Dali House

Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.

Ah, the Musee du Montparnasse – genteel, meditative, scholarly. Actually, this quiet little pile of bricks in south central Paris is where the post-impressionists posted some very, very bad impressions with nightly piss-ups early in the last century. That was long before it became a museum, of course.

The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him.

Marie Vassilieff, a Russian, was the proprietor. This was her studio, in fact. She’d studied at the Academy Matisse in the Boulevard des Invalides and in 1910 helped open the Academie Russe up the road at 54 Avenue du Maine. Old “Douanier” Rousseau was nesting in No 44. Marie had Fernand Leger around twice in 1913 and ‘14 to give lectures on this new “modern art” thing – supposedly the first public discussions on what the hell was happening to Painting As We Know It.

But Marie, for some reason, wasn’t selling a whole lot of her canvases, so she opened a canteen in her atelier where all the local starving artists could get some good, cheap nosh. Lunches turned into dinners, as is their wont, and the next thing you know there’s a whole live band jamming away – Scandinavian art students, no less – and Marie was doing her Cossack dances.

This is Marie in quieter times (1915) with Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Max Jacob and Picasso, and starring Henri-Pierre Roche as the chauffeur.

Modigliani, Soutine and Zadkine would set around the canteen in the evenings, trying to concentrate on their drawing (not really), and getting into arguments about the artwork on the walls: Chagall, Picasso, Leger. The place could stay open beyond the wartime curfew because the cops considered it a private club.

Anyway, the big Braque bash that Marie and Jacob organised saw Modigliani get in a scuffle with Alfredo Pina over somebody’s girlfriend. Pina pulled a gun, Marie pushed Modigliani out the door to safety and Picasso and Ortiz de Zarate locked it, but Matisse got the key back and the party got swinging again.

Usual suspects: From left, Marc Chagall, Ossip Zadkine, Chaim Soutine and Amadeo Modigliani.

The place shut down the following year and the premises drifted through ownerships for eight decades until Roger Pic and Jean-Marie Drot opened the Chemin du Montparnasse in May 1998. They subsequently changed the name and now they’ve got a website that explains that the museum is still an artists’ residence, to about 30 painters, architects, filmmakers, actors and others.

It says visitors can “dive into” the temporary thematic exhibitions and get “a greater understanding of what Montparnasse represents in the culture of the 21st century”.

The museum wesbite is just a launching pad for an engaging tale about artsy Montparnasse in the “good old days”, when it was the “centre of the world”, which you can read here.