JACQUES YANKEL 1920/2020

VERY BEAUTIFUL OIL DATED 69. FORMAT 65X81CM. THIS WAS THE TIME WHEN HE EXHIBITED AT THE FELIX VERCEL GALLERY IN PARIS AND NEW YORK.
Jacques Yankel, pseudonym of Jacques Kikoïne, was born on April 14, 1920 in Paris and died on April 2, 2020 in Aubenas (Ardèche), at almost 100 years old.
He is a French painter, sculptor and lithographer of the Second School of Paris.
He is the son of the painter Michel Kikoïne (1892-1968).

In 1952, he arrived in Paris, settling in La Ruche, and made his debut as a painter at the Lara Vinci gallery. In 1954, at the same time as his thesis defense in geology. he exhibits 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 Réginald Pollack, the 1st Prize of the Society of Art Lovers, as well as the Fénéon Prize, situating himself thus: “in Paris, the time is one of miserabilism and I am a miserabilist like my friends at the time, Orlando Pelayo, Jean Jansem, François Heaulmé… The new school of La Ruche is made up of Paul Rebeyrolle, Simone Dat, Michel Thompson, Michel de Gallard, who practice 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 associated with his first exhibition at the Romanet gallery and the influence of Nicolas de Stael on his work) until 1959, he continued to exhibit and traveled to the Maghreb, the Balearic Islands, Geneva and in 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 rushed to Israel for the 6-day war. He landed the sixth. He voluntarily joined the Kibbutz Zikhron Yaakov and Maayan Zvi and worked there for three months.

His father Michel Kikoïne died in 1968, the year he was hired as a plastic arts teacher by students at the Paris School of Fine Arts in order to succeed Raymond Legueult, who had resigned. Based at 3, rue de la Cité-Universitaire, he continued until 1985 this teaching which is historically associated with the emergence of the Vohou-vohou movement, started by a wave of students from the Ecole des Beaux- Arts from Abidjan came to continue their studies in his workshop, to be from November 1985 to January 1986 the curator of the exhibition African Arts – Sculptures of Yesterday, Paintings of Today organized at the initiative of the A.D.E.I.A.O. at the Museum of African and Oceanian Arts in Paris.
At the same time, he continued to exhibit during the 1970s. In 1978, he participated in the creation of the sets for the play Othello by Shakespeare produced 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 naive art to the Museum of Naive and Popular Arts in Noyers-sur-Serein. The second donation will take place in 2018.
In 2019, Jean-François Lacour, publisher of Jacques Yankel, 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 ".

Public collections:
France
Romanesque church of Sainte Marie-Madeleine de Balazuc, stained glass windows.
Jeanne-Matossian Foundation, Chartres Museum of Fine Arts.
École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, Untitled, mixed collage technique, Indian ink and gouache, 1996.
Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, Pigalle at night, watercolor; Saint-Germain-des-Prés, lithograph; Port, lithograph.
Sainte-Croix Museum, Poitiers.
Augustins Museum of Toulouse.
Israel
Helena Rubinstein Museum, Tel Aviv.
Swiss
Athénée Museum, Geneva.

Ref: TB4AOX480V