At the western exit of the Avenue du Maine tunnel at the foot of the Tour Montparnasse, there is an attractive iron gate that opens up into a serene leafy, pebbled alley. Come October, its profusion of Virginia ivy bursts into a blaze of crimson fire. Tucked away at the back end of the alley is Lieu-Dit, one of the city's most creative florists. But more importantly, this one-time depot of the western stagecoach (back in 1840....), is home to the Musée du Montparnasse (also known as Chemin du Montparnasse), where a bunch of enthusiasts, running on a shoestring budget, is keeping alive the golden years of Montparnasse. Similarly to other cites d'artistes sprinkled throughout the outlying arrondissements of Paris, the studios that line the alley were reclaimed from the 1900 World Fair and came into their own from 1912 on, when Marie Vassilieff opened here an atelier and also an academy, where she guided the young Chana Orloff. 

During the years of destitution during World War I, Vassilieff turned

Mother Earth and made this the cantine of Montparnasse's legendary artists - Picasso, Modigliani, Braques, Léger, Zadkine... and also Lenine and Trotsky, undesirable characters whose presence on her premises caused her to be jailed. Shame on the media who omit to bestow

on this modest sanctuary the attention it deserves. All the more the

shame because it was earmarked for demolition in the 1990s. It is

thanks to the creation of the museum that the alley has been preserved

and that we have been spared the eyesore of hideous concrete clutter in

its stead. For that alone, it deserves attention and respect. And also

for the fact that the place is still alive with working artists'

studios.

Every year the museum puts up quality exhibitions related to the golden

era of Montparnasse. This summer through September, an homage is paid

to the 122 deportee artists of Montparnasse, "Montparnasse Déporté,

Artistes d'Europe," a premiere on French soil and not to everyone's

liking (too sensitive an issue according to some).  The idea was born

out of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of

the Nazi camps in January 2005. A poignant message from the one-time

minister Madame Simone Weil, herself an Auschwitz survivor, states

clearly the importance and meaningfulness of the event:

 "The exhibition enables us to estimate the artistic wealth and

diversity we have been deprived of by the Nazi enterprise. By becoming

aware of their accomplished work, but also of the work that might have

been accomplished, we can take the measure to what extent the

destruction of all these artists has been an irreparable loss to

mankind."

Jewish more often than not, most of the artists had come to Paris from

central or eastern Europe in the early 20th century, having fled

persecution or the fossilised oppressiveness of ghetto life; often

both. They came to be known as l'Ecole de Paris, Paris the beacon of

Light towards which they streamed like butterflies (to paraphrase André

Warnod's metaphor), Paris, the capital of the arts, Paris, the

crossroads of all hopes (and more specifically, Montparnasse, the

birthplace and crossroads of a spectacular melting-pot of creative

effervescence between 1900 and 1930), Paris, the mother of universal

tolerance who would soon turn traitress and deliver the wings of the

innocent butterflies to the Nazi flames.

Most of them never returned. Some were more famous than others, notably

Chaim Soutine who actually was never deported, but was carried off in

1943 by ill health owing to the terrible conditions under which he was

living during the Occupation.  So was poet and painter Robert Desnos,

who was not Jewish, but was a Resistant, and was deported.  He died of typhus fever in Teresin (1945), just two days before the liberation of the camp.  His painting "Landscape with a Butterfly", (also titled "The Sword and the Butterfly"), brings a touch of dreamlike light to a world of hopeless darkness. And the sword does look like a cross. Other anti-Nazi artists are present too, the German Max Ernst, the French member of the Résistance, Violette Rougier le Coq, and the legendary Jean Moulin, who even under the massive pressure of his torturer, Klaus Barbie, never gave away the name of fellow resistants. In 1937 he was France's youngest Prefect, appointed to Rodez in the Aveyron, from where he would cycle to the magnificent village of Conques on Sundays, for the pleasure of capturing it in sketches and drawings, as did painter Pierre Soulages.  An immensely gifted artist, his self-portrait is not dated, but his sketch of the port of Marseilles dates from 1943, the year he was arrested. There is a portrait of Soutine by Modigliani, who was fortunate in a way to have died in 1920 because being an Italian Jew, in all likelihood he would have also been deported. As was Max Jacob, whose recent conversion to Catholicism was of little help once the Nazi death machine was set in motion: he died in the camp of Drancy, north of Paris, in 1944. The contrast with a delicate testimony of a carefree Paris, painted in the early 30s, at the opera, the circus, and at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, makes it almost impossible to conceive the inconceivable that was lying in wait, barely a decade ahead. Even more so when the painter stares at you out of his self-portrait, also painted in 1932, so real, so intense, so alive. And then no more.

There were all the other, less famous and sometimes equally talented

artists. Some would have become famous. All were nipped in the bud.

Both women and men. Rudolf Levy and his tender rendering of rural life,

going back to 1915. Otto Freundlich, whose bronze sculpture dating from

1911 is as avant-garde and as cubic as the works left by Zadkine. Moise

Kogan's poignantly tender female nudes, showered by their creator with

so much love, admiration, sacred awe. A patch of old Paris in the early

1930s, the Paris populaire, of the faubourgs, captured by Nathan Grunsweigh with its picture house, l'usine à rêves that allowed the labouring classes to escape. A self-portrait of Granovsky, the "cowboy" of Montparnasse during the Crazy Twenties. His two nudes and a dancer, in pastel and chalk, are more alive than a living model. One watches it

all speechless, taking in what's given in respectful silence, but one's

mind remains restless, thinking  constantly of what was destroyed, and

of what was never given a chance to be conceived and birthed. There is

no other way to experience this exhibition. The ghosts that created

the works on display, are tangibly omnipresent in the little museum,

thanks to the photos, letters and other documents that accompany the

exhibition, notably a letter written by Alexandre Heimovitz to his wife

and little daughter from whom he was separated during the Occupation,

and who would soon be arrested never to return. The letter is

accompanied by a drawing of his wife and little girl riding their

bicycle, their little dog tailing behind. It could have been your

family, it could have been mine. The letter is written in elegant

French, sprinkled with the touching grammar mistakes of a keen

foreigner. They so admired France. They so wanted to be adopted by

her.

Those who did escape destruction and were lucky to return reverted to

silence. As did those  urged to witness by Claude Lanzmann in his film

"Shoah." What else but silence can speak the unspeakable?  Perhaps the

lament of a violincello, a wood bas-relief by Shelomo Selinger who also

carved into a block of oak "Les Rescapés", dated from as recently as

1989. Walter Spitzer's preparatory work for the Vél-d'Hiv monument has

also been included in the exhibition. It was commissioned in 1996 for

the commemoration of the<italic> rafle du Vél d'Hiv</italic>, so called

after the winter velodrome where the Jews were rounded up on July 16th

and 17th, 1942.  The stadium stood on rue Nélaton, by the Eiffel Tower,

but has been demolished since. Spitzer's monument stands at the back of

convoluted name for a modest strip of a shady garden, by the Seine,

where you will seldom meet a living soul, other than on the annual

commemoration of the event. Uncannily, the monument faces the Eiffel

Tower, the emblem of faith in human progress. Behind it, by the water,

albeit invisible from this spot, is the reduced model of the no less

emblematic Statue of Liberty, looking to the west...

Special homage is due to Hersch Fenster who, between 1945 and 1951,

undertook the titanesque job of investigating, researching, collecting,

all the testimonies, all the documents, all the files, so as to

Artistes Martyrs, written in Yiddish in 1951, was prefaced by

Marc Chagall.

Paris, Volume I and III, by Thirza Vallois, in the chapters on the 6th, 14th and 15th arrondissements, and in Romantic Paris, by Thirza Vallois.

To order your copies of Around and About Paris and Romantic Paris, check out http://www.thirzavallois.com.