Esprit Montmartre : Bohemian life in Paris around 1900

Removed from glamour and over-the-top grandeur of Paris during French Belle Epoque, village-like district of Montmartre stood apart for many poets, artists, and composers as a more place on outskirts of city. In contrast with wide boulevards and well-tended parks of Haussmann's Paris, Montmartre possessed stretches of still-vacant land, strolling flaneurs, and infamous maquis packed with makeshift homes of les miserables. As a bohemian refuge from relentlessly modern metropolis, Montmartre played an important role for Van Gogh, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and many other creatives who called hilltop neighborhood home. While works of earlier impressionists tended to mirror well-heeled bourgeois lifestyle to which they were accustomed, this new generation of post-impressionists captured idyllic landscapes and quaint corner cafes of Montmartre as well as its harsh realities, including lives of vagabonds and prostitutes. The more than three hundred paintings reproduced in this volume are organized thematically, with chapters that collect works portraying everyday street scenes, rural city and effects of urbanization, and raucous Montmartre nightlife, including paintings of Moulin de la Galette and legendary Moulin Rouge. The paintings are accompanied by maps and historical photographs, including works by Eugene Atget. A critic of time once commented on Montmartre that the quarter resembles a huge studio. Esprit Montmartre explores this rich period of artistic production, contexts that influenced it, and how these contexts continue to influence image of artist and subject today.