School of Paris
巴黎畫派
A name for the French and émigré artists who worked in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century: not a single movement, but the years when Paris was the centre of Western art.
01About
In the early twentieth century Paris drew artists from all over the world, and Fauvism, Cubism, abstract art, and Surrealism all took shape there. In 1925 the critic André Warnod used "School of Paris" for the foreign artists who gathered in the cafés, studios, and La Ruche studio complex of Montparnasse, such as Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine, and Foujita; they shared no manifesto or style, only having left home to find their own way of painting in Paris. Sanyu went to France in 1921, and after returning to Paris from Berlin in 1923 he chose not the École des Beaux-Arts but the freer Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he drew nudes, often in ink and brush, stressing line over anatomical detail, a habit shaped by the calligraphy he studied as a boy; he too is counted among the School of Paris.
02In the gallery
Count how many lines make up a figure or an animal, then see whether their thickness swells and thins as a brush line would.
Wall label terms in Chinese
- 巴黎畫派
- School of Paris
- 蒙帕納斯
- Montparnasse
- 速寫
- Sketch
03Notes
The École de Paris was not a school but artists from elsewhere finding their own way in Paris.
In an oil painting, which stroke reminds you of brush and ink?