Born in Paris on April 14, 1920, in the artists' city of La Ruche, Jacques Yankel, son of the painter Michel Kikoine, spent a precarious childhood surrounded by art. His schooling was difficult, and he was rejected from the École des Arts Appliqués and the Beaux-Arts in Paris. During the Second World War, he worked in a printing house and became a geologist's assistant in Toulouse, where he obtained a higher diploma in geology and married Raymonde Jouve.
In 1949, he participated in the geological map of French West Africa, developing an interest in African art. Encouraged by Jean-Paul Sartre to turn to painting, he returned to Paris in 1952 and exhibited for the first time at the Lara Vinci Gallery. His first successes came in the mid-1950s, with several awards including the Neumann Prize and the Fénéon Prize. From 1957 to 1959, he exhibited and traveled to the Maghreb, the Balearic Islands, Geneva, and Israel.
He taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1968 to 1985, influencing the generation of the Vohou-vohou movement and organizing the exhibitionAfrican Arts - Sculptures of Yesterday, Paintings of TodayIn the 1970s, he drew inspiration from literature and the Torah, worked with pebbles and cement slabs, and developed a careful graphic style. The 1980s saw him focus on assemblages of heterogeneous objects and the exploration of lines and masses of color.
In the 1990s, he continued to experiment with ex-votos and reliquaries, freeing his imagination through objects drawn from artisanal and urban folklore. Jacques Yankel died on April 2, 2020 in Aubenas (Ardèche), leaving behind a deeply original body of work, blending expressionism, African influences, and formal inventiveness.
