Jules PASCIN (1885-1930)

Scene in a cabaret in Havana Oil on canvas. Signed lower left. 65 x 56 cm ( Certificate of Abel Rambert of June 13, 1989. Provenance : - Purchased at the Galerie Ariel, avenue de Messine, Paris, on March 1, 1952. - Private collection G.D. Exhibition : - Around Pascin, Montparnasse and the School of Paris from 01.09.1994 to 05.02.1995 in Tokyo, Osaka, Kurashiki, Saga, reproduced on page 42 of the exhibition catalogue. - Since Bonnard" at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, March 1957, reproduced under n° 141 of the exhibition catalogue. Bibliography: Pascin, Catalogue Raisonné, Y. Hemin, Guy Krohg, Klaus Perls, Abel Rambert, La bibliothèque des arts (10 December 1991), Tome IV, illustrated p. 193. Born in Bulgaria in 1885, the first years of the 20th century were decisive for the painter. He contributed to the Munich magazine Simplicissimus in 1903, providing satirical drawings in a sharp graphic style. He travelled to Vienna and Berlin and met the artists of the European avant-garde. Emigrating to Paris in 1905, he became one of the most original and well-known figures from Montmartre to Montparnasse. His friends were Apollinaire, Salmon, Braque, Max Jacob and Vlaminck. In 1914, he left Paris for London and then New York, from where he travelled to the southern United States: Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida and Cuba. On his return to Paris in 1920, he painted bars, popular parties, prostitutes and brothels. He became one of the main representatives of what was called the Paris School. The emergence of abstraction overtook the artist, who gradually sank into alcoholism. He committed suicide in 1930. If the drawings of Cuba are numerous, the paintings are very rare. Pascin, here, looks at the natives with an amused eye, not denying his satirical spirit and his training as a caricaturist (the line is also close to that of his German expressionist friend Georges Grosz). The "gallant scene" in the tropics is painted in a Cézanne cubist style; his very angular drawing was soon abandoned on his return to Paris in 1920 in favour of a more sensual painting with rounded forms, called the "pearly period".