Prince of Montparnasse / The Painter Jules Pascin, 1885 - 1930 | Ernest Hemingway / A Moveable Feast, Paris 1920s

Jules Pascin                                                                          Man Ray, Jules Pascin, 1923  

Jules Pascin, was a Bulgarian Jewish painter sometimes referred to as "the Prince of Montparnasse."

A close friend of Man Ray’s, Pascin created thousands of post-impressionist style watercolour landscapes and nudes, despite his very active social life. Squandering much of the money he earned from his works, Pascin became an alcholic and committed suicide at the age of 45 on the eve of one of his most prestigious solo shows.

"I went over and sat with Pascin and two models who were sisters. Pascin had waved to me while I had stood on the sidewalk on the rue Delambre side wondering whether to stop and have a drink or not. Pascin was a very good painter and he was drunk; steady, purposefully drunk and making good sense. The two models were young and pretty. One was very dark, small, beautifully built with a falsely fragile depravity. She was a lesbian who also liked men. The other was childlike and dull but very pretty in a perishable childish way. She was not as well built as her sister, but neither was anyone else that spring.

'The good and the bad sisters,' Pascin said. 'I have money. What will you drink?' 

‘Une demi-blonde,’ I said to the waiter. 

'Have a whisky. I have money.' 

'I like beer.' 

'If you really liked beer, you'd be at Lipp's. I suppose you've been working.' 

'Yes.'

'It goes?' 

'I hope so.' 

'Good. I'm glad. And everything still tastes good?' 

'Yes.' 

'How old are you?' 

'Twenty-five.'

Do you want to bang her?' He looked toward the dark sister and smiled. 'She needs it.' 

'You've probably banged her enough today.' 

She smiled at me with her lips open. ‘He’s wicked,’ she said. ‘But he’s nice.’ 

'You can take her over to the studio.'

'Don't make piggishness,' the blonde sister said. 

'Who spoke to you?' Pascin asked her. 

'Nobody. But I said it.' 

'Let's be comfortable,' Pascin said. 'The serious young writer and the friendly wise old painter and the two beautiful young girls with all of life before them.'” 

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

^ Pierre Marseilles and Jules Pascin with models Paquita and Césarine, 1920s  

He was born on March 31, 1885 in Vidin, Bulgaria to a Spanish-Sephardic Jewish father and a Serbian-Italian mother, the eighth of eleven children. The Pincas family moved to Bucharest, Romania in 1892 and Pascin was raised there until he left for boarding school in Vienna in 1896. 

While briefly working for his father’s grain merchant firm in Bucharest at fifteen, Pascin spent much of his time completing his earliest drawings in the local bordello, where he was residing under the Madame’s protection. In 1902, at the age of seventeen, Pascin moved to Vienna to study painting. The next year, he studied at the Heymann Art School in Munich. There, he supported himself by selling satirical drawings to Simplicissimus and other German magazines. Pascin would contribute drawings to a Munich daily through 1929. 

< Figures on Beach, Coney Island, 1917

Pascin’s contributions were widely recognized for their wit and insight, and upon his arrival in Paris in 1905 he was welcomed at the Gare Montparnasse by an international group of artists and writers who gathered at the Café du Dôme, which Pascin soon began to frequent regularly. The group included Grossman, Grosz, William Howard, Levy, and Emil Orlik. Pascin was also a close friend of Amadeo Modigliani. 

Upon his arrival in Paris, Julius Mordechai Pincas changed his name to Jules Pascin and soon became the symbol of the Montparnasse artist community. Always in his bowler hat, he was a witty presence at Le Dôme café, Le Jockey club, and the others haunts of the area’s bohemian society, and was known for hosting legendary all-night parties. (...)

< Figures and Cat in Park, 1916

Jules Pascin-woman with chair                            Jules Pascin, Und dann setzt man sich zu Tische, 1930

Jules Pascin, 1904

Jules Pascin, The Turkish Family, 1907                                                            Jules Pascin, Portrait of Lucy Krohg, 1925 

Jules Pascin, Two Figures and Cupid, 1920                         Jules Pascin,  Nude and Cupid, 1920

On the day of Pascin’s funeral, all the galleries in Paris closed. Thousands of acquaintances from the artistic community along with dozens of waiters and 

bartenders from the restaurants and saloons he had frequented, all dressed in black walked behind his coffin the three miles to the Cimetière de Saint-Ouen.

Jules Pascin, Figures with Cab, 1918

Jules Pascin, Four Men, 1926 

Pascin committed suicide by slitting his wrists and hanging himself in his studio in Montmartre. On the wall 

he left a message written in his own blood that said good-bye to his lost love, Elvire "Lucy" Ventura.

Jules Pascin, suicide note