Montparnasse

[citation needed] The area also gives its name to: 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.

[2] 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.

The Paris of Charles Baudelaire, Robert de Montesquiou, Zola, Manet, France, Degas, Fauré typically indulged in the Bohemianism cultural refinements of Dandyism.

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.

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.

"[3] They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe - from Europe, including Russia, Hungary and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, 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.

A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Jacob Macznik,[4][5] Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire,Ossip Zadkine, 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 Frenel, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Toño Salazar, Ezra Pound, Max Ernst, Marcel 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, 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, Endre Ady, Joan Miró, Hilaire Hiler and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.

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.

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.

Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse would establish the 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.

While the area attracted people who came to live and work in the creative, bohemian environment, it also became home for political exiles such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Porfirio Diaz, and Simon Petlyura.