page_title: Montparnasse
section_title: Artistic hub
hierarchical_section_title: Montparnasse / Artistic hub
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the brasserie/restaurant Le Dôme at boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris
context_page_description: Montparnasse is an area in the south of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail. Montparnasse has been part of Paris since 1669.
  The area also gives its name to:
  Gare Montparnasse: trains to Brittany, TGV to Rennes, Tours, Bordeaux, Le Mans; rebuilt as a modern TGV station;
  The large Montparnasse – Bienvenüe métro station;
  Cimetière du Montparnasse: the Montparnasse Cemetery, where, among other celebrities, Charles Baudelaire, Constantin Brâncuși, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, Samuel Beckett, Serge Gainsbourg and Susan Sontag 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.
  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.
context_section_description: In the 18th century, students recited poems at the foot of an artificial hillock of rock rubble from the catacombs, a near-by network of underground galleries. Ironically, they decided to baptise this mound "Mount Parnassus", named after the one celebrated by Greek poets. In the early 20th century, many Bretons driven out of their region by poverty arrived by train at Montparnasse station, the heart of the district, and settled nearby. 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 the 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 emigrant artists who inhabited 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", 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 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 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 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, 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 exis
caption: Le Dôme Café
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