Jules Pascin Biography | Oil Paintings

Jules Pascin was born Julius Mordecai Pincas in Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family of a grain merchant. The family spoke Judaeo-Spanish at home. His early artistic training at age of seventeen was in Vienna in 1902. In 1903 he went to Munich where he studied at Moritz Heymann's Academy. At the age of twenty in 1905, he adopted the pseudonym Pascin, an anagram of Pincas.

Also in 1905, Jules Pascin moved to Paris, becoming part of the great migration of artists to that city at the start of the twentieth century. In 1907 Pascin met the artist Hermine David, and they became lovers, living together in Paris until the beginning of World War I. He wanted to become a serious painter, but in time he became deeply depressed over his inability to achieve critical success with his efforts, so Jules Pascin entered the Académie Colarossi to study drawing, and, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he drew upon his surroundings and his friends, both male and female, as subjects.

At the outbreak of World War I, Pascin left for the United States via England, followed by Hermine David a few weeks later. Pascin and David lived in the United States from 1914 to 1920, avoiding World War I. He and David painted in New York City, where she had an exhibit, as well as in Miami, New Orleans, and Cuba. Pascin became a naturalized United States citizen in 1920.

During the 1920s, Jules Pascin mostly painted prostitutes waiting for clients, or models waiting for the sitting to end. His fleetingly rendered paintings sold readily, but the money he made was quickly spent. Famous as the host of numerous large parties in his flat, whenever he was invited elsewhere for dinner, he arrived with as many bottles of wine as he could carry, and soon would be joined by a few friends, and by diners end, he would need nine taxi's to continue partying in the cabarets.

Jules Pascin struggled with depression and alcoholism, and at the age of 45 on the eve of a prestigious solo show, he committed suicide by slitting his wrists and hanging himself in his studio in Montmartre. On the wall, he left a message written in blood, to a former mistress Lucy Krohg. In his last will, Pascin left his estate equally to his wife, Hermine David, and his mistress Lucy Krohg.

On the day of Pascin’s funeral, thousands of acquaintances from the artistic community along with dozens of waiters and bartenders from the restaurants and saloons Pascin frequented, all dressed in black, walked behind his coffin the three miles from his studio to the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen.

Art Movement: Expressionism, Cubism.
He Traveled To Austria, Germany, England, USA, Hungary, Cuba.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.