Julius Mordecai Pincas comes from a wealthy family of traders and bankers based in Bucharest. He was banished by them when they learned of his desire to embark on an artistic career and of his affair with the manageress of a brothel (who was to be a lasting inspiration for his work). He was forced to change his name to Jules Pascin.
After training in Eastern Europe, he moved to Paris, where he quickly became the “Prince of Montparnasse”. There he continued his work as a cartoonist and illustrator, while at the same time establishing links with avant-garde artists from Montparnasse and Montmartre. Among them Foujita, Van Dongen, Derain and Matisse.
When France entered the war in 1914, he was forced to go into exile in the United States, his nationality making him an enemy. He travelled all over America, from New Orleans to Cuba. After the Armistice and his return to Paris, he continued his travels to Algeria, Tunisia, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
From these journeys, he brought back sketchbooks, many of them erotic. If they had caused a scandal on the other side of the Atlantic, they were received by the French critics: “Why,” he said, “is a woman considered less obscene from behind than from the front, why are a pair of breasts, a navel, a pubis still considered immodest nowadays, where does this censorship, this hypocrisy come from? Does it come from religion? ». Pascin is at all the balls, all the parties and all the Parisian banquets; he has never ceased to frequent the brothels of Montmartre whose “daughters” are the subject of his works in the same way as his wife Hermine David or his mistress Lucy Krogh.
At a time when figurative art was being questioned by cubists, abstracts and surrealists, Pascin sank into the throes of alcohol and above all doubt, to the point of committing suicide at the age of 45 in his apartment on the Boulevard de Clichy. His funeral is a day of mourning for the Parisian artistic world.
