A painter of Montmartre, Gen Paul's work in the 1920s is distinguished by his expressionist portraits and his observations of street scenes.

Montmartre represents both the literal and artistic birthplace of Eugène Paul, better known as Gen Paul. Born in 1895 into a modest bohemian family, in an apartment on Rue Lepic, famous for having been depicted in a painting by Van Gogh, his mother was a seamstress and his father a cabaret musician. Interested in art from an early age, Gen Paul began painting and drawing. The death of his father when he was only ten years old forced the young Gen Paul to look for a job, which he found in Parisian decoration workshops, allowing him to continue his artistic activities.

Montmartre was, at the time, the beating heart of Parisian – and international – artistic creation, attracting poets, painters and musicians from all over the world. Its lively nightlife, rich in cabarets, circuses and café-concerts, which acquired an almost mythical status in the cultural imagination, is depicted in the famous works of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh and Maurice Utrillo, who influenced the young Gen Paul.

The arrival of the Great War put this colourful world on hold for a few years and found Gen Paul at the front, where he was wounded twice, the second time requiring the amputation of his right foot. Returning from the war, Gen Paul began his true artistic career. At the Bateau-Lavoir, a residence and meeting place for the artistic avant-garde, he met the Cubist painter Juan Gris, who gave him old artistic materials. His circle of friends also included Maurice Utrillo, Vlaminck and Jean Dufy, the latter maintaining a long and fruitful artistic correspondence with Gen Paul. Painters of ‘modern life’, according to Charles Baudelaire's famous phrase, they would go down in history as the École de Montmartre, specialising in urban landscapes and scenes of bohemian city life.

Amidst all these artistic influences, Gen Paul began to seek his own path of artistic expression, distinct from that of his contemporaries. He became one of the first French Expressionists, developing his own dynamic and free style. Gen Paul, like the German Expressionists of the same period, sought the sources of his art in dynamic urban life, street scenes, bistros and café-concerts.