Editing Montparnasse

{{Short description|Neighbourhood of Paris}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=July 2018}}
{{For|the film|Montparnasse (film)}}
[[File:Cemetery Montparnasse for Wikipedia.jpg|thumb|[[Montparnasse cemetery]]]]
'''Montparnasse''' ({{IPA|fr|mɔ̃paʁnas|lang|LL-Q150 (fra)-Benoît Prieur-Montparnasse.wav}}) is an area in the south of [[Paris]], [[France]], on the [[Rive Gauche|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. It is split between the [[6th arrondissement of Paris|6th]], [[14th arrondissement of Paris|14th]], and [[15th arrondissement of Paris|15th]] arrondissements of the city. Montparnasse has been part of Paris {{citation needed span|since 1669.|date=November 2017}}

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 (Paris Métro)|Montparnasse – Bienvenüe]] [[Paris Métro|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.

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 [[cabaret]]s opened their doors, becoming gathering points for artists. The area is also known for cafés and bars, such as the [[Brittany|Breton]] restaurants specialising in [[crêpe]]s (thin pancakes) located a few blocks from the Gare Montparnasse.<ref name=TheatreinParis>{{Cite web |url=https://www.theatreinparis.com/blog/paris-neighborhood-guide-montparnasse |title=Paris Neighborhood Guide: Montparnasse |author=Amanda Mehtala & Arthini Pulenthiran |year=2018 |publisher=Theatre in Paris |access-date=2020-02-18 }}</ref> The [[Pasteur Institute]] is located in the area. Beneath the ground are tunnels of the [[Catacombs of Paris]].

==Artistic hub==
[[File:Le Dôme - Paris.JPG|thumb|left|[[Le Dôme Café]]]]
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.<ref name=ParisDigest>{{Cite web |url=https://www.parisdigest.com/paris/montparnasse.htm |title=Montparnasse |year=2018 |publisher=Paris Digest |access-date=2018-08-13 }}</ref> 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]], [[Émile Zola|Zola]], [[Manet]], [[Anatole France|France]], [[Degas]], [[Gabriel Fauré|Fauré]] typically indulged in the [[Bohemianism]] cultural refinements of [[Dandyism]].

The cultural scene during the late-1920s for [[expatriate]]s in Montparnasse and the [[6th arrondissement of Paris|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 (residence)|La Ruche]]. Living without running water, in damp, unheated [[Atelier]]s, many sold their works for a few [[Franc]]s 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.

[[File:Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895.jpg|thumb|right| The 1895 [[Montparnasse derailment]] at [[Gare Montparnasse]]]]
[[File:Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon.jpg|thumb|right|[[Amedeo Modigliani|Modigliani]], [[Pablo Picasso|Picasso]] and [[André Salmon|Salmon]],<br/> at [[Café de la Rotonde|La Rotonde]], by [[Jean Cocteau|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''."<ref>Woodhead, Lindy, "War Paint: Madame Rubenstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry," Wiley, 2004, p. 128</ref> They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe - from Europe, including Russia, [[Hungary]] and [[Ukraine]], from the United States, Canada, [[Mexico]], [[Central America|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 de Chile|Santiago]]. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were [[Jacob Macznik]],<ref>Montparnasse Déporté: Artisti Europei de Parigi al Lager; published by Elede, 2007, under the auspices of the Musée du Montparnasse, the City of Turin, and the Region of Piemonte (Italy)</ref><ref>Undzere Farpainikte Kinstler, Hersh Fenster, Imprimerie Abècé, Paris, 1951</ref> [[Pablo Picasso]], [[Guillaume Apollinaire]],[[Ossip Zadkine]], [[Julio González (sculptor)|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|Yitzhak Frenkel Frenel]], [[Michel Kikoine]], [[Pinchus Kremegne]], [[Amedeo Modigliani]], [[Ford Madox Ford]], [[Toño Salazar]], [[Ezra Pound]], [[Max Ernst]], [[Marcel Duchamp]], [[Suzanne 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]], [[Marie Vorobieff|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 (artist)|Reginald Gray]], [[Endre Ady]], [[Joan Miró]], [[Hilaire Hiler]], [[Magdalena Rădulescu]], and, in his declining years, [[Edgar Degas]].

[[File:La Rotonde-2.jpg|thumb|left|[[Café de la Rotonde|La Rotonde]] 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 Jolas|Maria]] and [[Eugene Jolas]] came to Paris and published their literary magazine ''[[Transition (literary journal)|Transition]]''. Harry Crosby and his wife [[Caresse Crosby|Caresse]] would establish the [[Mary Phelps Jacob|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.

[[File:LaCloseriedesLilas.jpg|thumb|right|Cafés rented tables to poor artists for hours at a stretch. Several, including La Closerie des Lilas, remain in business today.]]

The cafés, [[bistro]]s and bars of Montparnasse were a meeting place where cultural ideas and connections were hatched and mulled over. The [[coffeehouse|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 Café|Le Dôme]]'', ''[[Closerie des Lilas]]'', ''[[Café de la Rotonde|La Rotonde]]'', ''[[Le Select]]'', and ''[[La Coupole (Paris)|La Coupole]]''—all of which are still in business—were the places where starving artists could occupy a table all evening for a few ''[[centime]]s''. 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 [[Administrative police (France)|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 [[Dadaism|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]]".
[[Image:ClubBobino.jpg|upright|left|frame|Great artists performed at the Bobino Nightclub.]]

On their stages, using then-popular single name pseudonyms or one birth name only, [[Marie-Louise Damien|Damia]], [[Alice Prin|Kiki]], [[Félix Mayol|Mayol]] and [[Georges Guibourg|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, [[Bohemianism|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 Collection|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==
[[File:Paris 14e arrondissement - Quartiers.svg|left|thumb|The different quarter of the 14th arrondissement, including Montparnasse]]
[[File:SNCFHQParis.JPG|thumb|upright|[[SNCF]] head office]]
[[SNCF]], the French rail company, has its head office in Montparnasse near the 14th arrondissement.<ref>"[http://www.sncf.com/en_EN/html/media/WS_MENTION.html Legal information] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120529225223/http://www.sncf.com/en_EN/html/media/WS_MENTION.html |date=29 May 2012 }}." [[SNCF]]. Retrieved 26 October 2009.</ref><ref name="HautLESeCHOS">"[http://search.lesechos.fr/archives/1999/LesEchos/17903-137-ECH.htm Le siège haut perché de la SNCF à Montparnasse]{{dead link|date=December 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}." ''[[Les Échos (France)|Les Echos]]''. 20 May 1999. Page 54. Retrieved 1 May 2010. "Pari tenu : réceptionné le 19 mars par Bouygues Immobilier et livré à son occupant dix jours plus tard, le nouveau siège de la SNCF est sorti de la gangue du grand ensemble de la gare Montparnasse, dans le 14e arrondissement de Paris, en quinze mois d'un chantier intense qui a mobilisé sur place jusqu'à 650 personnes. Quelque 800 postes de travail sont concernés sur les 2.500 qui gravitaient hier autour du siège historique de Saint-Lazare (9e arrondissement), consacrant la partition entre une direction générale resserrée et des services centraux pléthoriques."</ref>

Prior to the completion of the current [[Air France]] head office in [[Tremblay-en-France]] in December 1995,<ref name="GEMO">"[http://www.gemo-paris.com/eng/pdf/New_Fiche_AF_HQ_Eng.pdf AIR FRANCE HEAD QUARTERS – ROISSYPOLE] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110711081813/http://www.gemo-paris.com/eng/pdf/New_Fiche_AF_HQ_Eng.pdf |date=11 July 2011 }}." Groupement d'Etudes et de Méthodes d'Ordonnancement (GEMO). Retrieved 20 September 2009.</ref><ref>"[http://www.tremblay-en-france.fr/page/p-108/art_id-1617/ Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101013033424/http://www.tremblay-en-france.fr/page/p-108/art_id-1617 |date=13 October 2010 }}." [[Tremblay-en-France]]. Retrieved 20 September 2009.</ref> Air France had its headquarters in a tower located next to the [[Gare Montparnasse]] railway station in Montparnasse and in the [[15th arrondissement of Paris|15th arrondissement]]; Air France had its headquarters in the tower for about 30 years.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/27/business/air-france-s-big-challenge.html|title=Air France's Big Challenge|work=The New York Times|access-date=31 May 2009|last=Salpukas|first=Agis|date=27 December 1992}}</ref><ref>''World Airline Directory''. Flight International. 20 March 1975. "[http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1975/1975%20-%200530.html 466].</ref><ref>Mlekuz, Nathalie. "[http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/257106.html Air France vole vers ses avions, destination Roissy] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190228205205/https://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/257106.html |date=28 February 2019 }}". ''[[Le Monde]]''. 2 April 1997. Retrieved 22 September 2009.</ref>

==Education==
The Vandamme Library (Bibliothèque Vandamme) is located in the neighbourhood.<ref>"[http://www.paris.fr/portail/Culture/Portal.lut?page=equipment&template=equipment.template.popup&document_equipment_id=1731 Bibliothèque Vandamme]{{Dead link|date=August 2019 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}." City of Paris. Retrieved 22 February 2010.</ref><ref>"[http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-75014/des-livres-a-domicile-pour-les-seniors-11-08-2009-603657.php Des livres à domicile pour les seniors]." ''[[Le Parisien]]''. 11 August 2009. Retrieved 22 February 2010. "la bibliothèque Vandamme de l'avenue du Maine (Montparnasse, XIV e)."</ref>

{{Portal bar|France}}

==References==
{{Reflist|2}}

==Further reading==
* Billy Kluver, Julie Martin. ''Kiki's Paris: Artists and Lovers 1900–1930''. The definitive illustrated account of the golden age of Montparnasse.
* [[Shari Benstock]], ''Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940'', University of Texas at Austin, 1986
* ''Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930'' by [[Robert McAlmon]], [[Kay Boyle]] (1968)

==External links==
{{Commons category|Montparnasse}}

{{Visitor attractions in Paris}}
{{Authority control}}
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[[Category:14th arrondissement of Paris]]
[[Category:15th arrondissement of Paris]]
[[Category:6th arrondissement of Paris]]
[[Category:Artist colonies]]
[[Category:Districts of Paris]]
[[Category:Entertainment districts in France]]
[[Category:French art]]
[[Category:Modern art]]