Yankel Jacques

Biography

Jacques Yankel, pseudonym of Jakob Kikoïne, born April 14, 1920 in Paris, died April 2, 2020 in Aubenas (Ardèche), is a French painter, sculptor and lithographer of the second School of Paris. He is the son of the painter Michel Kikoine (1892-1968).
While, five years after his sister Claire, he was born at the Boucicaut hospital in Paris from the marriage of Michel Kikoïne and Rosa Bunimovitz - accepting this birth badly, Kikoïne had, in the company of Chaïm Soutine, fled to Cagnes-sur-Mer shortly before giving birth, abandonment lasting a year that Rosa would not forgive him despite the very developed paternal sense that would follow, Jacques Yankel spent a precarious early childhood in the artists' city of La Ruche, at 2, passage de Dantzig in the 15th arrondissement, which remained the place of residence of the Kikoïne family from 1912 to 1926. He grew up there surrounded by his family and works of art until he started kindergarten.
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In 1926, Michel Kikoïne acquired a house in Annay-sur-Serein (through which Yankel would remain linked to the Yonne department), then in 1927 the family left La Ruche to settle in Montrouge (rue de Gentilly) - "my bad company on rue de Gentilly could have made me a real scoundrel" Yankel would recall - before returning - "poverty caused us to leave the beautiful studio on rue de Gentilly" he would still remember - in the Montparnasse district (7, rue Brézin) in 1933.
His schooling was deplorable and he was refused admission to the École des arts appliqués and the Beaux-Arts in Paris. During the Second World War, he held temporary jobs in printing and engraving workshops. In 1941, he moved to Toulouse, in the free zone, and became an assistant geologist. He married Raymonde Jouve the same year, Michel and Rosa Kikoïne crossing the demarcation line clandestinely and separately in order to be present. He continued his studies and brilliantly defended a higher education diploma in geology at the Faculty of Sciences in Toulouse. In 1946, his daughter Dinah Kikoïne was born. He participated episodically as an amateur painter in the Chariot group with the artists Jean Hugon, Michel Goedgebuer, Bernard Pagès, Christian Schmidt, André-François Vernette and Jean Teulières.
In 1949, he was hired by the Ministry of Colonies for the geological map of Gao-Timbuktu-Tabankort in French West Africa. From this episode, he would keep a certain taste for African art of which he would become a collector. The following year, he unexpectedly met Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in Gao. The latter encouraged him to turn to painting.
In 1952, he returned to live in Paris, settling in La Ruche, and made his debut as a painter at the Lara Vinci gallery, rue de Seine. In 1954, while defending his thesis in geology at the Sorbonne, he exhibited his works in Paris and Mulhouse. In 1955, he experienced his first successes as an artist. He won the Neumann Prize, which he shared with Reginald Pollack, the 1st Prize of the Society of Art Lovers, as well as the Fénéon Prize, resituating himself thus: "in Paris, the era was one of miserabilism and I was a miserabilist like my friends of the time, Orlando Pelayo, Jean Jansem, François Heaulmé... The new school of La Ruche was made up of Paul Rebeyrolle, Simone Dat, Michel Thompson, Michel de Gallard, who practiced an expressionist realism influenced by Constant Permeke, Bernard Lorjou and Francis Gruber, and basically quite close to our work of the time."
From 1957 (a year he associates with his first exhibition at the Romanet gallery and the influence of Nicolas de Staël on his work) until 1959, he continued to exhibit and travelled to the Maghreb, the Balearic Islands, Geneva and Israel. In 1960, he married Jacqueline Daneyrole in Labeaume where he took up residence. From 1961 to 1965, he exhibited in Paris, Israel and Amsterdam. In 1966, his mother Rose Kikoïne died. In 1967, he left hastily for Israel for the Six-Day War. He arrived on the sixth. He voluntarily enlisted at the kibbutz Zikhron Yaakov and Maayan Zvi and worked there for three months.
His father Michel Kikoine died in 1968, the year he was hired as a professor of visual arts by students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris to succeed Raymond Legueult, who had resigned. Based at 3, rue de la Cité-Universitaire, he continued teaching until 1985, which is historically associated with the emergence of the Vohou-vohou movement, which began with a wave of students from the École des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan who came to continue their studies in his studio, and from November 1985 to January 1986 he was the curator of the exhibition African Arts - Sculptures of Yesterday, Paintings of Today, organized at the initiative of ADEIAO at the Musée des arts africains et océaniens in Paris.
At the same time, he continued to exhibit during the 1970s. In 1978, he participated in the creation of the sets for Shakespeare's Othello, staged by Georges Wilson. He began working with the Yoshii Gallery in Tokyo and Paris. In 1987, he married Lidia Syroka and exhibited in Antwerp. That year, he made the first donation of his collection of naïve art to the Musée des arts naïfs et populaires in Noyers-sur-Serein. The second donation will take place in 2018.
In 2019, Jean-François Lacour, Jacques Yankel's publisher, testified: "He will be a hundred years old in April 2020, and what is astonishing is his youth: he paints, he draws and talks about art like a child."
The 1970s: After his father's death, Jacques Yankel drew on literature in order to transpose it. He was particularly inspired by the Torah. He also painted pebbles incorporated into cement slabs and carried out projects intended for architecture. From 1975 to 1980, he refined the curve of his graphics. He played with non-colors, while his painting neglected neither still life nor interiors with strong consonances and regulatory divisions.
The 1980s: In his Ardèche studio, he strengthened his taste for assemblages of heterogeneous objects, common or not, on paper or canvas. Between 1985 and 1990, he emphasized the virtualities of the line and their close complicity with the masses of color incised by linear characters.
The 1990s: He tirelessly experiments with the operating field that is offered to his senses. He paints in a hurry, preferably in oil. "We live and paint without knowing," he states in conclusion to his confidences in Raymond Laurent's monograph. His production is made up of reliquaries, assemblages and ex-votos. He frees his imagination through objects taken from artisanal, industrial or urban folklore.