Tsuguharu Foujita, Japanese painter and engraver (left), at a cabaret with one of his outrageous models, Kiki of Montparnasse (centre)
Few districts of any city can boast such a transformation as Montparnasse, a garbage heap that, in the course of a century, came to be hailed as the center of the civilized world.
When, in the 19th century, seminarians from the Latin Quarter climbed up from the Seine, heading for the village of stonemasons who made and sold cheap wine, they first had to clamber over an accumulation of rubble from demolished buildings and spoil from the underground stone quarries. Worse, this was also Paris’s Potter’s Field, where the unknown dead lay in unmarked graves. Sarcastically, the students christened it Mont Parnasse—Mount Parnassus—after the peak in Greece where the muses lived. In 1860, Baron Haussmann’s work gangs leveled the spoil heap and built an avenue along the hilltop to mark the southernmost border of Paris. But the name stuck. The street became boulevard du Montparnasse.
Tsuguharu Foujita, Japanese painter and engraver (left), at a cabaret with one of his outrageous models, Kiki of Montparnasse (centre)
Invasion created the culture of Montparnasse. Like the first hippies in San Francisco colliding with the last of the Beats, or London’s Angry Young Men bumping heads with survivors of prewar Fitzrovia, new arrivals after World War I found a colony dating back 50 years, to when Haussmann demolished the Left Bank slums. In shacks they called estaminets, Italian masons, powdered with stone dust, shared tables with men and women dressed like gypsies—who, since gypsies were thought to come from the German region of Bohemia, were called “bohemians.”
The rival cultures settled down to an uneasy peace. In a city notorious for its insularity and suspicion of foreigners, this was a community where artist could meet writer, dancer befriend painter, model encounter poet, Surrealist consort with Impressionist, Russian seduce Greek. Some compared male behavior in Montparnasse to that of diplomats socializing in the legation quarter of a foreign country, others to gentlemen passing the evening in a brothel.
Once accepted by the Montparnos, the newcomer had no need to look further for work, shelter or sex. On her first night in Paris in 1914, British painter Nina Hamnett went to the Rotonde alone. The man at the next table introduced himself as “Modigliani, painter and Jew.” The beautiful and bisexual Hamnett was soon a fixture of the community, and destined to be christened “Queen of Bohemia.”
Man Ray arrived from New York in July 1921. Met at the Gare Saint-Lazare by Marcel Duchamp, he was taken that night to Montparnasse and introduced to the core of the Surrealist group, including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard and Philippe Soupault. He rented a studio on nearby rue Delambre, and met Alice Prin, aka Kiki of Montparnasse, who became his lover and model. The following December, Soupault’s wife organized his first show at the Librairie Six on rue Brea. In the cafés, Ray met couturier Paul Poiret, who hired him to shoot his gowns. Jean Arp, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso asked him to photograph their work and, in many cases, make their portraits. Both Henri-Pierre Roché, author of Jules et Jim, and American William Seabrook commissioned him to create erotica for their private use. His address changed from rue Delambre to rue Campagne-Première, but both geographically and intellectually he never left Montparnasse.
Group portrait of American and European artists and performers in Paris: Man Ray, Mina Loy, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, Ezra Pound, Jane Heap, Kiki de Montparnasse, c. 1920s
Boulevard du Montparnasse marked the frontier of what expatriates designated as The Quarter. Bounded to the east by boulevard St. Michel (aka “Boul’Mich’”), rue de Rennes to the west and the Seine to the north, the Quarter was not so much a suburb of Paris as its international colony, as alien to the city at large as Soho was to London or Greenwich Village to New York. Life within it had little to do with France. Few residents spoke more than a smattering of the language, fewer still consorted with the French. Why bother? What British journalist Sisley Huddleston wrote of Paris in 1927 went double for Montparnasse. It offered “everything that is obtainable. Things of the spirit and things that minister to bodily needs, comforts and pleasures. Everything there is to be seen anywhere is in some form to be seen [here]. It is the microcosm of the universe.”
As the value of the franc dropped, foreign money flooded into the Quarter. “Those who used to come to Paris once a year come once a season,” wrote Janet Flanner in 1922. “Those who stayed a month have chosen their quartier and signed a lease.” Astonished at how much their dollars could buy, Americans littered franc notes onto the sidewalk among the feet of the panhandlers and prostitutes who prowled it night and day, and laughed at the desperation with which they fought for them.
Estaminets remade themselves as cafés to accommodate the growing need for places not simply to drink but also to socialize. The Select, the Rotonde and the Dôme at the intersection of boulevards du Montparnasse and Raspail, and, after 1927, La Coupole, became central to expatriate life. In their warm companionability, men and women could forget their unheated unsanitary bug-infested studios and play at being the artists they most wanted to be.
Individuals and groups adopted particular cafés. At the Rotonde, the Spaniards held an afternoon peña or discussion group, chaired by the day’s fashionable intellectual. Germans and English preferred the Café du Dôme. On a famous occasion, Henry Miller sat at one of its tables, flat broke, drinking steadily and hoping someone would come by to pay for the coffees and cognacs represented by the pile of saucers growing steadily higher at his elbow. He was rescued by Alfred Perles, who became his closest friend and a major character in his autobiographical novels. The Select stayed open all night, a magnet for drunks, whores and assorted mysteries. In February 1929, poet Hart Crane got into a drunken brawl there over the bill, and spent six days in the Santé prison before Harry Crosby bailed him out.
In a culture where few had private phones, cafés were places to meet, to gossip, to plot, to seduce, to buy and sell, but seldom to work. Ernest Hemingway retreated to Closerie des Lilas, at the far end of boulevard du Montparnasse, to write such stories as “Big Two-Hearted River” and parts of his expatriate novel The Sun Also Rises. Though his characters often disparage café life, he wasn’t averse to relaxing in the wicker chairs that spilled out onto boulevard du Montparnasse from the Dôme and the Select. In 1923, in “Christmas on the Roof of the World,” he wrote lyrically of “Paris with the snow falling. Paris with the big charcoal braziers outside the cafés, glowing red. At the café tables, men huddle, their coat collars turned up, while they finger glasses of Grog Americain and the newsboys shout the evening papers.”
Montparnasse extended for a few blocks on either side of the Raspail/Montparnasse intersection. Around the corner from the Dôme, rue Delambre was lined with small hotels and studios, the homes and working places of Amadeo Modigliani, Tsuguharu Foujita, Jules Pascin, and Isadora Duncan, who gave Foujita dance lessons in return for champagne. At the Dingo Bar on Delambre, Hemingway and Fitzgerald first met. A block further south, just this side of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, on rue Edgar Quinet, were Le Sphinx, the Left Bank’s most modern brothel, and lesbian club Le Monocle. Across boulevard Raspail, on rue Campagne-Premiere, the Hôtel Istria provided a convenient drinking and fornicating venue for Picabia, Pascin, Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet.
On the downhill side of boulevard du Montparnasse, small art galleries and ateliers clustered along rue Brea and rue de Grande Chaumière. In particular, L’Académie de la Grande Chaumière incubated numerous talents, from Balthus, Giacometti and Calder to an arresting miscellany that included Hollywood costumier Irene Sharaff, Russian “cubo-futurist” movie and theater designer Alexandra Exter, and the sensational Tamara de Lempicka, who fled from the Russian revolution of 1917 to study in Paris, and whose flamboyant and vivid Art Déco portraits were matched by a life which even seasoned Montparnos thought gaudy.
Artists colonies inevitably attract more wannabees and has-beens than the truly creative, and Montparnasse was no exception. By the mid-1930s, most successful writers and visual artists had moved on. Many of those who remained became professional bohemians, panhandling drinks and peddling spurious reminiscences to credulous tourists. The nadir would be reached immediately after the Second World War when Kiki touted for tips around La Coupole, claiming she needed money to pay her gas and light bill, but actually to buy cocaine. She died in 1953, aged only 51. Her monument in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, not far from that of Man Ray, reads “Kiki, 1901–1953, singer, actress, painter, Queen of Montparnasse.” With her death, said Foujita at the funeral, the golden days of Montparnasse were buried forever.
The Dôme, Rotonde, Select and Coupole all still flourish, the first two on opposite corners of boulevards du Montparnasse and Raspail, the others a stone’s throw away at 99 and 102, boulevard du Montparnasse, respectively. 10, rue Delambre, now the Auberge de Venise, is the site of the former bar Le Dingo. At 171, boulevard de Montparnasse, the Closerie des Lilas is also a going concern. (all 14th.) In all cases, however, these are now more restaurants than cafés, and, particularly in the case of Closerie des Lilas, quite costly. For further addresses in Montparnasse, see Walking Tour No. 3. Housed in the former home of painter Marie Vassilieff, who decorated one of the painted columns in La Couple, the Musée du Montparnasse at 21, avenue du Maine (15th) presents exhibitions of work by and about the area and its distinguished residents. Between 1925 and 1932, Edward Titus published a magazine called This Quarter, showcasing work from such artists of the neighborhood as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Salvador Dalì and Man Ray.
