Montmartre and Modernism: L'Histoire de l'Avant-Garde

An entirely fresh study of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, Montmartre in Paris inspired a vital, innovative and unique community of artists who revolutionized Western art.

After the 1871 Paris Commune, Montmartre played a significant political, social, and artistic role; its revolutionary spirit attracted independent artists, writers, and musicians, and its cabarets, cafés, circus, dancehalls, and theaters such as the cabarets Lapin Agile, Le Chat Noir, and Quat'z'arts, the Cirque Fernando, the Elysée Montmartre, the Moulin de la Galette, and Moulin Rouge dance halls made Montmartre a popular cultural center. Avant-garde artists, writers and performers from one generation encountered those of the next on the streets, in the cafés and places of entertainment. Post 1900 the area lost much of its cutting-edge, anti-establishment aura, but its reputation as a haven for a free-loving, radical, bohemian life-style continued to appeal to young artists such as Pablo Picasso, who first came to Paris to visit the World Fair and who later settled in Montmartre as a place to work and create.

Drawing on important artworks from the Weisman Collection and the Musée de Montmarte, Paris, as well as a wealth of archival photography, maps, and prints to illustrate its narrative text, this volume presents up to 180 color illustrations, including paintings by Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Kees van Dongen, Otto Freundlich, Amedeo Modigliani, Suzanne Valadon, André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Frantisek Kupka, who were at the centre of Montmartre's artistic and cultural life during this period. An appendix lists all the main artists, teachers, writers, musicians, patrons and establishment owners and promoters in Montmartre during this period. A timeline of key moments and events in Montmartre from 1870-1910, a map of Montmartre showing the locations of studio spaces, residences and cabarets, and a selected bibliography provide important sources of new information for scholars.