Michel Kikoine

Biography

Kikoine held his first solo exhibition in 1919, at the Chéron Gallery in Paris. He was twenty-seven, he had lived in France for seven years, and four of those years he had spent in the army.

He was born on 31 May 1892 in Gomel, the son of a bank clerk (31 May, Old Style, in some reference works given as 1891; I take 1892). Soon afterwards the family moved to Rezhitsa in Vitebsk province, where his maternal grandfather was a rabbi, and in 1904 they settled in Minsk. The place of birth is also disputed: sources name either Gomel or Rechytsa, his father’s home town.

In Minsk Kikoine attended a commercial school and the drawing school of Yakov Kruger. There he became friends with Chaïm Soutine, and the friendship lasted all their lives. Together with Soutine he went to Vilna, to an art school, where he met Pinchus Kremegne. The years of study there are given differently, 1908 and 1910; it is hard to say more exactly.

In 1912 Kikoine moved to Paris to join his cousin Joseph and settled in La Ruche, the artists’ hostel in Montparnasse, where Soutine and Kremegne were already living. For a few months he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts; according to some accounts, in the studio of Fernand Cormon. In 1914 he married Rosa Bunimovich, whom he had known since Minsk, and in the same year, according to some of the sources, he volunteered for the French army. He served until the end of the First World War. From 1914 he showed work at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants, and in 1920 he acted as secretary of the Salon d’Automne. In 1920 his son Jacques Yankel, who also became a painter, was born. After the first exhibition his shows became regular: in 1924, at the Netter and Zborovsky galleries, then in Paris, New York and London. In 1924 Kikoine received French citizenship. In 1922–1923 he worked with Soutine in Céret and Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he painted landscapes with a sharp, Expressionist play of light and shade. In 1926 he bought a house in Annay-sur-Serein in Burgundy, in 1927 he left La Ruche and settled in Montrouge, and in 1933 he returned to Montparnasse, where he set up a studio. In summer the family usually lived in the south of France. In 1928 his work was shown at an exhibition of contemporary French art in Moscow.

In 1939 he was mobilised; in the reserve near Soissons he painted gouaches of garrison life. During the Occupation, escaping deportation, Kikoine and his family lived near Toulouse. After the Liberation he returned to Paris and painted mainly nudes, self-portraits and portraits. In the 1950s he travelled in Spain, Italy and Israel; in 1950 he took part in exhibitions in Haifa and Tel Aviv.

From 1958 he lived permanently in Cannes and returned to landscape. He died on 4 November 1968; the place of death is given differently, Cannes or Paris.

In 2004 a wing of the Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery at Tel Aviv University was dedicated to his memory. One of his works is in the National Art Museum of the Republic of Belarus.