Mid 20th Century Jacques Zucker Synagogue Interior Scene Fauvist Oil Painting

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Genre: Post Impressionist
Subject: Landscape
Medium: Oil
Surface: Canvas
Country: France
Dimensions: 24" x 20"

Jacques Zucker was born in … Read more Genre: Post Impressionist
Subject: Landscape
Medium: Oil
Surface: Canvas
Country: France
Dimensions: 24" x 20"

Jacques Zucker was born in 1900 in Radom, Poland. He was a notably famous Jewish American artist mostly known for his expressionist figure paintings. In his young years he traveled to Palestine to study fine arts at the Bezalel Art School in Jerusalem. In 1917 he joined the British Royal Fuesiliers under the leadership of General Allenby to liberate Palestine from the Turks. After the first World War he settled in Paris, where he continued his studies at Académie Julian and Academie Colarossi. He then emigrated to the United States in 1922 and continued his art studies at the National Academy of Design. He supported himself by designing jewelry. In 1925 he returned to Paris and studied at the Academie de la Grande Chaumier et Colarossi. During the Depression he worked for the WPA. From 1928 he took part in the Paris Salons: Autumn and the Tuileries. His works are expressionistic variations in the type of the Ecole de Paris. As a protégé of both Chaim Soutine and Renoir, hints of their style can be observed in much of his own work. Zucker’s style, that may have been influenced from the art of artists such as Marc Chagall, took pride in being an “internationalist”, standing the art of painting in its highest expression is universal no matter where the canvas was created. People who respond to quality in art will understand the beauty and meaning, in their own land or in a foreign land, this was his main idea behind his artworks that was exhibited in numerous solo show in leading galleries and museums in New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, and other art centers. Claude Roger-Marx of Figaro Litteraire, dean of French art critics, write a comprehensive study of Zucker’s illustrated with 135 color and black and white plates. He traveled widely, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Israel. From then on Zucker lived alternately in New York and Paris, maintaining homes in both places, and spent considerable time painting in Mexico, Portugal, Greece, and Israel. Zucker's post-impressionist works including town and landscapes, still-lives, and portraits, are part of an array of permanent installments in numerous museums and private collections in Tel Aviv, including the Joseph Hirschorn collection in Washington, D. C., the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and the Bezalel Art Museum in Jerusalem. In 1947 he settled in Arcueil near Paris. Zucker died in 1981 in New York.

The School of Paris, Ecole de Paris, was not a single art movement or institution, but refers to the importance of Paris as a center of Western art in the early decades of the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940 the city drew artists from all over the world and became a centre for artistic activity. School of Paris was used to describe this loose community, particularly of non-French artists, centered in the cafes, salons and shared workspaces and galleries of Montparnasse. Before World War I, a group of expatriates in Paris created art in the styles of Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Fauvism. The group included artists like Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani and Piet Mondrian. Associated French artists included Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes.
The term "School of Paris" was used in 1925 by André Warnod to refer to the many foreign-born artists who had migrated to Paris. The term soon gained currency, often as a derogatory label by critics who saw the foreign artists—many of whom were Jewish—as a threat to the purity of French art. Art critic Louis Vauxcelles, noted for coining the terms "Fauvism" and "Cubism", Waldemar George, himself a French Jew, in 1931 lamented that the School of Paris name "allows any artist to pretend he is French. it refers to French tradition but instead annihilates it.
The artists working in Paris between World War I and World War II experimented with various styles including Cubism, Orphism, Surrealism and Dada. Foreign and French artists working in Paris included Jean Arp, Joan Miro, Constantin Brancusi, Raoul Dufy, Tsuguharu Foujita, artists from Belarus like Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, and Jacques Lipchitz, the Polish artist Marek Szwarc and others such as Russian-born prince Alexis Arapoff.
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, Chaim Soutine, Adolphe Féder, Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Maxa Nordau and Shimshon Holzman.
The Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme has works from School of Paris artists including Pascin, Kikoine, Soutine, Chana Orloff and Jacques Lipchitz. See less