School of Paris

The School of Paris (École de Paris) is a collective term describing the diversity of artists who worked in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the city became a magnet for artists from around the world and the principal centre of innovation in modern art. It is not a school in the literal sense nor a single style, but rather a designation for an international creative community concentrated in the districts of Montmartre and Montparnasse. Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and abstraction intersected here, and artists' cafés and studios such as La Ruche became spaces for the exchange of ideas. A distinctive feature of the School of Paris was the large proportion of foreigners and émigrés: Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris from Spain, Amedeo Modigliani from Italy, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine and Ossip Zadkine from Eastern Europe. Artists of Ukrainian origin made a significant contribution, including the sculptor Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern; known before her marriage as Sonia Terk) and Mykhailo Boichuk, whose presence firmly places their work within the European artistic context. After the Second World War the term was also applied to a new generation of abstract painters. The School of Paris symbolises the era when Paris was the undisputed capital of world art.