Moïse Kisling

In June 1914, two Polish painters faced each other with swords in a field outside Paris over a quarrel about honour. One of them was Moise Kisling, then 23 and newly arrived from Krakow. His second that day was the young Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Both men survived with light wounds, and the duel became one of the founding legends of Montparnasse.

Kisling had come to Paris in 1910 and settled among the painters of the Left Bank, sharing a building at one point with the painter Jules Pascin and living close to Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian painter who became a friend and painted his portrait in 1916. When the First World War broke out Kisling, still a foreign citizen, volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. He was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1915 and was granted French citizenship in return for his service.

He painted portraits, flowers, and reclining nudes with a hard, enamel-smooth surface and clean bright colour that made him one of the most sought-after painters of the 1920s. Being Jewish, he fled France again when the Germans invaded in 1940 and spent the war in the United States. He came back afterwards to the south of France and died at Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, in 1953.