school of Paris

school of Paris

school of Paris. The center of international art until after World War II, Paris was a mecca for artists who flocked there to participate in the most advanced aesthetic currents of their time. The school of Paris is not one style; the term describes many styles and movements. The practitioners and adherents of fauvism, cubism, and orphism all belonged to the school of Paris, as well as many artists whose styles fit into no one category. After the war, when New York City challenged Paris's preeminence in the art world, the school of Paris continued to produce major figures and styles in art: Jean Dubuffet and the Art Brut school are recent examples.

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The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Paris, School of

 

(Ecole de Paris), the conventional designation for an international group of artists that formed in Paris mainly between 1910 and the late 1920’s.

In a narrow sense, the term “school of Paris” is used to designate a group of artists from various countries who, in the opinion of a number of critics, created their own variant of expressionism, marked by elements of fantasy and, at the same time, by extremely intimate images. Such artists included A. Modigliani from Italy, M. Chagall from Russia, J. Pascin from Bulgaria, C. Soutine from Lithuania, M. Kisling from Poland, and T. Foujita from Japan.

In a broad sense, the term “school of Paris” is used to designate all artists, both French and foreign, who lived in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris, the favorite haunt of bohemian artists. These artists continued, in various ways, the experiments of the early 20th century (fauvism, cubism) or created new movements (dadaism, surrealism) that were similar to avant-gardism in literature.

REFERENCE

Nacenta, R. Ecole de Paris. Neuchâtel, 1960.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.