Dali House

Something like Sting and his Police did for punk, Amedeo Modigliani made modern art, if not cubism itself, safe for home consumption, sculpting faces into razor-edged African distortions without being scary about it. The classical elegance remained evident. He was standing at cubism’s door but refused to go inside. Gregarious, likeable, handsome and a flash dresser, he got distracted and dismantled. He was consumed, and in death from consumption, he was nearly consumed by myth.

Charges of decorum seem odd when applied to someone as wrecked on booze and dope as he was. When a worried neighbour broke into his squalid Paris flat on a freezing January morning in 1920, there lay the once brash Modigliani, all of 35, about to die from tuberculosis in a bed littered with empty liquor bottles.

His mistress Jeanne Hebuterne, clearing away the stack of sardine tins, admitted she hadn’t thought to call a doctor. Amedeo, who’d been scraped up reeking from a pavement, taken to hospital and then shipped home with a shrug, died on the 24th, as if according to script. (This isn’t Jeanne, it’s “Portrait of Madame Zborowska”, from 1917.)

Two days later Jeanne threw herself out a window, nine months pregnant with their second child. It was a while before his family let her be buried next to him in the posh grave his high-office brother bought for Modi at Pere Lachaise, where hundreds of friends and admirers had gathered to see him off. See the rest.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour. See the rest.

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.

“Homage to Friends from Montparnasse”, a 1962 painting by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (1892-1984), a Russian cubist whose nickname was Marevna, after a fairy princess, reputedly bestowed on her by Maxim Gorky. It shows a caped Amedeo Modigliani surrounded by (top row from left) Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo’s wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, (bottom row) Marevna, her and Rivera’s daughter Marika and Moise Kisling.

The best thing about poking 72 thumbtacks into Google Earth’s satellite imagery of Paris to indicate places of interest in art history is that it gives other viewers something to look at besides Metro stations and the thousands of placemarks suffocating the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

It’s amazing to me that Google Earth users who obviously know the City of Lights well – certainly far better than I do, since I’ve never been there – are only interested in “complete” sets of subway, bus and train stops. Scant attention is given to the capital’s incredible history. The Moulin Rouge is well marked, but mostly because of the Nicole Kidman movie. Toulouse-Lautrec was, after all, just a minor character in the film.

So, with the help of online walking tours from Jack-Travel.com, BonjourParis.com and MetropoleParis.com, I had a good gawk at the city when it was being rebuilt by individual creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even as it was being refashioned by Baron Haussman.

Following are some of the highlights, in a travelogue broken up into three parts because it’s quite a hike. All of the Hemingway components, though, have been surgically removed, wrapped in butcher’s paper and delivered to Dorseyland, because they’re more into Google Earth over there than in art.

Geeks. See the rest.

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. See the rest.