Moïse
KISLING

It was on the advice of Pankiewicz, his teacher at the Krakow School of Fine Arts, that Moses Kisling, of Polish origin, arrived in Paris in 1910. 
In Montparnasse, he met Juan Gris, Picasso, Soutine and Modigliani, with whom he became particularly close friends. He visited Brittany, intrigued by the profound renewal initiated by the Pont-Aven School. In 1913, he also went to Céret, which was then called "the Mecca of Cubism" and where Matisse regularly enjoyed staying. The young man was influenced by the great artistic figures of the beginning of the century, first and foremost Cézanne, whose lesson was beginning to be understood and applied. Like Cézanne, he focused on painting still lifes of great sobriety, which were a pretext for the construction of geometric forms by facets. 
But Kisling's inspirations are more extensive, they intermingle to form his own style, giving birth to melancholic and sensual characters, explosive bouquets or even resolutely constructed landscapes.

In 1919, the Druet Gallery gave him his first exhibition. Shortly after the Second World War and after returning from several years of exile in the United States, far from his family, the painter settled in Sanary in the villa he had built at the end of the previous decade. From the 1920s onwards, several stays in the small seaside town in the South of France had decided the couple to gradually make it their home. It is there that he died in 1953.