Paris:- Wednesday, 26. March 1997:- Julius Mordecai Pincas was born in Vidin, Bulgaria in 1885 and he died as Pascin in a hideout hotel in Paris in 1930.

Between the two dates, Pascin also managed with ease to become the living symbol of Montparnasse; its incarnation in person.

A grand retrospective of Van Gogh's in Munich in 1903 had made Paris the place to be again. For Pascin, Montparnasse started on 24. December 1905 when he arrived from Munich, to join the friends he had made there, including pals Rudolf Grossmann and Georg Grosz, on the terrace of the Dôme.

If they were not working or eating or sleeping, the Dôme was their home, their living room; open to all comers. In 1908, the Scandinavians, the eastern Europeans, the artists from the Balkans, all funneled through Germany to arrive at the Dôme - they were, collectively, Les Dômiers.

To forget the hard work of their ateliers, and when they ran out of talk, they often played poker - at the center of the room at the front. It was a non-stop game was played, for years. In a middle-Europe tradition, the Dôme was their stammtisch.

They made no particular attempt to participate in the salons in Paris, nor in exhibitions in their home countries. In June 1914, there was one exhibition at Flechtheim's gallery in Düsseldorf. It was called 'Der Dôme' and 23 artists showed there, not all of them Germans, not of any 'movement;' they were merely all these Dômiers.

On Pascin's arrival he was met at the station by the Dômiers, and installed in the Hôtel des Ecoles in the rue Delambre, around the corner from the cafe, and he stayed there until 1908.

With his humor, he became the figure at the centre of the Dômiers. Upon arriving at the café, he would demand paper and turn out sketch after sketch; sometimes adding color with coffee stains or by lightly singeing the paper with a lit match. When he did watercolors, he used 'Seltz' mineral water. Designs he did not care for fell to the floor, and after a while his place in the café resembled a pigpen.

His sketches, drawings and caricatures were successful. So it was natural that he really wanted to be was a painter, and like other artists in the group of Dômiers, he would go to the Louvre to copy the masters; although his choices there were a bit eccentric. He also took drawing courses at the Academy Colarossi and turned out a style far, far from the masters in the Louvre.

From 1908 to 1912 his designs were shown at the Fall Salon, and at salons in Berlin and Budapest. Berthe Weill accepted some of his drawings for an exposition in January 1910; but she had to put them in a corner of their own, because they could be shocking to ordinary viewers of the day.

Pascin drew the life around him. In the Dôme, in the restaurants of Montparnasse, in the brothels; he made sketches of his friends, their models, his models, girlfriends, their girlfriends, his friends' wives; of costume balls, even of Cinderella. After the Dôme, after the party, throughout the night he would often draw on copper with a ivory pen, in effect doing engravings by drawing 'blind.' He was engraving the night.

Amid the noise, the smoke, shouted orders, the multilingual conversations, he would draw. It was said he could draw so fast, that he would have a portrait of a man jumping out a window finished before the subject hit the pavement four floors below.

During the forty-five years between the dates of his birth and death, Pascin managed to either live in or visit Bucharest, Vienna, Munich, Spain, Portugal, Cologne, Berlin, New York, London, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Cuba, Tunisia, Cairo and Düsseldorf, not to mention holidays with the Dômiers on the Côte d'Azur. Pascin made his last visit to Bulgaria in 1913.

Not all of the Dômiers were men. Hermine David, who learned the painting of miniatures, engraving and design, began studies at the Beaux-Arts in 1902, which lasted only a few months before she left for the Academy Julian. Starting in 1905, she exhibited regularly at the Salon des Femmes, where it was said she had a future.

This future began in 1907 when Pascin, wearing a kimono at Henri Bing's apartment, opened the door to Hermine and immediately figured out with scissors how the unravel the rock-solid corset Madame David had installed on her daughter. Pascin prudently allowed the quite respectable Rudolf Levy inform Madam David of the fait accompli.

Women were tolerated with no great politesse by the Dômists; they were usually models or transitory girlfriends, and it took a while for Hermine to be accepted there. It was said she had a side to her considered to be 'a bit childish and hysterical.'

She also drew these surroundings incessantly and became respected for her talents and for her patience with whole evenings when only German was spoken. When Pascin quit the Hôtel des Ecoles and took up a nomadic life in Paris between Montmartre and Montparnasse, he would be often rejoined by Hermine, who never entirely left her mother.

One of the three French students of Matisse, Pierre Dubreuil, a friend of Per Krohg and Nils Dardel, Dômists all, were more comfortable with the Germans than the Americans. They were part of Pascin's crowd, even though he mocked them for their attachment to Matisse.

Pierre Dubreuil fell in love with Elvire Ventura who lived in the rue Delambre, whose father was a sculptor and assistant of Rodin's. In 1910 at age 14, Elvire had posed for Pascin, at his atelier at 8. rue de la Grande Chaumière.

Elvire was a girlfriend of Cécile Vidil, who was called Lucy. Lucy's mother had taken her out of school in 1905, also at age 14, to become an apprentice. She did care for this and ran away from Issy to Paris, and later had a bad turn when her 'rich' Brazilian boyfriend failed to turn up for a meeting with her parents.

She then followed Elvire's advice to become a model in the academies of Montparnasse and in 1910 she was working at Matisse's, where she met Per Krohg. Amour exploded between them at the Bal Bullier in early 1911, although she had posed for Pascin in Montmartre in 1909 and 1910 while he was still attached to Hermine.

The Spanish and the Agrentines danced best at the Bal Bullier, according to Per Krohg. As soon as the tango began, they threw everybody else off the dance floor and then the fights began. Per and Lucy studied the dancers at a safe distance, and practiced back at Per's atelier. When they felt confident to take the centre of the floor, and they did so with success.

So much so that they did a tour of Scandinavia, where Per was considered by his family to have degraded himself to a mere dancer. The pair made a lot of money though and they wisely invested it in high-life in Montparnasse, where they were celebrated as being the 'ideal couple.' They posed as 'apaches' for posters. They were married in Paris in December 1915.

After passing the War years in North America, Pascin and Hermine returned to Paris at the end of October 1921. On returning to the rue Joseph Bara to recuperate drawings left in a cave there, Pascin met Lucy again and they took a walk in the Luxembourg.

The two couples and Guy, the Krohg's son, spent a lot of time together before going different ways for the summer: the Krohgs to Norway and Pascin and Hermine to Tunisia.

In the fall, Hermine broke with Pascin and moved to the Hôtel d'Odessa while Pascin found an atelier in Montmartre. Pascin schemed at a reunion with Lucy, and if she did figure increasingly in his designs and etchings, she refused to quit Per and Guy. Pascin was obsessed with her.

In September 1922 Nils Dardel and Thora ran into Pascin by chance on a Montmartre corner, and they became friends. Montmartre was not what it had been before the war, but Braque, Gris, Utrillo and Valadon lived there, and Picasso returned from Montparnasse.

Pascin had a huge but practically empty atelier on the top floor of the building at 36. boulevard de Clichy. Pascin held monster parties there, amid the smells of the boulevard below: waffles, candy floss, cooking gas, lions in cages mixed with firecrackers and poorly cooked sauerkraut served at the atelier's buffet.

Pascin continued to write invitations to Lucy. Per found a new girlfriend in Treize, who he met at the Jockey where she went nightly with Kiki. Per refused to let Guy leave with Lucy for Pascin and his 'deregulated' life, and Lucy insisted on maintaining a semblance of family life by living near her son.

In fact, she passed the days with Pascin. She returned to have dinner and feed Guy, and then went out with Pascin's crowd in the evening. Pascin was not happy with this arrangement, and drank more and more.

During a dinner in 1925 at Chez Alfredo near Pigalle, the American engraver and poet, Herbert Lespinasse, invited a whole crowd down his 'villa' at Saint Tropez. Pascin, who never missed a party or a trip that promised to be one, accepted. Nils Dardel and Pascin were unable to wake Thora and they left by train without her.

A day later and furious, Thora rounded up the Swedish painter Zuhr and his wife and they took the express to Toulon. Arriving at Saint Tropez after dark, a café waiter indicated the way to the Dardel 'villa,' and after much stumbling around in the dark, they arrived to find the ladies of the Chez Alfredo party in men's pajamas, and the 'villa' not much more than a simple cabin.

Lespinasse woke the party in the mornings with gunshots, and everybody was assigned their tasks. Nils and Pascin were charged with carrying water and several of the ladies gathered firewood. While Rolla, Lespinasse's model, talked 'back to nature,' she applied her elaborate makeup using a pocket mirror, the only one there.

They went for boat rides, they went swimming, and after a few days Madame Zuhr and the Dardels went to Marseille, on account of Pascin's greco-turk-roman cooking. Pascin, of course followed, but not for the food; he and Kisling, under the protection of a local brothel-owning art lover, undertook an intensive tour of the local color in the Vieux Port, where they painted and did other amusing things.

By the time Pascin was 40 - on 31. March 1925 - he was pretty famous. His works were sold in Pierre Loeb's gallery in the rue Bonaparte, along with the works of Léger, Miro, Soutine, Utrillo and Picasso; and Lucy was selling them in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery too. The birthday party was held at Dagorno's, a well-known steak-house near the slaughter-houses of la Villette. A small group of loud friends gave him a golden replica of his habitual bowler hat.

When Pascin was invited to dinner, he arrived with all the bottles of red he could carry. When he invited everybody, as he did often, to Alfredo's, Afredo feared for his premises. In summers, they would go in great groups to picnic beside the Marne; the lunches lasting all afternoon.

He became an American citizen in 1927; sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz and Maurice Sterne. Pascin arrived in New York in August, and Lucy followed in January, but did not feel at ease there and returned to Paris after a few weeks.

In Paris, Pascin continued to make his 'bombes' - wild parties - with his band from around the boulevard de Clichy; but more than ever he was despondent over his inability to achieve personal success with his painting. He thought he should quit it altogether, and content himself to hang out, go on trips, and modestly get by with the sale of his designs.

On 5. June 1930, Lucy who had been looking for Pascin for days, got an apprentice locksmith to open the door of his live-in atelier, and Pascin was found dead. He had written "Adieu Lucy" on a wall in blood from a pricked finger. After failing to bleed to death, he had hung himself from a door handle.

Pascin's funeral was on Saturday, 7. June. All the galleries in Paris closed for the day. Thousands, including waiters and barmen, musicians, the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse, everybody Pascin knew, all dressed in black, followed the coffin the five kilometres to the cemetery at Saint Ouen under a blazing sun.

Lucy and her brother were last in line, on foot, behind Hermine David and a rabbi in a car. Abruptly, Per left the side of Treize and gesturing Lucy's brother aside, took the arm of Lucy and went the rest of way with her.

Exposition: 'Pascin - Gravé la Nuit'

The Bibliothèque Nationale is presenting over a hundred examples of Pascin's works - mostly engravings. This is the largest single collection of Pascin's works and includes proofs he pulled himself, of which there are very few copies.

Pascin was Paris from just after the turn of the century until the end of the 1920's and this was the subject of his drawings and engravings; a sort of illustrated autobiography.

The hundred or so examples on display at this exposition, represent possibly less than five percent of Pascin's lifetime production. If he was drawing non-stop in the Dôme in 1905 and he was as fast as he probably was, then his creative production from that date could have easily amounted to 25,000 designs.

That he can be vividly remembered, is accounted for by hundreds of personal memories by his contemporaries, hundreds of photographs; but only with difficulty from slightly over 100 engravings.

He was an artist personally as well as professionally, but as a painter, he was not up to his own - perhaps too high, standards. As a person who 'lived' in Paris, even in those days when the living was particularly vivid, Pascin also set a standard - that was matched by a few but exceeded by none.

If Montparnasse is synonymous with the 'Années Folles' - the Crazy Years - then Pascin was Monsieur Montparnasse. The Bulgarian, an artist who was a Parisian, one with an American passport. So right.

The exposition is located in a gallery in the passage, the Galerie Colbert. Opened in 1826, it is a smaller version of the neighboring and similarly 'L'-shaped Galerie Vivienne, opened three years earlier.

Both have circular spaces at the right-angle, although the Colbert's is larger with a diametre of 17 metres. The Galerie Colbert is now owned by the Bibliothèque Nationale; and is also the location of the restaurant, Le Grand Colbert, opened in 1900.

Galerie Colbert, 2. rue Vivienne or 6. rue des Petits-Champs, Paris 2. Métro: Bourse or Palais-Royal. From Thursday, 27. March until Saturday, 14. June. Open daily except Sundays from 12:00 to 18:30. Entry is free. A catalogue with 39 illustrations, costing 25 francs, is available in the Librarie Colbert, next door to the gallery.