
Bulgarian-born artist Jules Pascin (1885-1930), known as the "Prince of Montparnasse," became a central figure of the École de Paris with his delicately toned paintings of women. Born Julius Mordecai Pincas in Vidin to a Sephardic Jewish grain merchant family, he moved to Bucharest as a child and began drawing in brothels at age fifteen. After training in Vienna and Munich, he adopted the pseudonym Pascin (an anagram of Pincas) when contributing to the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, sparing his father embarrassment. In December 1905, he arrived in Paris, joining the artists gathering at Café le Dôme in Montparnasse.
Pascin's style combined the fleeting, gestural qualities of Expressionism with thinly painted, poetically bitter studies of women, often prostitutes, rendered in subtle pearlescent tones. His work was included in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where twelve of his pieces introduced American audiences to European modernism. When World War I began, he fled to London, then to the United States, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1920 with support from Alfred Stieglitz. Though he returned to Paris soon after, his American citizenship allowed him to travel freely between continents during the jazz age. Pascin's lavish hospitality made him beloved in artistic circles, but depression and alcoholism led to his suicide in 1930 at age 45. His paintings of women in warm, muted tones hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
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