The Musée de Montmartre, tucked appropriately away on a small street in Montmartre carries on a split mission: It reflects the history and work of artists who lived and worked in what is now the museum, and it carries the memory of the once-rural village that they made famous through their art, and to some extent their antics.
The museum’s two buildings, which share a sloping garden, date to the late 17th century, but it was only in the late 1800s that the neighborhood and flats in the buildings attracted their famous tenants, including Renoir, Suzanne Valadon, Maurice Utrillo, Émile Bernard, Raoul Dufy and a host of others.
There’s not much trace of the actual rooms and studios occupied by the various tenants; the space is mainly given over to galleries. Only the spaces used by Valadon, her son Utrillo and her husband, André Utter are kept.
The picture above was our One-Clue Mystery this week, correctly identified by George G and PortMoresby.
Valadon’s studio; her painting of the main building is on a garden sign. Below that, René Zimmerman’s 1933 view of ‘Utrillo’s House.’
Renoir’s The Swing, and the space in which he painted it…
But there are exhibits of Montmartre history, often illustrated with paintings; galleries highlighting the social and cultural milieu of the neighborhood from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, and special exhibitions. The major exhibit I saw in September, was a retrospective of Raoul Dufy’s work in Paris. It closed last week; I just missed a exhibition on Montmartre and the Commune of 1871.
The Commune, by the way, plays a notable role in Montmartre’s history; high on a hill above the city, it was a center of the rebellion, and an important target during its suppression, because it was the site of artillery emplacements. Some of the harshest fighting in that period took place there.
Earlier, during the German siege of Paris, which had cut off communications with the rest of France, it was from Montmartre that Defense Minister Léon Gambetta made aviation history by using a hot-air balloon to leave the city to try to rally the country.
Up to the mid-1800s, Montmartre had been pretty much a rural village, with a few mills and significant farmland, but even before the artists, and others, arrived, that had changed as the area was extensively quarried for gypsum (yes, plaster of Paris). That ended when the land became unstable, but elements of the past remained: the mills that appear in many paintings, and, next to the museum the last vineyard in Paris, Le Clos Montmartre.
But while it’s the last vineyard in a city that has grown grapes since the 10th century, it’s not what some would have us believe, an ancient survivor. It was actually planted in 1933 to keep an open area from being built over. That area is part of the ‘Maquis,’ an open area that slowly filled with shacks, shanties and makeshift buildings of various kinds.
A view of the Maquis around 1900 by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, and a Julien Pavel view of the garden, before the planting of the vines.
Picturesque scenes like that attract both painters and developers, and while the developers eventually had their way with most of it, pushing through new streets and new buildings, the vineyard saved a bit of it. And in the area also, one of the best-known artist’s hangouts, Le Lapin Agile, or agile rabbit. It’s still there, though no longer home to Renoir, Braque, Picasso, Modigliani and the like. The sign is by Andre Gill, by the way, an active Communard.
The museum also has several galleries devoted to the famed cabarets of the late 1800s and early 1900s, with posters by artists including Steinlen, Toulouse-Lautrec and more, as well as memorabilia of artist bars of the period between the wars, including this classic bar phone from 1937, which many of us know from the movies…
Behind the gardens, a view of the old Montmartre water tower, and in a corner, a pleasant cafe for a quiet snack or drink.
