Montmartre
Related: Paris - modern art
Since Montmartre was officially outside the city and free of its taxes, and the nuns there made wine, the hill did not take long to become the place to go to get drunk cheaply. From there, it was only a short step for Montmartre to become the center of free-wheeling and decadent entertainment in the years at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the popular cabaret the "Moulin Rouge" and at "Le Chat Noir" where the city's most famous artists, singers and performers regularly appeared including Yvette Guilbert, Marcelle Lender, Aristide Bruant, La Goulue, Georges Guibourg, Mistinguett, Fréhel, Jane Avril, Damia and others. [May 2006]
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Montmartre is a hill in the north of Paris, France, in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the "Right Bank". The name "Montmartre" comes from "Mont des Martyrs" because the bishop Saint Denis (patron saint of France), the priest Rustique, and the archdeacon Eleuthere were all decapitated there around the year 272. Here in 1534 Ignatius Loyola and seven companions took the vows that led to the creation of the Jesuits. A large nunnery once stood on the hill. For many years the vineyards and windmills gave Montmartre an air of the country in the middle of Paris. During the Revolution it was renamed "Montmarat" to commemorate the assassinated revolutionary Jean Marat, but the name did not stick.
When Napoleon III and his city planner Baron Haussmann planned to make Paris the most beautiful city in Europe, a first step was to grant large sweeps of land near the center of the city to Haussmann's friends and financial supporters. This drove the original inhabitants to the edges of the city: to the districts of Clichy, La Villette, and the hill with a view of the city, Montmartre.
Since Montmartre was officially outside the city and free of its taxes, and the nuns there made wine, the hill did not take long to become the place to go to get drunk cheaply. From there, it was only a short step for Montmartre to become the center of free-wheeling and decadent entertainment in the years at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, especially in the popular cabaret the "Moulin Rouge" and at "Le Chat Noir" where the city's most famous artists, singers and performers regularly appeared including Yvette Guilbert, Marcelle Lender, Aristide Bruant, La Goulue, Georges Guibourg, Mistinguett, Fréhel, Jane Avril, Damia and others.
Near the end of the 19th century, Montmartre and its counterpart on the Left Bank, Montparnasse, became the principal artistic centers of Paris. Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and other impoverished artists lived and worked in a commune, a building called Le Bateau-Lavoir during the years 1904-1909. Artist associations such as Les Nabis were formed and individuals such as Vincent Van Gogh, Pierre Brissaud, Alfred Jarry, Gen Paul, Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Henri Matisse, André Derain, Suzanne Valadon, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Maurice Utrillo, Camille Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec plus many other artists worked in Montmartre and drew part of their inspiration from the area. The very last of the bohemian Montmartre artists was Gen Paul (Eugene Paul), (1895 - 1975), born in Montmartre, a friend of Utrillo, whose calligraphic expressionist lithographs, sometimes memorializing picturesque Montmartre itself, owe a lot to Raoul Dufy. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montmartre [Aug 2004]
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