The ambition that burned in the breasts and the brushes of the immigrant artists at La Ruche was not enough to warm them on winter nights. Hunger is what lured them to Paris and hunger is what kept them there, a zealous hunger that fortified them against the physical hunger which incessantly rumbled in the bellies of the painters, the poets, and the musicians, many of them Jews, who clawed their way from their respective shtetls to the City of Light. La Ruche, which means The Beehive, was — and still is — a colony of humble artists’ studios in the fifteenth arrondissement in Paris, near Montparnasse. La Ruche was among the many artist complexes in Montparnasse that together sheltered the École de Paris, which is what the French art critics christened the swarms of immigrants suddenly overflowing their academies and their galleries in the early decades of the twentieth century. The title distinguished the foreign contaminants from the École Française, which, according to street gossip as well as literary magazines, the emigres were polluting. In a monograph on the painter André Dunoyer de Segonzac which appeared in La Carnet de la semaine in 1925, the art critic Louis Vauxcelles (himself a French Jew as well as a textbook arriviste, who was petrified that his unsavory Semitic brethren would upset his position in the art establishment) proclaimed that “a barbarian horde has rushed upon Montparnasse, descending [on the art galleries of] rue La Boétie from the cafes of the fourteenth arrondissement… these are people from ‘elsewhere’ who ignore and at their hearts look down on what Renoir has called the gentleness of the École Française — that is, our race’s virtue of tact.” (Note that anxious our.) The art critic Fritz Vanderpyl was a good deal nastier. In an article in 1924 entitled “Is There Such a Thing as Jewish Painting?” which appeared in the Mercure de France, he gnashed his teeth: In the absence of any trace of Jewish art in the Louvre, we are nevertheless witnessing a swarming of Jewish painters in the past-war salons. The Lévys are legion, Maxime Lévy, Irene and Flore Lévy, Simon Lévy, Alkan Lévy, Isidore Lévy, Claude Lévy, etc… not to mention the Lévys who prefer to exhibit under pseudonyms, a move that would be quite in line with the ways of modern Jews, and without mentioning the Weills, the Zadoks, whose names one comes across on every page of the salon catalogues. A year later the magazine L’Art vivant asked significant members of the Parisian art-sphere which ten living artists should be included in the permanent collection of a new museum of French modern art. The prominent Polish Jewish painter Moïse Kisling replied with commendable venom: “Simone Lévy, Leopold Lévy, Rudolph Lévy, Maxime Lévy, Irène Lévy, Flore Lévy, Isidore Lévy, Claude Lévy, Benoit Lévy, et Moise Kisling.” The Jewish painters of Paris had pride. Scandalous and indecorous and unconventional as they emphatically were, the School of Paris was still another of the many limbs of the French art world, and it shared vital organs with its more traditional counterparts. Like all artists in France at the time, these young rebels’ careers were dependent on showing in salons. Academic pompiers such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the distinguished but kitschy painter who was president of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, maintained a tyrannical power over the standards of French art, imposing them most publicly by rejecting works that did not conform to the accepted canons from the official annual Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. This stranglehold was momentously loosened in 1883. After having been rejected by the Salon three years earlier, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists organized a Salon des Refusés (the second in twenty years), after which the Société des Artists Indépendants was founded. Cezanne and van Gogh were among the participants in the first Salon des Independants. Since this new salon had no jury, it lacked a wider prestige. As an alternative, the competitive Salon d’Automne was held for the first time in 1903, in the newly built Petit-Palais, which had been constructed for the World’s Fair of 1900. Two years later Matisse, Derain, and their cohort famously exhibited paintings in hot violent colors, which prompted Vauxcelles, consistently averse to disruption, to call these artists Fauves or “wild beasts.” The painters at the Beehive, and more generally the School of Paris, plotted their progress into the establishment through their acceptance into the new salons. They were not really a “school,” at least insofar as they shared no artistic theories or crusades. All the styles of their time, all the modernisms and all the traditionalisms, were represented under that octagonal roof. But they had other traits in common. While a certain degree of assimilation was inevitable for these newcomers from distant lands, their otherness never left them. Otherness was among the stimulating discomforts that all the members of the “school” shared. Many thousands of hours in Parisian cafes never drowned the aftertaste of their origins. This did not defeat them, though the history books do not honor their tenacity. A handful from the School of Paris would carve their initials into the annals of art, but most of their names were uttered for the last time many decades ago. They made up a large part of the throng of Montparnasse in its golden years, of its tremendous artistic commotion, but they were erased and forgotten. Say a prayer for these minor artists, who consecrated themselves to art against circumstance; these men and women whose genius sputtered more often than it glowed, and did their best, which was often very good but rarely good enough; and say a prayer, too, for the open hands and hearts that welcomed and nurtured them, and could always spare a loaf or a smile for these destitute stewards of beauty. “You left either famous or dead,” Chagall said about La Ruche, into which he moved the fall of 1911. An overstatement, but barely. At the hive Chagall met
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