Works by early 20th century Jewish artists go on show in London

How can you mend a broken heart? Immersing yourself in the light and colour of the Mediterranean can go a long way to help, as Marc Chagall found when he made a new home on the French Riviera after World War II.

The greatest Jewish artist of the 20th century was devastated by the events of the Holocaust, including the destruction of his native Vitebsk, and he also lost the love of his life, Bella, to illness in the USA, where the couple spent the wartime years in exile.

You might never suspect the emotional turmoil he underwent from the three joyful and playful Chagall works in the new Royal Academy show Painting the Riviera, although there is nostalgia in his Fiances Floating above Nice, a ghostly echo of his earlier paintings of the artist and Bella, the wife with whom he spent 30 ecstatic years, floating together inside and above the streets of Vitebsk in marital harmony.

Chagall did find love again on the Cote d’Azur, where he spent the rest of his life, energised by a return to his beloved France. He married Valentina Brodsky, saw a dedicated museum to his work open in Nice and was buried in his local cemetery.   It’s clear in the vibrant canvas of 1968, one of the three Chagalls making their London debut in the RA show, that he is at home again, with his Riviera hilltop hamlet substituting for the Russian shtetl of his youth present in his early paintings, along with the chicken and goat which were recurring motifs throughout his artistic life.

Once again a couple is visible in the shadows of a painting singled out for its emotional power. “The elegiac quality of Table Before the Village with Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the background underscores the quality of refuge Chagall found in his last home on the Mediterranean,” says Heather Lemonedes Brown, co-curator of the RA exhibition.

Although they were both captivated by the Riviera, it was in Paris that Chagall met Chaim Soutine, one of many eastern European artists working out of La Ruche studios in Montparnasse, one of whom introduced him to fellow Jewish artist Amedeo Modigliani. It was Modigliani who first encouraged Soutine, a painter so impoverished that he often slept rough until an American collector bought 60 of his canvasses on the spot, to visit the Riviera.

Soutine’s sudden wealth led to him to immediately hail a taxi and demand to be driven 400 miles to Nice, and he spent the mid-1920s dramatising the curvy roads winding between the Mediterranean and the hills behind. Leopold Zborowski, the art dealer Soutine shared with Modigliani, wrote about the eccentric artist after a visit to him in the south: “He gets up at three in the morning, walks 20 kilometres loaded with canvasses and colours to find a site he likes.”

One of Soutine’s Cagnes-sur-Mer landscapes is also making its UK debut at the RA, while another lent by the Tate has inexplicably not been displayed in London for more than 60 years. But now the artist also has a portrait on display at the Courtauld, side by side with a rare nude by his old friend Modigliani in a new show of 20th century painting. Rare because Modigliani abandoned the genre after three years, his nudes considered so provocative with their depiction of pubic hair that an exhibition featuring them was closed by police  in 1917 on the grounds of indecency.

One more Jewish artist, Man Ray, features in both of these new exhibitions, and neither feature the surreal photographs for which he was best-known. The artist born Emanuel Radistzky also painted canvases and made films, and can be seen at the RA enjoying the pleasure and freedom which drew so many artists to the Riviera with friends including Picasso and his muse, Lee Miller, while his largest and most important painting is making its first UK appearance in 50 years at the Courtauld.

Singled out as a highlight alongside paintings by Picasso and Magritte, Man Ray’s Black Widow dates back to 1915, this monumental figure painting considered one of the most epic works by the artist born to Russian immigrants in 1890. His father was a tailor, prompting suggestions that the fabric swatches and suit patterns he grew up surrounded by have made their way into the picture. Certainly this painting was dear to his heart, a canvas he kept for nearly 40 years after painting it.

While it’s Jewish artists of the early 20th century who made their names abroad returning to the West End this month, a painter who made his name a few decades later, alongside Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff – England’s own Jewish artists forming the School of London –  also has a new one-man show. It’s worth hopping on a 94 bus from Piccadilly to Holland Park to enter the weird but wonderful world of RB Kitaj, the Wandering Jew who fled what he perceived as the antisemitism of the UK to surround himself with Kabbalah and Jewish ritual in his native USA.

Painting the Riviera is at the RA until 31 January 2007. Paintings by Picasso, Magritte and Man Ray are at the Courtauld Gallery