Montparnasse

The Montparnasse Tower, which at 209m was the tallest building in Western Europe when it was built.

Montparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centered on the intersection of the Boulevard de Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse was absorbed into the 14Ã¨me arrondissement in 1860.

The area also gives its name to:
*Gare Montparnasse â€" trains to Brittany, TGV to Tours, Bordeaux, Le Mans; rebuilt as a modern TGV station;
*The large Montparnasse - BienvenÃ¼e mÃ©tro station;
*CimetiÃ¨re du Montparnasse â€" the Montparnasse Cemetery, where Charles Baudelaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett are buried
*Tour Montparnasse, a lone skyscraper.The Pasteur Institute is located in the area. Beneath the ground are tunnels of the Catacombs of Paris.

There are a number of Breton restaurants specializing in crÃªpes (thin pancakes), a few blocks from the Gare Montparnasse, serving Bretons who arrived here from Brittany.

The name Montparnasse stems from the nickname "Mount Parnassus" (In Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses â€" the Muses â€" of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighborhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry.

The hill was levelled to construct the Boulevard Montparnasse in the 18th century.

During the French Revolution many dance halls and cabarets opened their doors.

Artistic Montparnasse

Like its counterpart Montmartre, Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as the AnnÃ©es Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. From 1910 through the start of World War II, Paris' artistic circles migrated to Montparnasse, an alternative to the Montmartre district which had been the intellectual breeding ground for the previous generation of artists. The Paris of Zola, Manet, France, Degas, FaurÃ©, a group that had assembled more on the basis of status affinity than actual artistic tastes, indulging in the refinements of Dandyism, was at the opposite end of the economic, social, and political spectrum from the gritty, tough-talking, diehard, emigrant artists that peopled Montmartre.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios", seldom free of rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell in the millions of dollars.

They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de ZÃ¡rate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, ToÃ±o Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, LÃ©on-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, Andre Breton, Pascin, Salvador DalÃ, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan MirÃ³ and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.

[[Image:PicassoandFriends.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Montparnasse friends.In a 1915 photograph in front of La Rotonde are (left to right): {{Manuel Ortiz de ZÃ¡rate}}, {{Henri-Pierre RochÃ©}} (in uniform), {{Marie Vassilieff}}, {{Max Jacob}} and {{Pablo Picasso}}]]

La Rotonde at night 2002

Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Leger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew." They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.

While most of the artistic community gathered here were struggling to eke out an existence, well-heeled American socialites such as Peggy Guggenheim, and Edith Wharton from New York City, Harry Crosby from Boston and Beatrice Wood from San Francisco were caught in the fever of creativity. Robert McAlmon, and Maria and Eugene Jolas came to Paris and published their literary magazine Transition. Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse would establish the Black Sun Press in Paris in 1927, publishing works by such future luminaries as D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and others. As well, Bill Bird published through his Three Mountains Press until British heiress Nancy Cunard took it over.

CafÃ©s rented tables to poor artists for hours at a stretch. Several, including La Closerie des Lilas, remain in business today.

Le DÃ´me at night 2002

The cafÃ©s and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where ideas were hatched and mulled over. The cafÃ©s at the centre of Montparnasse's night-life were in the Carrefour Vavin, now renamed Place Pablo-Picasso. In Montparnasse's heyday (from 1910 to 1920), the cafÃ©s Le DÃ´me, La Closerie des Lilas, La Rotonde, Le Select, and La Coupole—all of which are still in business— were the places where starving artists could occupy a table all evening for a few centimes. If they fell asleep, the waiters were instructed not to wake them. Arguments were common, some fueled by intellect, others by alcohol, and if there were fights, and there often were, the police were never summoned. If you couldn't pay your bill, people such as La Rotonde's proprietor, Victor Libion, would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay. As such, there were times when the cafÃ©'s walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the world's greatest museums drool with envy.

There were many areas where the great artists congregated, one of them being near Le DÃ´me at no. 10 rue Delambre called the Dingo Bar. It was the hang-out of artists and expatriate Americans and the place where Canadian writer Morley Callaghan came with his friend Ernest Hemingway, both still unpublished writers, and met the already established F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Man Ray's friend and Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, left for New York, Man Ray set up his first studio at l'HÃ´tel des Ecoles at no. 15 rue Delambre. This is where his career as a photographer began, and where James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and the others filed in and posed in black and white.

The rue de la GaitÃ© in Montparnasse was the site of many of the great music-hall theatres, in particular the famous "Bobino."

Great artists performed at the Bobino Nightclub.

On their stages, using then-popular single name pseudonyms or one birth name only, Damia, Kiki, Mayol and Georgius, sang and performed to packed houses. And here too, Les Six was formed, creating music based on the ideas of Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau.

The poet Max Jacob said he came to Montparnasse to "sin disgracefully," but Marc Chagall summed it up more elegantly when he explained why he had gone to Montparnasse: "I aspired to see with my own eyes what I had heard of from so far away: this revolution of the eye, this rotation of colors, which spontaneously and astutely merge with one another in a flow of conceived lines. That could not be seen in my town. The sun of Art then shone only on Paris."

While the area attracted people who came to live and work in the creative, bohemian environment, it also became home for political exiles such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Porfirio Diaz, and Simon Petlyura. But, World War II forced the dispersal of the artistic society, and after the war Montparnasse never regained its splendour. Wealthy socialites like Peggy Guggenheim, who married artist Max Ernst, lived in the elegant section of Paris but frequented the studios of Montparnasse, acquiring what would become masterpieces that today hang in the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy.

The MusÃ©e du Montparnasse opened in 1998 at 21 Avenue du Maine. Although operating with a tiny city grant, the museum is a non-profit operation.

External links

* La Rotonde Terasza, Paris (1917), by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna) (scroll down to 5th painting).
* Homage to Friends from Montparnasse by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (Marevna), c.1962, oil/canvas, top left to right: Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, his wife Jeanne HÃ©buterne, Max Jacob, galerie owner Leopold Zborowski[1][2]; bottom left to right: Marevna, her and Diego Rivera's daughter Marika, (Amedeo Modigliani), Moise Kisling.
* "Legendary Sin Cities" â€" CBC television documentary
*The Montparnasse district - Photographs of the years 1900 at our days
* Map of Montparnasse in Paris

Montparnasse: Encyclopedia BETA

Contents

Montparnasse

Artistic Montparnasse

Further reading

External links