Sylvie Buisson: Expert on the work of Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita

 Paris, a Nurturing Ground for Artists

Just as there was a School of Fontainebleau, so too was there a School of Paris. The former brought together Italian and French artists around Francis I; the latter united, around nothing in particular, an elite group of young international artists in Paris at the dawn of the 20th century. The first School of Paris was centered in Montmartre, then in Montparnasse. The second, during the 1950s, extended from Montparnasse to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Schools are memorable especially when they have neither masters nor students—emerging solely from spontaneous, reasoned forms of opportunism. Those who would form the ranks of this School of Modernities—later labeled the “School of Paris”—were grouped under this name in 1925 by journalist and art critic André Warnod. They all loved Paris passionately, as did Warnod himself, a former art student of the Butte Montmartre with a sharp pen and a talent for promotion.

He knew them all, having discovered many of them. He loved them like brothers, without distinction. “We know the role played in today’s art by Picasso, Pascin, Foujita, Chagall, Van Dongen, Modigliani, Galanis, Marcoussis, Juan Gris, Kisling, Lipchitz, Zadkine, Sabbagh, etc.,” he wrote in 1925. For various reasons, they had all felt the irresistible pull of Paris—the city of the Louvre, of Van Gogh, Lautrec, Monet, Manet, Cassatt, Degas, Rodin, Bonnard, Braque, Picasso, Marie Laurencin, Tamara de Lempicka… to name but a few.

What they knew of Paris before arriving was little compared to what they would discover once there. But they suspected as much. Paris allowed for all possibilities—from the scandals of the Impressionists and the Salon des Refusés to every kind of artistic revolution. Since biblical times, it was said that no one is a prophet in their own land. Paris became the ideal destination—a fertile ground for those hoping not to preach in the desert. As Montaigne once wrote: “No man is a prophet not only in his own house but also in his own country. In my native Gascony, people find it amusing that I’m printed.” The further one was from home, the greater their reputation.

The Long Journey

To uproot oneself as Chagall did—from Vitebsk to La Ruche—or Modigliani from Livorno to Montmartre, Foujita from Tokyo to Montparnasse, Brancusi walking from Romania to the Falguière and Ronsin artist studios, or Soutine from his shtetl to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris—was a tremendous challenge. Making the leap to Montmartre and Montparnasse was a risk. The biographies of the School of Paris artists reveal how hard their fight was. Many of them endured war, hunger, illness, poverty, and hardship. Yet many reached a form of catharsis—a fusion of their roots with the transformative power of Paris. They discovered their own Art as a therapeutic solution to their emotional crises. Thank you, Paris.

With few resources, most settled in makeshift studios, enduring cold, hunger, and isolation. Yet between Vaugirard and Bullier, they experienced fabulous encounters and decisive moments. Apollinaire, Picasso, and Rousseau had already signaled the move from Montmartre to Montparnasse as Montmartre grew too expensive. Utrillo, Max Jacob, Juan Gris, and Marcoussis would occasionally follow by taking the Nord-Sud metro. Modigliani, perpetually homeless, moved constantly, despite his official address being Place Émile-Goudeau.

At Montparnasse, the smoke-filled cafés around the Vavin crossroads served as shared studios for thought. The School of Paris artists reshaped the world over a café crème, around crowded tables and bustling zinc counters. They all spoke a common language despite coming from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Romania, Germany, Japan, or Scandinavia. They felt Parisian. The most destitute—survivors of pogroms—healed with a pencil in hand. Most had studied fine arts in their home countries, but considered coming to France the ultimate experience. Especially Paris, with its unmatched reputation. Studying at the Louvre was a rite of passage. Depending on their means, they lived alone, shared a studio, or joined an artist commune. Paris offered them a chance—they had to act fast.

The “Boucher Spirit” of Artist Communes

Studios were essential. The wealthy lived in central Montparnasse; others in peripheral communes where marginality and poverty were the norm. These places were not only shelters but spaces for contemplation, dialogue, and celebration—true laboratories of innovation. Despite precarious living conditions, freedom was total, and art was central. Alongside La Ruche stood the Ronsin cul-de-sac, conceived by the visionary academic sculptor Alfred Boucher, a Fourierist. Artists moved from one commune to another.

That Soutine and Modigliani, amidst their most troubled times, painted dozens of masterpieces in these conditions is proof of the power of these places. Zadkine sculpted monumental wood and stone works at La Ruche—hungry but inspired. Léger painted the Tubism manifesto there. Sculptors housed on the ground floor would relegate painters to the upper, comfortless floors. Brancusi stored his stones there, teaching sculpture to Modigliani before returning to Ronsin. Like many others, Modigliani moved between La Ruche, the Bateau Lavoir, and the Cité Falguière to avoid paying rent. “Only the atmosphere of Paris inspires me. I am unhappy here, but I truly cannot work anywhere else,” he said. The street reconciled him with the world. His models were passersby of genius. “It is the human being who interests me. The face is nature’s supreme creation. I use it endlessly.”

Paris overflowed with striking faces and gazes. The global elite of poetry, painting, sculpture, and literature passed through Montparnasse. Sick and dying, Modigliani never left Paris. “He was only an artist and a poet. He thought only of art,” wrote Max Jacob. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled: “I saw him calm, with soft, gentle eyes. I also saw him furious, cheeks and chin covered in dark stubble. This Modigliani would shriek like a bird, perhaps like an albatross.” He loved Baudelaire’s poem about the awkward bird mocked by sailors—the winged traveler, pitiful on land. Paris lost him in January 1920, worn out and unaware that his London exhibition had succeeded. Guillaume Apollinaire had preceded him in death in 1918, taken by the Spanish flu. Montparnasse never quite recovered. Chagall, another La Ruche resident, was luckier. “It was there [in Paris], between four walls, that I washed my eyes and became a painter,” wrote Chagall, who had arrived in winter 1912, aged 23. “I had a studio in the rotunda, where the poorest gathered. The stone buildings housed the wealthier. I was happy on the second floor—my window opened to the sky, and it was poetic.” He worked there until 1914. Influenced by Picasso and African sculpture, the communes—especially La Ruche—were transformed. They became havens for both French and foreign intelligentsia.

The First World War: An Artistic Challenge

The artists of Paris endured four years of war. They faced a tremendous challenge: to survive without losing faith. Cendrars, Apollinaire, Braque, Cocteau, and Léger went to the front; others—foreigners, unfit for service, or reformed—such as Soutine, Modigliani, and Max Jacob, tried to help and hold on through a time of despair for the younger generation. Paradoxically, the war also became a dynamic catalyst for Modern Art, already deeply rooted in Paris. Each artist, in their own way, sought to save France—redoubling their efforts, imagination, and avant-garde spirit. Women stepped in to compensate for the lack of male labor, both in factories and hospitals. In Montparnasse, Marie Vassilieff famously transformed a corner of her studio into a canteen to feed her starving friends. They gathered there with family, poets, and politicians—day and night—sharing time, meals, and artistic dreams for a country under threat. An extraordinary intercultural creativity emerged amid a bleak geopolitical context. The artists accomplished feats that have since become iconic.

Among these was the Salon d’Antin, inaugurated in July 1916 at the home of couturier Jacques Doucet, with help from André Salmon. All of Montparnasse gathered there around Picasso’s seminal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. A marvel. The following year, in May 1917, as the war dragged on, came the birth of Parade, considered the most astonishing ballet of the time, staged at the Théâtre du Châtelet. Directed by Diaghilev and performed by the Ballets Russes, it fused the genius of Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso—libretto, set, and cubist costumes combined in dazzling harmony. In a shared desire to preserve France’s cultural leadership, the Parisian artist community rose to the challenge of 1914–1918 with immense force—a moment of artistic resistance that art history continues to celebrate.

The Role of the Allochthones (from the Greek ἄλλος χθών, “from another land”)

When peace returned, Paris gave back what it had received. For artists and art lovers alike, it became one of the most attractive cities on earth. “Before the war, La Rotonde was mostly Slavic, Le Dôme German and American, Le Petit Napolitain Italian, and Le Styx Scandinavian. But after 1914, everyone began to mix. It was a very new aspect of the artistic bohème,” said André Warnod. From the Vavin crossroads to Vaugirard, international artistic innovation was everywhere. No street was untouched by artists and their followers. Artist cafés, academies, galleries, and journals succeeded one another.

Painters, sculptors, photographers, poets, dancers, architects, designers, and couturiers were revered as icons of a new kind—public figures who continued to reinvent the world together. In Montparnasse, women cutting their hair short signaled their emancipation and commitment alongside men. Painting and photography—led by Man Ray—immortalized this revolution, their napes exposed, makeup bold. They also freed their waists, once constrained, in sack dresses and shoes fit for tennis or the beach. All devoured La Garçonne, the cult novel that cost its author his Legion of Honour but delighted Van Dongen, who illustrated the reprint and adored the modern feminine transformation. Men enjoyed sharing the spotlight with bold, artistically engaged women—even as many numbed their war wounds with pleasure, jazz, alcohol, and a frantic creativity.

“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein famously told a young Ernest Hemingway, back from Italy and visiting her. The phrase stuck. Americans had arrived in droves after the war: soldiers in recovery, writers, journalists—all swelling the ranks of the School of Paris and the Surrealists around Man Ray. Despite Stein’s label, they were anything but lost. They found themselves—through Paris. The originality, boldness, diversity, and freedom of the city captivated them. With the dollar far stronger than the franc, they could afford Paris and invest in art. They helped build the myth of the Années folles. Hemingway’s book title, A Moveable Feast, was no accident.

They gathered in American bars like La Coupole, the Rosebud, Harry’s Bar, and Le Bœuf sur le Toit. At the center of the scene: McAlmon, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Miller, and the provocative Anaïs Nin, whose exploits and eccentricities fascinated Paris. At that time, works by the School of Paris covered café walls and were sold along the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse. Many left for New York, Philadelphia, or San Francisco. Art was alive, timely, and increasingly lucrative. Artists—utterly original—lived day and night beyond their studios, accompanied by their models at La Rotonde, Le Dôme, Le Select, La Coupole, Bal Nègre, Bobino, Versailles, Baty, Bal Bullier, Le Caméléon, Le Jockey, La Cigogne, or the College Inn—entertaining a curious bourgeoisie that followed them through popular press features.

Kiki, Lucie, Claudia, Jacqueline, Youki, and many other garçonnes and Montparnasse muses brought life to both the dance floor and the gallery opening. Their nude bodies were also displayed at major salons—Indépendants, Tuileries, and d’Automne. Wealthy collectors joined in their company and shared their passion for life and art. A certain Dr. Barnes, an American, rescued Chaim Soutine from poverty, providing him with a chauffeur. He wasn’t the only one riding in a convertible—Derain, Picabia, and Foujita had them too—but Barnes’ transformation of Soutine’s life was so spectacular, it amazed even the artist himself. For those who had known him at La Ruche, it confirmed the rule: Art could triumph over hardship and death.

The first School of Paris—centered in Montparnasse—experienced thirty glorious years of multiform expansion.

A New Era Begins

The global economic crisis that began in October 1929 in New York first drew Americans back home, before devastating the rest of the world, especially Europe. Montparnasse mourned the departure of its foreign artists, whose presence had transformed the neighborhood for the better. Some stayed and sowed seeds for future generations. The Second World War brought the first School of Paris to an end—and ushered in a second wave, notably with abstraction, that continues to shape the banks of the Seine today.