Vichy government took power, School of Paris artists could no longer exhibit in Paris at all.

A significant subset, the Jewish artists, came to be known as the "Jewish School of Paris" or the "School of Montparnasse." The "core members were almost all Jews, and the resentment expressed toward them by French critics in the 1930s was unquestionably fueled by anti-Semitism." Jewish members of the group included Emmanuel Mané-Katz, Abraham Mintchine, Chaïm Soutine, Adolphe Féder, Marc Chagall, Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel, Moïse Kisling, Maxa Nordau and Shimshon Holzman.

The artists of the Jewish School of Paris were stylistically diverse. Some, like Louis Marcoussis, worked in a Cubist style, but most tended toward expression of mood rather than an emphasis on formal structure.

Jewish School of Paris

France

Artists of Jewish origin had a marked influence in the École de Paris. Paris, the capital of the art world, attracted Jewish artists from Eastern Europe, some fleeing persecution, discrimination and pogroms. Many of these artists settled in Montparnasse. Several Jewish painters were notable in the movement; these include Marc Chagall and Jules Pascin, the expressionists Chaïm Soutine and Isaac Frenkel Frenel as well as Amedeo Modigliani and Abraham Mintchine. Many Jewish artists were known for depicting Jewish themes in their work, and some artists' paintings were imbued with heavy emotional tones. Frenkel described the artists as "members of the minority characterized by restlessness whose expressionism is therefore extreme in its emotionalism".

The term coined by the art critic André Warnod in 1925 in the magazine Comœdia, was intended by Warnod to negate xenophobic attitudes towards the foreign artists, many of whom were Eastern European Jews. Louis Vauxcelles, a prolific critic of Jewish painters, wrote several monographs for the publisher Le Triangle. In a 1931 monograph, he wrote: "like a swarm of locusts, an invasion of Jewish colorists fell on Paris — on the Paris of Montparnasse. The causes of this exodus: the Russian revolution, and all that it brought with it of misery, pogroms, exactions, persecutions; the unfortunate young artists take refuge here, attracted by the influence of contemporary French art.... They will constitute [an element of] what the young critic will call the School of Paris. Many talents are to be considered in this crowd of what is nowadays sometimes referred to as outsider art or métèque art. leading to the dwindling of the Jewish School of Paris. Others managed to leave or fled Europe, mostly to Mandate Palestine or the US. This phenomenon began with the return of École de Paris Isaac Frenkel Frenel to Mandatory Palestine in 1925 and his opening of the Histadrut Art Studio. His students were encouraged to continue their studies in Paris, and upon their return to Pre-Independence Israel amplified the influence of the Jewish artists of the School of Paris they encountered. Furthermore, as is characteristic of Jewish Parisian Expressionism, the art was dramatic and even tragic, perhaps in connection to the suffering of the Jewish soul. During the 1930s several such painters would paint scenes in the Land of Israel in an Impressionist style and a Parisian light, greyer and dimmer compared to the powerful Mediterranean sun.

Artists Quarter of Safed

Safed, a city in the mountains of Galilee and one of the four holy cities of Judaism, was a centre of École de Paris artists during the mid- and late 20th century. Artists were attracted there by the romantic and mystical qualities of the Kabbalistic mountain city. The artists' quarter, founded in 1949, was formed at first by Moshe Castel, Shimshon Holzman, Yitzhak Frenkel and other artists, many of them influenced by, or part of, the School of Paris. Though not united by a common artistic trope, it was a clear bastion of École de Paris in the country. Marc Chagall would walk the streets and paint portraits of religious children. Several of these artists would commute between Safed and Paris.

After World War II

In the aftermath of the war, "nationalistic and anti-Semitic attitudes were discredited, and the term took on a more general use denoting both foreign and French artists in Paris".

New School of Paris

Post-World War II (Après-guerre), the term "New School of Paris" or École de Paris III often referred to tachisme, and lyrical abstraction, a European parallel to American Abstract Expressionism. These artists include again foreign ones and are also related to CoBrA. Important proponents were Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Hans Hartung, Wols, Serge Poliakoff, Bram van Velde, Max Ernst, Simon Hantaï, Gérard Schneider, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Zao Wou-Ki, Chu Teh-Chun, Georges Mathieu, André Masson, Jean Degottex, Pierre Tal-Coat, Jean Messagier, Alfred Manessier, Jean Le Moal, Olivier Debré, Zoran Mušič, Jean-Michel Coulon and Fahrelnissa Zeid, among others. Many of their exhibitions took place at the Galerie de France in Paris, and then at the Salon de Mai where a group of them exhibited until the 1970s.

In 1996, UNESCO organized the 50th anniversary of the School of Paris (1954-1975), bringing together "100 painters of the New School of Paris." Notable artists included Arthur Aeschbacher, Jean Bazaine, Leonardo Cremonini, Olivier Debré, Chu Teh-Chun, Jean Piaubert, Jean Cortot, Zao Wou-ki, François Baron-Renouard, among others. This grand exhibition featured a hundred painters from 28 different countries at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The exhibition's curators were the art critics Henry Galy-Carles and Lydia Harambourg.

Art critics

Art critics and renowned writers have written prefaces, books, and articles regarding the painters of the School of Paris, notably in periodicals such as Libération, Le Figaro, Le Peintre, Combat, Les Lettres françaises, Les Nouvelles littéraires. Among these writers and critiques were Waldermar George, Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, Jean-Paul Crespelle, Arthur Conte, Robert Beauvais, Jean Lescure, Jean Cassou, Bernard Dorival, André Warnod, Jean-Pierre Pietri, George Besson, Georges Boudaille, Jean-Albert Cartier, Jean Chabanon, Raymond Cogniat, Guy Dornand, Jean Bouret, Raymond Charmet, Florent Fels, Georges Charensol, Frank Elgar, Roger Van Gindertael, Georges Limbour, Marcel Zahar.

==Selected artists==<!-- will eventually need a separate article; list of Jewish School of Paris article at fr.wikipedia lists hundreds of names. But right now working on English citations and clarifying who was considered to belong and who was simply in Paris at the time -->

  • Constantin Brâncuși. Romanian-born sculptor, considered a pioneer of modernism.
  • (1920-2005), French painter, recognized as part of the New School of Paris
  • Marc Chagall. Lived in Paris from 1910 to 1914 then again after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1923; Jewish; was arrested in Marseilles by the Vichy government but escaped to the US with help from Alfred H. Barr Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art, and collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, among others
  • Robert Delaunay, French painter, co-founder of Orphism with his wife Sonia
  • Sonia Delaunay,
  • François Zdenek Eberl, a naturalised French painter, a Catholic born in Prague
  • Tsuguharu Foujita, Japanese-French painter
  • Boris Borvine Frenkel a Jewish painter from Poland <!-- fr French WP -->
  • Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel, father of modern Israeli art, Jewish, Israeli French artist. Sent his students to learn in Paris. Carried the influence of the School Of Paris to pre-independence Israel which up to that point was dominated by Orientalism.
  • Leopold Gottlieb, Polish paintier
  • Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum, Polish Jewish artist
  • Pinchus Krémègne A young and highly regarded member of the École de Paris in the 1930s, prior to its decimation by the Reich.
  • Louis Marcoussis, had a studio in Montparnasse
  • Adolphe MIlich, born and trained in Poland and Germany, arrived in Paris 1920, had a studio in Montparnasse
  • Abraham Mintchine
  • Amshey Nurenberg, born in Elisavetgrad (Ukraine) in 1887, arrived in Paris in 1910, lived at La Ruche
  • Chana Orloff, Jewish portrait sculptor worked in Montparnasse
  • Jules Pascin, Bulgarian-born Jew
  • Zinaida Serebriakova, Russian painter, arrived in Paris in 1905
  • Chaïm Soutine, Jewish artist, born in a shtetl near Minsk,
  • Max Weber, German artist, arrived in Paris in 1905

Associated with artists

  • Albert C. Barnes, whose buying trip to Paris gave many School of Paris artists their first break
  • Jonas Netter, an art collector