In the 18th century, students recited poems at the foot of an artificial hillock of rock rubble from the
Catacombs of Paris. Ironically, they decided to baptise this mound
Mount Parnassus, named after the
Mount Parnassus celebrated in
Ancient Greek literature. In the early 20th century, many
Bretons who were driven out of their region by poverty arrived by train at
Gare Montparnasse, in the heart of the Montparnasse district, and settled nearby. Montparnasse became famous in the
Roaring Twenties, referred to as
les Années Folles (the Crazy Years), and the 1930s as the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. From 1910 to the start of
World War II, Paris' artistic circles migrated to Montparnasse as the alternative to the
Montmartre district which had been the intellectual breeding ground for the previous generation of artists. The Paris of
Charles Baudelaire,
Robert de Montesquiou,
Zola,
Manet,
France,
Degas,
Fauré typically indulged in the
Bohemianism cultural refinements of
Dandyism. The cultural scene during the late-1920s for
expatriates in Montparnasse and the
6th arrondissement is described in
John Glassco's 1970 book
Memoirs of Montparnasse. Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere of Montparnasse and for the cheap rent at artist communes, such as
La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated
Ateliers, 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
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell for millions of euros. at
Gare Montparnasse ,
Picasso and
Salmon, at
La Rotonde, by
Cocteau, 1916. In post-
World War I Paris, Montparnasse was a euphoric meeting place for the artistic world.
Fernand Léger wrote of that period: "man...relaxes and recaptures his taste for life, his frenzy to dance, to
spend money...an explosion of
life-force fills the world." They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe - from Europe, including Russia,
Hungary and
Ukraine, from the United States, Canada,
Mexico,
Central and South America, and from as far away as Japan.
Manuel Ortíz de Zárate,
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
Jacob Macznik,
Pablo Picasso,
Guillaume Apollinaire,
Ossip Zadkine,
Julio Gonzalez,
Moise Kisling,
Jean Cocteau,
Erik Satie,
Marios Varvoglis,
Marc Chagall,
Nina Hamnett,
Jean Rhys,
Fernand Léger,
Jacques Lipchitz,
Max Jacob,
Blaise Cendrars,
Chaïm Soutine,
James Joyce,
Ernest Hemingway,
Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel,
Michel Kikoine,
Pinchus Kremegne,
Amedeo Modigliani,
Ford Madox Ford,
Toño Salazar,
Ezra Pound,
Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp,
Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti,
Henri Rousseau,
Constantin Brâncuși,
Eva Kotchever,
Claude Cahun and
Marcel Moore,
Paul Fort,
Juan Gris,
Diego Rivera,
Federico Cantú,
Angel Zarraga,
Marevna,
Tsuguharu Foujita,
Marie Vassilieff,
Léon-Paul Fargue,
Alberto Giacometti,
René Iché,
André Breton,
Alfonso Reyes,
Pascin,
Nils Dardel,
Salvador Dalí,
Henry Miller,
Samuel Beckett,
Emil Cioran,
Reginald Gray,
Endre Ady,
Joan Miró,
Hilaire Hiler,
Magdalena Rădulescu, and, in his declining years,
Edgar Degas. at night 2007 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
Chaïm Soutine,
Amedeo Modigliani,
Jules Pascin and
Fernand Léger 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
Café de la Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". They became good friends and 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. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. 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. The cafés,
bistros and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where cultural ideas and connections were hatched and mulled over. The
cafés 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 cafés
Le Dôme,
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 could not 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 café's walls were littered with a collection of artworks. There were many areas where the artists congregated, one of them being near Le Dôme at no. 10 rue Delambre called the
Dingo Bar. It was the hang-out of artists and ex-patriate Americans and the place where Canadian writer
Morley Callaghan, who came with his friend
Ernest Hemingway, both still unpublished writers, met the already-established writer
F. Scott Fitzgerald. When
Man Ray's friend and
Dadaist,
Marcel Duchamp, left for New York City, Man Ray set up his first studio at l'Hôtel des Ecoles at no. 15 rue Delambre. This is where his career as a photographer began, and where
James Joyce,
Gertrude Stein,
Kiki of Montparnasse,
Jean Cocteau and the others filed in and posed in black and white. The
rue de la Gaité in Montparnasse was the site of many of the great
music-hall theatres, in particular the famous "
Bobino". 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 differently 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 colours, 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, an art collector who married artist
Max Ernst, lived in the
Hôtel Lutetia and frequented the artist studios of Montparnasse, acquiring pieces that would come to be recognized as masterpieces now in the
Peggy Guggenheim Museum in
Venice, Italy. The
Musée du Montparnasse opened in 1998 at 21
Avenue du Maine and closed in 2015. Although operating with a tiny city grant, the museum was a non-profit operation. The
Gallery of Montparnasse was one of the first to introduce
abstract expressionism in France in the 1940s, and still holds contemporary art exhibitions today. ==Economy==