In the history of art at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, there was the school of paris, which refers not only to the French, but mainly to artists from different countries who worked in Paris in the years after the First World War, that among them there was a very interesting representative, Moïse Kisling, born in Krakow, Poland, in 1891, closely related to Modigliani.
Kisling was a very prolific artist who left lots of works of art, however Polish museums only own 4 of his works.
It is like in the case of Tamara Lempicka, Polish painter whose paintings are in high demand by private collectors while museums hardly own any.
I study in the Krakow School of Fine Arts with Jozef Pankiewicz (1866-1940), admirer of Auguste Renoir and of the French Impressionists, who encouraged Kisling to go to Paris. Kisling, in Montmartre y Montparnasse, met the poets Max jacob y andre salmon, the painters Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine, Marc Chagall y Amedeo Modigliani.
In 1911-12, Kisling spent almost a year in the city of Ceret, which became famous for the advance expressionist landscapeYo. Picasso, the cubist painter John Gray y Max jacob, Picasso's first roommate during his days of poverty in Paris, were also present during Kisling's stay.
When World War I broke out, Kisling volunteered to serve in the French Foreign Legion and Kisling seriously wounded in 1915 in the bloody battle of the We Are, for which he obtained French nationality.
Moise fled from France during the Nazi occupation, exhibiting in New York y Washington, and then settling in California. stayed in United States until 1946, when he returned to France.
Moise's painting style was influenced early by Cezanne and Cubism, but became increasingly fluid and colorful. Landscape and still life have always occupied a prominent place in the artist's work.
Frequent subjects included nudes, children, and portraits of people in the arts, including actresses, the writer Colette, and the painter Marie Laurencin, by which style some of Kisling's paintings appear to be influenced.
His portrait of a female model, "Kiki de Montparnasse in a red sweater", from 1925 for example, is both realistic and stylized, smoothly blended, yet somewhat dreamy and otherworldly, with an emphasis on shape contours.
Likewise, Moise's flower paintings were quite expressive and an important part of his work.
Interestingly, most of them seem unusually limited, since, like Kiki, they cling to the central axis of very vertical canvases as if they will cling to life.
With Kisling's dual sense of rather strong color as opposed to compositional constriction, his paintings have something very important to say, perhaps of a tangled personality afraid to go beyond itself into the world.
Moïse's legacy is not only portraits and images of the so-called “lost” generation, but also landscapes, still lifes and book illustrations stored in various museums and private collections around the world.
Died in Sanary-sur-Mer, FranceIn 1953.