Discerning Jewish Modernism in Paris
By Vladyslava Moskalets
As I was leaving for my month-long research stay in Paris, I took along Blooming Spaces: The Collected Poetry, Prose, Critical Writing, and Letters of Debora Vogel (2020), translated and edited by Anastasiya Lyubas. This collection of texts by Vogel, a Jewish writer from Lviv, resonated with me so powerfully and seemed so timely that I read the full book on board.
In one of her letters, Vogel mentioned her forthcoming trip to Paris in the 1930s: "Paris is a symbol of a life that always wins, that does not allow any stagnation, or 'squeezing to one point'." Her references to Paris made me think about the link Jewish intellectuals and artists had with this city in the early 20th century. Paris maintained its status as the center of gravity for numerous artistic initiatives during the interwar period, and they searched for contacts, self-assertion, and career opportunities there. Now, we can look for their traces in the city's geography, reflected not in architecture but in symbols that only we can decipher.
One such experience happened in a room in the Musée de l'Orangerie with paintings by Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955), a Parisian post-impressionist who depicted the urban landscapes of Montmartre. His paintings of city streets became famous in Paris in the interwar period. This is where Vogel likely saw them when she visited the city in the 1920s and 1930s. Utrillo impressed the poet, and she included him in her works in various contexts.
Vogel's poem "Suburban Houses" begins with the note "After Utrillo." She probably owes to Utrillo her attention to billboards, graffiti, and other transient urban landscape elements. Two hearts punctured by an arrow, a motif she saw in a Utrillo painting, became a symbol of sadness and hopelessness, just like Parisian love songs. This painting is held in the Pola Museum of Art in Japan rather than in the Musée de l'Orangerie. Vogel also mentioned Utrillo in her essays on art history, for example, comparing him to Marc Chagall and contrasting the static fatality of his landscapes with the dynamic suffering of Chagall's works. I had learned about Utrillo from a poem by Vogel, so now the museum room gave me a sense of a special contact with the Lviv poet rather than the Parisian painter.
The Museum of Jewish Art and History was another place to look for familiar stories. Its rich exposition shows the diversity of the Jewish world. Paris was home to Ashkenazi Jews and, increasingly during the 20th century, to Sephardic Jews. Still, I was amazed when I first saw the works of the artist Issachar Ber Ryback (1897–1935). He was born in Yelisavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine) and came to Paris in 1925. Rybak was a member of the Kultur Lige, a Jewish organization that emerged in Ukraine governed by the Central Rada and promoted secular Jewish culture, so he was closely associated with the development of Ukrainian culture. Rybak's family suffered in the pogroms, which deeply affected him. His engravings and expressionist paintings depicted the dark, gloomy shtetl. For Rybak, the shtetl was already a memory, not nostalgic, but grim and heavy.
Rybak's painting Aleph Bet, which hangs at the entrance, is on loan from his museum in the Israeli city of Bat Yam. This is Rybak's early work, dated 1918-1919, i.e., from the Kultur Lige period. Aleph Bet is a cubist still life in which a kiddush cup, candlestick, and matzah are intertwined with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. For Rybak, just like for El Lissitzky, another Kultur Lige artist, Hebrew letters were, on the one hand, in line with the visual tasks of abstract art, while on the other, served as an introduction to deeper motifs having to do with the Jewish tradition. This work best reveals Rybak's approach to Jewish art, as declared in the programmatic article "Paths of Jewish Painting. Reflections of an Artist" (1919), which he wrote jointly with Boris Aronson. The article argued that national art was possible precisely because of the form and cited the example of Chagall as the first Jewish artist. Aronson and Rybak concluded with an optimistic prediction: "Having exhausted all forms of the plastic craft and sacrificed the ecstasy of life's emotions in the name of mastery, the tired West is calling for new artists, Jewish artists, who are in love with the form the Asian way." As we can see, the West was not a source of inspiration for them, but rather a place to be enriched by hitherto absent or even discriminated artists.
The museum also has models of Eastern European synagogues, including some from Ternopil, Zhovkva, and Ostroh. Made in 1948, they stand alone, unfortunately, and are not provided with any explanations. The lack of descriptions slightly complicates the museum's educational role. Rybak's painting in the hall has no comment, while the museum's website says that he is "a key artist in the revival of Jewish art in Russia" and that "the final Bolshevik victory in Kyiv shattered the dream of Jewish cultural autonomy in Russia." The Ukrainian context of the Kultur Lige is ignored quite frequently. However, while such an omission is not surprising in the case of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Putin's Russia, it seems very strange in the case of a European museum.
Not all artists experienced Paris as a stepping stone to success. Vogel's friend, Drohobych writer and artist Bruno Schulz, also went to Paris in 1938, as we read in his correspondence with Romana Halpern, a member of Warsaw's literary and artistic milieu. She sincerely believed that the trip would cheer him up: "If you can really concentrate on going to Paris, it will, of course, be much better medicine than visiting even the most famous neurologist (…) Bruno, have a little faith in yourself because you are a great artist and will create things that will surprise the world" (15 May 1938, Bruno Schulz. Book of Letters. Compiled and prepared for publication by Jerzy Ficowski, translated by Andrii Pavlyshyn, 2012). His trip was overshadowed by the bureaucratic complications of obtaining a passport. Because of the delay, Schulz only managed to get to Paris in the summer when all the people he had been trying to contact had already left. He couldn't speak French, which prevented him from communicating with those who were there. Thus, the trip was more of a depressing experience than an inspiration for Schulz, as he wrote in a letter to Halpern: "Nevertheless, I am satisfied with my visit to Paris. I saw so many amazing things. I saw the art of great eras up close, at least once, rather than in replicas. Finally, I got rid of certain illusions about a world career." (29 August 1938, Book of Letters).
Paris allows you to see many things relevant to the Ukrainian cultural context. However, not all the links are obvious, even though the institutions I have mentioned are open to the public, and the books by Vogel and Schulz and the Kultur Lige catalogs are published in Ukraine. Vita Susak's book Ukrainian Artists in Paris. 1900–1939 was published in 2010, but it can only be found in libraries now. Piotr Lukaszewicz's monograph Artes Group of Artists (1929–1935) and Other Stories of Lviv Modernism (translated and edited by Andrij Bojarov), which mentions Parisian influences on Lviv artists, was published in Ukrainian in 2021. The exhibition "In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s" (2022) presented Ukrainian artists who became famous abroad, including the Jewish artist Sonia Delaunay, who was born in the Poltava region and mentioned the influence of Ukrainian culture on her artistic sense. Awareness and presentation of these links in a more popular context are crucial for increasing our agency.
Vladyslava Moskalets
Researcher at the Lviv Center for Urban History, lecturer at the Department of History and coordinator of the Jewish Studies program at the Ukrainian Catholic University, and visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois Chicago. She researches the social history of Galician Jews and the history of urban spaces.
Originally appeared in Ukrainian @Ukraina Moderna.
Translated from the Ukrainian by Vasyl Starko.
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