Georges Kars

A major painter of the École de Paris, now largely overlooked, the Czech artist Georges Kars regains his rightful place at the mahJ in this first major retrospective in over forty years.

Georges Kars (Prague, 1880 – Geneva, 1945) belonged to that generation of artists from Central Europe who made Paris one of the leading centres of artistic modernity.

Trained in Munich before settling permanently in France in 1919, he developed an original body of work in which the legacy of Expressionism and Cubism gradually gave way to a deeply personal figuration, grounded in the solidity of its construction and the fullness of its forms.

Surrounded by Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Berthe Weill, Paul Poiret, Jules Pascin, Juan Gris, Suzanne Valadon or Chana Orloff, he took a full part in the artistic life of the interwar years. Yet his work gradually fell into oblivion after his suicide in Geneva in 1945.

Bringing together exceptional loans from the largest Czech institutions, this exhibition traces his career, highlights the links between the Prague and Paris art scenes and restores to Georges Kars the place he occupies in the history of 20th-century art.