Jules Pascin
Jules Pascin
1885 - 1930
American painter, draughtsman and printmaker of Bulgarian birth, active in France. He attended secondary school in Vienna, returning in 1901 to Bucharest, where his family had settled, and working briefly in the office of his father’s grain-merchandizing business. He was, however, already becoming passionately interested in drawing, for which he showed precocious talent. At the age of 16 he became the lover of a woman who ran a brothel and was allowed by her to draw the residents. In 1903 he moved to Munich, where he attended the art school run by Moritz Heymann.
Pascin sent drawings to the famous satirical magazine Simplicissimus in 1904 and was given a substantial contract. Altogether 67 of his drawings were published in Simplicissimus between March 1905 and December 1913, showing scenes of contemporary life, such as those he had witnessed in brothels, and the people he had met there: young prostitutes, aged procuresses, male clients and the shadowy, disreputable personalities of the underworld, whom he depicted with sharp, humorous observation and an eye to the grotesque. His early drawings, such as Young Munich Girl (pencil, 1903; Paris, Mus. A. Mod. Ville Paris), were mostly illustrative in a Jugendstil manner, stylized and highly finished, with modelled forms and elaborate hatching, some showing the influence of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. In 1905 he adopted the name Pascin at the request of his family, who disapproved of his way of life.
At the end of 1905 Pascin went to Paris, where he was welcomed by a delegation of the artists who frequented the Café du Dôme, including George Grosz. After settling first in Montparnasse, he lived from 1906 to 1912 in Montmartre, near Place Pigalle, before returning to Montparnasse. While continuing to send drawings to Simplicissimus, he began to exhibit at the Berlin Secession, the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants in Paris and in dealers’ galleries, showing oil paintings and drawings. His early paintings, such as the portrait of Hermine David (1908; Grenoble, Mus. Peint. & Sculp.), mostly female portraits or studies of a model, were densely painted in blues, browns and yellows and were solidly modelled in a style influenced by Paul Cézanne and by the Fauves. He mixed with artists and members of the Scandinavian and German literary circles such as Wilhelm Uhde and Rudolph Levy, and for Paul Cassirer he illustrated Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski by Heinrich Heine (Berlin, 1910), a novel about the amorous adventures of a young rake. His drawing style gradually became more direct and simplified, with a fluent, expressive line.
Rather than serve in the army of the king of Bulgaria, at the outbreak of World War I, Pascin left for London, where one of his brothers was living and where he was given a ticket to go to the USA on the next available boat. As his work was already known there from the Armory Show (1913), he was welcomed in artistic circles in New York and introduced to Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Guy Pène du Bois, Max Weber and the collector John Quinn, among others. He frequented the night clubs, cafés and the black theatre in Harlem, but soon spent much of his time in Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, also visiting Cuba. During these years he drew constantly and made a great number of quick, vivid sketches and watercolours or coloured drawings of the life around him, for example Louisiana Scene (ink, 1917; Grenoble, Mus. Peint. & Sculp.), and studies of black Americans working in the fields or on the wharves. Although he experimented with Cubism for a short time in 1915–16 and painted several Cubist pictures such as Woman in a Landscape (1916; Oslo, G. Krohg priv. col., see cat. rais., p. 115), with fractured forms and in a near monochrome range of ochres and greys, this did not have any lasting effect on his work. Shortly after becoming a US citizen in September 1920, he returned to Paris.
Apart from a visit to New York from August 1927 to June 1928 to maintain his American nationality, trips to Tunisia (1921, 1926) and to Spain and Portugal (1929), almost all the rest of Pascin’s life was spent in Paris, where he continued to lead a bohemian existence. He would frequently rise at midnight and wander the streets, returning the next day remembering nothing of what he had done or where he had been. The wild parties that he gave in his Montmartre studio on Saturdays in the 1920s were famed for their abundance of expensive foods and wines; he drank heavily and was sometimes involved in brawls, spent money prodigally as soon as he got it on entertaining his friends and had many hangers-on.
Although Pascin made a few oil paintings of flowers, café scenes, biblical subjects and black American subjects, and also painted portraits, he is known above all for his studies of the 1920s of teenage girls, either nude or wearing only the flimsiest of chemises. Usually single figures, but sometimes in pairs, for example Two Sleeping Women (1927; Paris, Pompidou), they are depicted in langorously erotic poses, standing, seated or sprawling on couches. These later pictures were painted with oils diluted with turpentine on very thin canvas, in order to achieve an increasingly rapid execution. Delicately lit, and misty and imprecise in outline, they have an opalescent tonality, based on subtle variations of faded pink, pale blue, yellow and brown. In failing health and deeply depressed after a quarrel with his girlfriend, he took his own life. On the day of his funeral, many galleries in Paris closed as a mark of respect. [Ronald Alley. "Pascin, Jules." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 10, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T065635.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
French, 1864 - 1901
