PARIS in the 1920s + 1930s i.a. PICASSO
* Brilliant Insider-Film-Docu (You-Tube): “Paris the Luminous Years”
The beginning of Modern Art, i.a. Picasso, Hemingway etc., when Paris revolutionized the arts - see
< menu on the left "Paris 1920s + 30s Video" (Paris the Luminous Years)
The "New York Times" writes:
“Paris the Luminous Years”... is about Paris at the dawn of modernism. This film.... looks at the city that seduced the likes of PICASSO, CHAGALL, Apollinaire, Diaghilev and of course, HEMINGWAY and Gertrude Stein. It pays homage, though, not in the seditious, inventive spirit of the avant-garde that Paris once nurtured, but in the time-tested, didactic and dutiful tone of a typical PBS documentary."
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MONTMARTRE & MONTPARNASSE IN PARIS DURING THE 1920s and 1930s
"At the beginning of the twentieth century, during the Belle Époque, many artists had studios or worked in or around Montmartre (Paris), including
* Salvador Dalí,
* Amedeo Modigliani,
* Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Piet Mondrian,
* Pablo Picasso, Camille Pissarro, and
* Vincent van Gogh.
Montmartre is also the setting for several hit films.....
In 1871, Montmartre was the site of beginning of the revolutionary uprising of the
* Paris Commune.
During the Franco-Prussian War, the French army had stored a large number of cannon in a park at the top of the hill, near where the Basilica is today. On 18 March 1871, the soldiers from the French Army tried to remove the cannon from the hilltop. They were blocked by members of the politically-radicalised Paris National Guard, who captured and then killed two French army generals, and installed a revolutionary government that lasted two months….
By the 19th century, the butte was famous for its cafés, guinguettes with public dancing, and cabarets. Le Chat Noir at 84 boulevard de Rochechouart was founded in 1881 by Rodolphe Salis, and became a popular haunt for writers and poets. The composer Eric Satie earned money by playing the piano there.
* The Moulin Rouge at 94 boulevard de Clichy was founded in 1889 by Joseph Oller and Charles Zidler; it became the birthplace of the French cancan.
During the Belle Époque from 1872 to 1914, many notable artists lived and worked in Montmartre, where the rents were low and the atmosphere congenial.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir rented space at 12 rue Cortot in 1876 to paint Bal du moulin de la Galette, showing a dance at Montmartre on a Sunday afternoon. Maurice Utrillo lived at the same address from 1906 to 1914, and Raoul Dufy shared an atelier there from 1901 to 1911. The building is now the Musée de Montmartre.
* Pablo Picasso,
*Amedeo Modigliani and other artists lived and worked in a building called Le Bateau-Lavoir during the years 1904–1909, where
* Picasso painted one of his most important masterpieces, Les Demoiselles de Avignon.
Several noted composers, including Erik Satie, lived in the neighbourhood. Most of the artists left after the outbreak of World War I, the majority of them going to the Montparnasse quarter. The last of the
* bohemian Montmartre artists
was Gen Paul (1895–1975), born in Montmartre and a friend of Utrillo. Pauls calligraphic expressionist lithographs, sometimes memorializing picturesque Montmartre itself, owe a lot to Raoul Dufy.
Among the last of the neighborhood’s bohemian gathering places was R-26, an artistic salon frequented by
* Josephine Baker, Le Corbusier and Django Reinhardt.
Montparnasse
Students in the 17th century who came to recite poetry in the hilly neighbourhood nicknamed it after "Mount Parnassus", home to the nine Muses of arts and sciences in Greek mythology.
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.
The area is also known for cafes and bars, such as the Breton restaurants specialising in crêpes (thin pancakes) located a few blocks from the Gare Montparnasse.
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Artistic Montparnasse
Montparnasse became famous in the
* 1920s, 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 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, Fauré, 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, die-hard, emigrant artists that peopled Montparnasse.
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 Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler,
* today works by those artists sell for millions of euros.
In post-World War I Paris, Montparnasse was a euphoric meeting ground 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 Ortiz 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
* 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, Chaim Soutine,
* James Joyce,
* Ernest Hemingway,
Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound,
* Max Ernst,
Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Henri Rousseau, Constantin Brâncuși, 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 poet and journalist,
* Joan Miró,
Hilaire Hiler and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas. 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 Léger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris,
* Picasso and * 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.
*** 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
* Ernest Hemingway,
Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, 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.
__Cafés rented tables to poor artists for hours at a stretch. Several, including La Closerie des Lilas, remain in business today.
__The cafés and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where ideas were hatched and mulled over.
The cafés at the centre of Montparnasses night-life were in the Carrefour Vavin, now renamed Place Pablo-Picasso. In Montparnasses heyday (from 1910 to 1920), the cafés Le Dôme, 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 fuelled 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 Rotondes proprietor, Victor Libion, would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay.
As such, there were times when the cafés walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the worlds greatest museums drool with envy.
There were many areas where the great 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 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 Rays friend and Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, left for New York, Man Ray set up his first studio at la Hôtel 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 Gaité 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 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, who married artist Max Ernst, lived in the elegant section of Paris but frequented the studios of Montparnasse, acquiring pieces that would come to be recognized as masterpieces that now hang in the
* Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, Italy.
The Musée du Montparnasse opened in 1998 at 21 Avenue du Maine. Although operating with a tiny city grant, the museum is a non-profit operation." Source: Wikipedia