The movement only got its name when it was in danger.

In 1923, the Société des Artistes Indépendants announced that Parisian artists would henceforth show their work by nationality at their annual Salon exhibitions.

For Vitebsk-born Marc Chagall, who had just returned to Paris from Moscow via Berlin, this meant that he had to compete as a citizen of the Soviet Union, and for Moïse Kisling, who was originally from Kraków, which was Austro-Hungarian at the time, that he had to compete as a Pole.

The same was true of former Russian subject Louis Marcoussis of Warsaw, while Lou Albert-Lasard, born in the former German border town of Metz, was now a French citizen.

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Many of the sculptors and painters who exhibit regularly at the Salon des Indépendants also had an origin in common that went beyond the national: they were Jews.

Her right to live and work in Paris was widely contested, most emphatic in an article in the magazine Mercure de France, which answered in the affirmative the question it asked whether there was "a Jewish art" but affirmed that art at the same time denying any aesthetic quality.

The critic André Warnod turned against this new form of anti-Semitic demagogy in an essay in which he deliberately placed the Jewish artists next to the non-Jewish foreign artists in France – i.e. Jules Pascin next to Picasso, Marcoussis next to Juan Gris, Ossip Zadkine and Jacques Lipchitz next to Galanis and van Kees van Dongen.

But did this school really exist?

In the auction world, the term is mainly used for artists from the first half of the twentieth century whose market value does not come close to that of Chagall, Modigliani and Chaim Soutine.

The exhibition, which the Jewish Museum Berlin conceived together with the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris, is now trying to revalue the "École de Paris" by reincorporating the three art market stars on the one hand, and on the other narrowed the perspective on Jewish artists.

Unlike Warnod, it is not about Picasso and Gris, but about those talented artists from Eastern and Central Europe who came to Paris before 1920 to make their fortune in the French metropolis.

There is also a piece of historical realism in this foreshortening,