Michel Kikoine

Michel Kikoïne (; , Michail Kikóin; 31 May 1892 – 4 November 1968) was a Lithuanian Jewish -French painter who belonged to the Ecole de Paris art movement.

Life Kikoine was born in Rechytsa, present-day Belarus. The son of a Jewish banker in the small southeastern town of Gomel, he was barely into his teens when he began studying at "Kruger's School of Drawing" in Minsk. There he met Chaïm Soutine, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. At age 16, he and Soutine were studying at the Vilnius Academy of Art and in 1911 he moved to join the growing artistic community gathering in the Montparnasse quarter in Paris, France. This artistic community included his friend Soutine as well as fellow Belarus painter Pinchus Kremegne, who also had studied at the Fine Arts School in Vilnia. He enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts in Cormon's studio.

For a time, the young artist lived at La Ruche while studying at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. In 1914, he married a young lady from Vilnia with whom he had a daughter and a son. Their son, Jacques Yankel, born in France in 1920, also became a painter. The same year as his marriage, Kikoine volunteered to fight in the French army, serving until the end of World War I. His first solo exhibition took place in 1919 at the Chéron Gallery.

Kikoïne found great success in Paris. He went on to exhibit internationally across Europe and in New York. He also exhibited in Israel where he stayed for several months during the 1950s.

Style Kikoïne desired not only to describe nature but also show the unmediated experience of one in nature. And showcase nature's passion and depth in the world. Kikoïne continued with the evolution of post-Impressionist painting whilst also expressing his own Jewish spirit, as is characteristic of the Ecole de Paris movement. It is said by that the expressionist language employed by Kikoïne (and similar to that of Soutine, Frenkel and other Jewish artists of the Ecole de Paris) was a manifestation of Jewish mysticism and the experience of Jewish existence. Furthermore, it is said his art also reflected the suffering of Eastern European Jewry as well as the anxiety of a foreigner far from home, experiences he related to deeply.

Influence In 2004, at the university in Tel Aviv, Israel, a new wing in the Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery was dedicated to the memory of Kikoine.