(Author: Ute Ben-Yosef, Vol. 66, #3, Chanukah 2011)
Moses Kottler was one of the most distinguished South African Jewish sculptors, probably best known for the controversy that erupted when puritanical civil servants forced the removal of his relief sculpture, intended for the Population Registration Building in Pretoria, on the grounds of indecency.1 This was a far cry from his experiences in Paris, where he lived and worked from 1913 to 1914.
The influence of Kottler’s year in Paris on the development of his sculpture is little known and has not been adequately explored. The issue has only recently come to light thanks to the seminal work of Lithuanian art historian Antanas Andrijauskas,2 who has shone light on previously unknown aspects of the lives of Litvak artists who had worked in Paris and were part of the École de Paris.
The term “Litvak” used by Andrijauskas in the context of this article may be rather narrow as the Jewish artists under discussion came to Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century from all over Eastern Europe – from Russia, Lithuania, Latvia,
Poland, and from the Pale of Settlement, to which Russian and Polish Jews were confined under Czarist rule. While many of these areas had frequently changed borders and nationalities in the turbulent past centuries, the identities of the Jews in the Eastern European villages and shtetls remained unchanged.
The Eastern European Jewish artists in Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century were regarded as a distinct group within the modern art movements. Their life and work was researched for an exhibition in the Jewish Museum in New York in 1985.3 Prominent art historians distinguished them as the “Jewish enclave within the École”4 or as the “École Juive”5. In 1988 the SA National Gallery in Cape Town, in a wellresearched exhibition entitled “Paris and South African artists 1850-1965”, included the Eastern European Jewish artist of the Ecole de Paris and specifically Moses Kottler.6
Moses Kottler (1889/90-1977) was, as Claudia Braude points out,7 part of the group of Eastern European sculptors of the École de Paris. The fifth child of Joseph and Zirla Kottler, he was born in the northern Lithuanian shtetl Joniskis (Yanishki) into a loving, close-knit family who admired his manual dexterity. For want of a better option, they sent him at the age of 17 to be apprenticed to a watchmaker-jeweler in nearby Shavli (Siauliai). This he endured for less than a year. One cold winter when the snow was deep, he built a snowman for the children in the neighborhood and his life changed. His uncle, Chaim Israel Sacks, was so enthralled by his young nephew’s ephemeral masterpiece that he took a photo of it. At a Zionist meeting, he showed this to the famous sculptor Ilya Yakovlevich Guenzburg (1859-1939), and Guenzburg recommended that the snowman sculptor be trained to be a sculptor.8
However, Moshe had nothing but his penchant for making a true likeness, and had further absorbed his family’s fear of venturing alone into the sink of iniquity, Paris, without being able to speak French. Uncle Chaim, a Zionist, suggested instead that he study in Palestine in the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, which had been established in 1906 by the Lithuanian born Boris Schatz (1867-1932). A pupil of the great Jewish sculptor, Marc Antokolsky, Schatz had the talent to become a remarkable monumental sculptor of powerful expressionistic dynamism. However, after meeting Theodor Herzl in 1903, he found his true vocation as a Zionist and was assigned to establish Bezalel to create a distinctive style of Jewish art for the new nation they were building through the revival of Jewish crafts and their ageold symbols.
For Kottler, Bezalel was a huge disappointment. No sculpture was taught there, and there were no nude models in the drawing classes. Deeply disappointed, he left after six months but the character drawings of Jewish men which he executed there were of sufficiently high a standard to win him acceptance at the Munich Academy of Arts (he could speak German). Unfortunately, the sculpture class in Munich was full, and in June 1913, having had enough of the Munich Academy, Kottler went to Paris. There he found himself a home within the École de Paris.
Kottler’s parents and his younger siblings had in the meantime left Lithuania as part of the wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe and joined his older brothers in South Africa, settling in the vicinity of Oudtshoorn.
The École de Paris was not really a “school” but rather a lose network of avant garde artists from France and elsewhere who inspired one another. After passing a period of intense poverty, they established themselves through recognition by prominent art dealers and connoisseurs. The leading artists such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse lived in Montmartre (the cradle of cubism), situated on a hilltop on the right side of the Seine.
Most of the Eastern European artists within the circle of the École de Paris had received a solid artistic training back home in Odessa, Vilna or Vitebsk and had graduated prior to their arrival in Paris. They went to live on the poorer left side of the Seine, in Montparnasse, many renting a live-in studio in a round building in the No. 2 Passage Dantzig. The latter, dubbed “La Ruche” (The Beehive), comprised about 80 studios, set up by the art lover Alfred Boucher in 1902 with a very low annual rent of 50fr.
Montparnasse was studded with cafés, each with its own ambience.9 These became gathering places for local and international artists, dealers, collectors and writers. Art historians such as Waldemar George (a Polish Jew) reviewed their work in journals of modern art. Leópold Zborowski, a Polish art patron and dealer from Lvov, gave financial assistance to Litvak painters10 before unfortunately going bankrupt.
This crowd inevitably also drew its own entourage of unusual characters. The Jews generally met in the Café du Dôme which Chagall, according to Andrijauskas, remembered as being “like a synagogue for us”11 and where they chatted and argued in Yiddish. Kottler thus discovered that he did not need French in order to live in Paris.
In 1909, the painter-sculptor Amédee Modigliani (1884-1920) joined the group at La Ruche. The scion of a distinguished Italian Jewish family, he befriended the painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943), whose anguish, irrationality, pessimism, masochism and tendency towards necrophilia fascinated Modigliani and helped him break out of his refined but confining aestheticism. The cultured Italian in turn introduced his new circle of friends to the museums and the Old Masters, to whose work they had never been exposed before, as well as to the Parisian contemporary art world in which he was at home.
The Eastern Europeans absorbed the cosmopolitanism of the art metropolis and were inspired by its seething artistic innovations. The painters were influenced by the Fauves, an expressionist movement, while the sculptors were primarily influenced by Picasso’s cubism.
What connected the Eastern Europeans to each other – apart from the horrors of the murderous pogroms back in the Ukraine and Poland and prejudice against Jews everywhere in the Russian empire – was a desire to break free from the severity of the traditional centuries-old Eastern European orthodoxy in which their lives were so firmly rooted and so strictly regulated. Yet, as Andrijauskas repeatedly points out, they could never entirely escape the power of their childhood memories, their humanism, and sense of existential tragedy.12 Thus, while expressing themselves in the idiom of the École de Paris, they continued to draw on the folk traditions of Eastern Europe.
Paris offered these transplanted Jews the freedom to establish their own individual artistic expression. Inspiring and influencing each other, they created a distinct visual language. This initially placed them on the periphery of the Parisian art scene, yet gradually they became a dominant factor within the avant garde. By communicating with each other in Yiddish, they were even more distinct from the others. Furthermore, these Jewish artists could not participate in the carefree Parisian life, because they were so poor.
During the first half of the 20th Century, there were 151 Eastern European Jewish artists living in Paris. Some studied in art schools, some in Parisian academies and some worked by themselves. All, however, studied the Old Masters. This distinguished them from the mainstream French artists. Whereas the latter largely wanted to break away from the shackles of their tradition, the Eastern European Jews never lost their reverence for the Old Masters and frequented the Louvre and the other great art museums on a regular basis.
The most important formative year of Moses Kottler’s life was the year he spent in Paris from the summer of 1913 to the summer of 1914. He visited the Louvre, the Palais de Luxembourg, Parisian art galleries and exhibitions. He also visited studios of other artists, among them that of Aristide Maillol13 whose simplification of form into large heavy masses in the tradition of preclassical Greek, archaic art would have a powerful impact on his sculpture as it was to appear later in South Africa.
In Paris, Kottler met up with old friends from Lithuania who had preceded him to the art metropolis14. He first took a room in a little hotel (In the Rue Servandoni, just off the Rue de Vaugirard), very close to La Ruche. Later he moved to a studio close by, where he met Soutine, Chagall and sculptors Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko and Raymond Duchamp-Villon,15 through whose work he became acquainted with cubism. Of all the artists, Josef Tchaikow was the one who became his mentor and friend.
The influence of Tchaikow, who taught Kottler the technique of sculpture, was crucial.
Throughout his artistic life Kottler’s work revealed the disciplined handcraft of his mentor, his portrait heads of strong male characters, such as General Christiaan de Wet (Fig. 1) in particular, show a resemblance to Tchaikov’s portrait heads of Russian personalities.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] Fig 1. Moses Kottler. General Christiaan de Wet.1921. Bronze. University of Stellenbosch. GerickeLibrary. By kind permission Joseph Tchaikov (1888-1979) was born in Kiev in Russia, where he had trained as an engraver. He came to Paris in 1910 and joined the Machmadim (“The precious ones”), a friendship circle16 which had embraced and tried to develop further the idea of a national Jewish Art in the same ideological framework as that adopted by Boris Schatz. The group met on a regular basis to discuss the subject and participated in Zionist lectures and cultural programmes.17 In a complex way they belonged to, while at the same time stood apart from, the Jewish artists of the École de Paris. Tchaikov had established himself as a sculptor, exhibiting in the annual Salon D’Automne. He worked as an art teacher and graphic artist and was part of the friendship circle of the Litvak sculptors Oskar Miestchanianoff, Chanah Orloff and Ossip Zadkine. When the First World War broke out in 1914, both Kottler and Tchaikov had to leave Paris in haste. Kottler lost sight of his mentor, but always remembered him. Tchaikov returned to Kiev, where he was active in the Russian Revolution and became a prominent sculptor in the Soviet Union, co-founding the Jewish Socialist Cultural League, within which he taught sculpture. He also worked as director of a children’s art studio and illustrated children’s books. After the Russian revolution in 1917, he created billboards and propaganda posters for the Soviet state. In 1921, he published the book Skulptur, the first Yiddish book on sculpture, in which he advocated avant-garde sculpture as a contribution to a new Jewish art. Around 1920 Tchaikov (who by then had changed the spelling of his name to Iosif Moisevitch Chaikov), moved to Moscow and taught art in the style of cubism and futurism. For him the geometric dynamism of this style, as was the case with the Russian Constructivists, mirrored a new dawn in Soviet Russia. From 1929, he was head of the Society of Soviet sculptors in Moscow and a member of an artist’s association called “Four Arts”. Then, all of a sudden, the authorities quashed the new style of the Russian avant-garde and the artists were forced to return to socialist realism or – terrible alternative! – be branded “bourgeois western subversive enemies of the people”. Chaikov, who wanted to live and work, had to comply and created monumental sculptures idealising the daily life and heroism of the Soviet people.18 He continued working in a variety of genres, techniques and scales and in 1959 was elected Honoured Artist of the USSR. He died in Moscow in 1979. After he had left Paris and came to Cape Town, Kottler’s work showed a strong influence of cubism (Fig’s 2, 3, and 4). These little figures reveal his thorough grasp of its principles and show the influence of his friends Alexander Archipenko and Jacques Lipchitz. Kottler arranged the complex forms of the human figure in such a way that the sculptures maintain their purity of volume and are not cluttered with planes. Fig. 2. Moses Kottler. Embrace. 1920. Bronze. Bycourtesy of Deneys Kottler. Fig. 3. Statuette. 1920. Cement. By courtesy ofDeneys Kottler. Fig. 4. Moses Kottler. Standing figure (Statuette)1920. Cement. Courtesy of Deneys Kottler. They show different facets, synthesised into volumes around a central axis. These planes reveal a thorough feeling of their latent structures and despite their minute size they have a monumental impact. The art public of Cape Town, however, was not ready for the formal language of cubism. During his first solo exhibition in 1920, Kottler came under attack by a critic for his “ultra-modern studies” while on the other hand lauding him for his “virile manner of presenting his subject”.19 Kottler had to admit that he was working within an intellectual desert and he complained: “There is scarcely anyone here with whom one can discuss art. There is a very small group of really cultured people, another section of pseudointellectuals have an interest which is mostly a pose, and the remainder, the great mass of South Africans, is wholly indifferent to art in any shape or form. There is no art tradition here.”20 He kept himself going by commissions of portrait sculptures, the most important one being that of the prominent art collector Max Michaelis. This enabled him to leave Cape Town in 1929 and spend two years in London. After that he settled in Johannesburg, where he carried out some commissions for mining companies. However, the most prominent commissions eluded him. In Kottler’s wood sculptures of African nudes (see Fig. 5) and ‘Mother and Child’ motifs, he developed his sensitivity for formal relationships between volume and contour, and the transition of light and shadow in which he discovered the essence of life and through which he captured what remained most vital to him: the human element, its most personal and intimate characterization. His female figures are captured in moments of extreme silence. Maillol had influenced him in the separation of the formal elements of the human figure, The cubist style of Fig. 5. Moses Kottler. Kneeling Girl. 1959.Teakwood. H: 46cm. Scholz collection. Universityof Stellenbosch. Sasol Museum. With kindpermission. the École de Paris gave him his rhythmic vitality, but Kottler’s humanism burst forth in his intimate sculptures of women in their frailty, their silence and their pride. They bear the stamp of his unique style in which he reached true universality as a sculptor. Moses Kottler’s female figures have a presence and an essence of their own, beyond the realm of mere portrayals. A stifling environment can impact on the style of an artist, but not on his essence of creativity. Right to the end, Moses Kottler remained true to himself. He often was overlooked for official commissions in favour of his contemporary, Coert Stenberg, who was the representative sculptor of the nationalist community, although two years before his death he was credited by Prof J du P Scholtz with having given the nation “the finest portrayals of Afrikaner leaders.”21 Yet his personal works, notably the African figures, are housed in every South African art gallery. Five years after his Population Registration figures were ignominiously removed, the SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns awarded Kottler a gold medal for his contribution to sculpture in South Africa. Did shame at the treatment of the statue have something to do with the award? In 1975, Scholtz referred to that episode as “a disgrace”, adding that “the main thing is that the injustice which Moses Kottler had experience in 1957 from Afrikaners, should now be undone by Afrikaners – it is never too late to regain one’s honour.”22 In his year in Paris, Kottler had the opportunity to develop as an artist, rubbing shoulders with other Jewish and non-Jewish artists who, like him, were part of a golden age of artistic ferment and talent. This he brought to South Africa as part of his artistic heritage. Dr Ute Ben Yosef, who holds a PhD in Art history, is a former director of the Jacob Gitlin Library. Her publications include The Graven Image: The Life and Works of Moses Kottler (Perskor, Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1989). 
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