Description:

Jules Pascin
New York / France, Bulgaria, (1885-1930)
one illustration from Ferme la Nuit by Paul Morand
lithograph print
Pencil signed lower right. Numbered "B/E" on lower left.

Biography from the Archives of askART: Jules Pascin was born in 1885 in Vidin, Bulgaria. His name was Julius Mordecai Pincas and he was the eighth of eleven children of a Spanish Sephardic Jew and his Serbian-Italian wife. He was raised in Bucharest, Romania. He attended art schools in Vienna and Munich and traveled to Berlin and Paris. From 1905 to 1929, he worked as a satirical cartoonist for a Munich weekly. From 1914 to 1920 he lived in America.

He changed his name to Pascin (French) but he was equally at home in any country; he became a citizen of the United States in 1920. He traveled extensively in the southern states and portrayed the downtrodden segments of society. In 1920 he returned to Paris and from there he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa. He changed his mediums from watercolor and drawing to oil paint.

Pascin's preoccupation was women. Everywhere he went he liked to sponge up wine, Pernod and brandy; he liked to work with thirty or forty friends carousing about him in his studio. Mostly his subjects and companions were the girls of easy, and available virtue.

Pascin was sensuously ugly with heavy features under a perennial black derby. As he began to age, his art more and more portrayed the image of an old man teased by willing sprites. Slowly his vision of women softened to match their contours. As his nudes grew ever more evanescent in powdery pastels, they also became even more erotic.

In 1930, at the age of forty-five, Pascin slashed his wrists, wrote a note to his mistress on the wall in blood, and finding death too slow in coming determinedly hanged himself from his studio door.

Sources include:
Time Magazine, January 20, 1967

  • Provenance: Julius Mordecai Pincas (March 31, 1885 – June 5, 1930), known as Pascin (pronounced [pas.kin];erroneously French: [pas.k?~] or [pa.s?~]), Jules Pascin, or the "Prince of Montparnasse", was a Bulgarian artist known for his paintings and drawings. He later became an American citizen. His most frequent subject was women, depicted in casual poses, usually nude or partly dressed.

    Pascin was educated in Vienna and Munich. He traveled for a time in the United States, spending most of his time in the South. He is best known as a Parisian painter, who associated with the artistic circles of Montparnasse, and was one of the emigres of the School of Paris. Having struggled with depression and alcoholism, he committed suicide at the age of 45.
  • Dimensions: 10"H x 15"W (sight), 15 1/4"H x 21"W (frame)
  • Medium: lithograph print

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April 29, 2023 11:00 AM EDT
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