Jules Pascin

Biography

In 1905 the Munich magazine Simplicissimus was printing drawings by the twenty-year-old Julius Pincas. His father did not want the family name under such subjects, and with his consent the signature was changed to an anagram: Pascin.

He was born on 31 March 1885 in Vidin, Bulgaria, the eighth of eleven children in a Sephardic Jewish family. His father, Marcus Pincas, was a grain merchant, and the family was counted among the wealthiest in the town. His mother, Sophie, née Russo, came from a family that had moved from Trieste to Zemun; at home they spoke Ladino. In 1892 the family moved to Bucharest. At about fifteen Pascin worked briefly in his father’s firm and began drawing at that time, visiting a local brothel. He started systematic study in Vienna (1902), then in Munich at Moritz Heymann’s school, where, according to his biographers, he got to know Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin and Wassily Kandinsky.

He arrived in Paris in the last days of December 1905. There he was welcomed by the regulars of the Café du Dôme, known as the Dômiers. He attended the Académie Matisse, and at the Louvre he spent long hours studying Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze and Boucher. In 1907 his first solo exhibition was held at Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin, and in the same year he met the painter Hermine David. Cassirer commissioned him to illustrate Heinrich Heine (1910). Until 1914 Pascin showed mostly drawings, watercolours and prints; painting appeared around 1907–1909, portraits and nudes influenced by Fauvism and Cézanne. He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Indépendants, the Berlin Secession and the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, and in 1913 twelve of his works were shown at the Armory Show in New York.

In 1914, to avoid service in the Bulgarian army, he left for New York by way of London; at the end of October Hermine David joined him. They lived in the United States until 1920, spending most of their time travelling in the South: New Orleans, Charleston, Texas, Florida, South Carolina; he also visited Cuba. He made a great many drawings of street life. In 1915–1916 Cubism is noticeable in his work, and he soon abandoned it. In 1918 he and David were married in New York. In September 1920 he became an American citizen and soon returned to Paris.

In the 1920s Pascin became a fixture of Montparnasse: in a bowler hat, at the tables of the Dôme and the Sélect, with a company that by dinner time grew to twenty people. The subjects of his pictures were little girls, prostitutes waiting for clients, and models waiting for the sitting to end. He painted with heavily thinned oil, as if in watercolour, in grey, pink, ochre and blue-violet tones. His work sold readily, but the money went quickly. In 1923 Ernest Hemingway met him at the Dôme with two models and described that evening in “A Moveable Feast”.

He travelled a good deal: Algeria and Tunisia (1921, 1924), Italy (1925), the south of France, Cairo, and in 1923 and 1924 Bulgaria. In 1924 he took up etching. In August 1927 he went back to the United States, in June 1928 again to Paris, and in 1929 he travelled to Spain and Portugal.

Pascin died in Paris in early June 1930, in his studio at 36 boulevard de Clichy, shortly before the opening of a solo exhibition. The sources disagree on the date: 2 June or, according to others, 5 June. He left his estate in equal parts to his wife, Hermine David, and to Lucy Krohg. Thousands of people came to the funeral on 7 June, artists, café and restaurant workers, and models; many Paris galleries closed that day. He was first buried in the Saint-Ouen cemetery, and a year later his family moved his remains to Montparnasse.