Flower Vase, 1916,

Oil on plywood, 50x39.5 cm,

Signed and dated.

Literature: Moise Kisling,

No III J Kisling. p. 218, no.4 (ilustrated).

Moïse Kisling, born in Krakow and a graduate of its Academy of Fine Arts, arrived in Paris in 1910, the same year in which Marc Chagall and Chana Orloff also came to the city; five years after Modigliani and Pascin had settled there (1905); a year before Kikoine arrived (1911); and three years before Soutine joined the group (1913). The first decades of the twentieth century were the time of the émigrés to Paris, chiefly artists from Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Romania) who gathered together in Montmartre and Montparnasse and together created the â€?School of Paris.â€? Every young aspiring painter from the European provinces was sent at that time to Paris to witness with his own eyes and body the sparks of the modern avant-garde then being shaped and built. So too was Moïse Kisling sent by his teacher, the Polish painter Józef Pankiewicz, to the Mecca of modern art in order to refine his style with a French flair.

The group of Jewish painters who emigrated to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, and who formed the subgroup known as the �Jewish School of Paris, � had no intention at all of producing Jewish art. Hungry for painting and avid for every artistic innovation, they thirstily absorbed something from every relevant current, beginning with Impressionism, through Fauvism and Cubism, to Expressionism, and even Surrealism in a later phase. Except for Chagall, who painted the Jewish shtetl, the fiddler on the roof, and the levitation of his love for his wife Bella, none of them was distinguished by Jewish motifs. Following the group's leader, Chaim Soutine, they painted stormy, color-saturated village landscapes, urban scenes, portraits of women and children, sensuous nudes, and still-life compositions.

The painting before us demonstrates Kisling's mastery in still-life composition. It is distinguished by its corner viewpoint: Kisling has constructed here a precise encounter between the diagonal architectural lines of the perspectival window and a double flowering—that of the overflowing bouquet of gladioli and that of the rose ornament on the vase. The lower ornament is splendid with deep violets and reds, while the bouquet itself is light and quick in yellow and blue, sharing a background of a bright landscape outside and a dark green curtain inside. The diagonals of the window receive a further echo in the triangle of the green box, which enters the frame at the lower-left corner, on whose inner face Kisling also signed his name. This precise arrangement creates an intimate corner that moves between the bright outside and the dark inside, and emphasizes the differences between them: what is within, inside the house, is embroidered and ornamented; what is outside is yellow and bright.

The choice of the ornamented vessel, which appears precious, attests to what the Dutch called â€?all-European taste, â€? founded on porcelain vessels imported from various sources, which became naturalized across the whole of Europe; similar pieces can be identified in other paintings, including a still-life by his Polish teacher, Pankiewicz. In contrast to the overflowing still-life compositions on a table painted by Pinchus Krémègne, also a member of the Jewish School in Paris, Kisling's painting is modest, keeps to a sense of measure, and is focused on a single object. Yet precisely because of this it is so alive, and so warming to the heart.

Tali Tamir