Montparnasse in the Roaring 20's

Cafés, binges, passions, jazz and the first international colony of artists (as Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" recalls)

•France's Jewish heritage

•Creativity on the other side of the tracks

Paris's southern fringe...

witnessed the blossoming of some of the 20th-century's most important art, writing and ideas.

So diverse were the styles and origins of the artists who flocked there that they are grouped together simply as "The School of Paris", a term that includes Modigliani, Picasso and Jewish painters from Eastern Europe. It could be extended to most major American novelists of the 1920's... and Russian revolutionaries in exile.

: Exempt from fighting World War I because they were foreigners, these men all became part of art history. Picasso is on the right (by Jean Cocteau, 1916)

: "Le Dôme", one of a cluster of cafés where artists gathered when light failed and studios grew cold.

Our tour evokes this haven of freedom and bohemia,

which could aid creativity, or destroy it.

It can be a mini-course in art history as well.

We begin with two legendary women, who chose Montparnasse for its sexual freedom

• Gertrude Stein

•In Hemingway's footsteps

: "Gertrude Stein", by Picasso, 1904

For 20 years Stein's Saturday night soirées were one way that 2000 Parisians in all the arts active, French and foreign, came to know each other, directly or via different groups. Among our subjects: salons, cafés, restaurants, bars (...) as points of contact.

Stein visited the young Picasso in Montmartre perhaps 90 times for this portrait, which is considered the beginning of Cubism. We explain how Montmartre and Montparnasse connect.

_{Leo and Gertrude Stein's collection, then and now}

She "happened to be at the heart of a movement of which the art world knew nothing." - Gertrude Stein, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas"

We tell how Gertrude and her brother Leo, eliciting quizzical looks from Parisians as they walked around in their sandals, were among the first to encourage painters who launched modern art.

• Alice Prin, "Kiki de Montparnasse"

: "Portrait of Kiki", by Kisling

This exuberant girl is probably art history's most famous model. She was also a naive painter of insight and wit and was an all-time great for having fun.

Her life resembles that of Louise Weber in Montmartre. It also ended sadly.

Photos of Kiki by Man Ray

Montparnasse artists painted more portraits than did their predecessors of Montmartre, and fewer groups. A reaction to the carnage and dehumanization of World War 1?

Photography and experimental movies were arts with which Montparnasse people experimented (Man Ray, Cocteau...). Man Ray is representative too in being foreign, American and Jewish.