Artists
The painters and sculptors of the same rooms as the writers — collected at the salons, painted in the studios, argued with at the cafés.
Painter · Sculptor
Pablo Picasso
The painter whose canvases papered the walls of 27 rue de Fleurus before the writers arrived — the salon's resident modern master.
Illustrator
Jean Cocteau
Poet, artist, impresario, and our doorway from painting into cinema — he brought Picasso into Parade, gave the Return to Order its enduring name, and made films the New Wave generation studied as scripture.
Painter · Sculptor
Amedeo Modigliani
Montparnasse's mournful portraitist — the long necks and empty eyes of the École de Paris, dead at thirty-five before the twenties he shaped had begun.
Illustrator
Marcelle Kahane
Jack Kahane's wife, whose cover designs gave the Obelisk Press contraband its look.
Illustrator
Maurice Girodias
Kahane's son, who survived the Occupation under his mother's name, revived Obelisk, and founded the Olympia Press — Lolita, Beckett, Naked Lunch.
Painter
Zelda Fitzgerald
Novelist, painter, and the Jazz Age's other Fitzgerald — the subject of A Moveable Feast's most disputed portrait.
Painter
Fernand Léger
The machine-age classicist — Cubism rebuilt with engine-part polish, and the postwar call to order answered in industrial gray.
Painter
Francis Picabia
Dada's fastest engine — machine portraits, the journal 391, and the scenario for Entr'acte, dashed off on Maxim's letterhead for the ballet Relâche.
Painter · Sculptor
Marcel Duchamp
The century's quietest revolutionary — readymades, the abandonment of painting, chess on a Paris rooftop in Entr'acte, and one anemic film of spinning puns signed Rrose Sélavy.
Painter
Man Ray
Montparnasse's American eye — portraitist of the whole expatriate quarter, inventor of the rayograph, and maker of films (Emak-Bakia, L'Étoile de mer) that treated the camera as another darkroom.
Painter · Sculptor
Salvador Dalí
The self-made icon of Surrealism — melting watches and manicured scandal — who arrived in Paris by way of two films written with Buñuel, dreamed together before the movement claimed them.
Painter
Gen Paul
The Montmartre expressionist — a leg lost at Verdun, a studio on the avenue Junot, and the closest of Céline's painter friends.
Painter
Kiki de Montparnasse
The Queen of Montparnasse — Man Ray's muse and the face of Ballet mécanique and L'Étoile de mer, cabaret singer, memoirist (Hemingway wrote the introduction), and a painter who sold out her own show.
Painter
Grégoire Michonze
Bessarabian-born painter of crowded, dreamlike village scenes — Max Ernst introduced him to the surrealists, but he went his own way and called it 'surrealist naturalism.' From a 1928 meeting at the Dôme, a lifelong friend of Henry Miller.
Painter
Abraham Rattner
American expressionist of stained-glass color who spent the interwar decades painting in Paris — and, home again in 1940, rode shotgun in the Buick on Henry Miller's American tour for The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.
Painter · Sculptor
Joan Miró
Catalan painter and sculptor. He came to Paris in 1920, took a studio at 45 rue Blomet beside André Masson's, and spent the next sixty years turning the family farm at Mont-roig into a language of floating signs.
Painter
René Magritte
Belgian Surrealist, in Paris from 1927, who painted ordinary objects in impossible arrangements and made the picture itself the subject. He met Salvador Dalí in Paris in the spring of 1929 and spent that August with him at Cadaqués.
Sculptor
Constantin Brâncuși
Romanian-born sculptor in Paris whose simplified forms (Bird in Space, The Kiss) reshaped modern sculpture. A close friend of Duchamp, who later handled sales of his work in America.
Painter
Mina Loy
British-born poet and artist of the Futurist and New York Dada circles, and a regular at the Arensberg salon where she knew Duchamp.
Painter
Claude Monet
Impressionist painter whose late Water Lilies cycle fills the Orangerie's two oval rooms — a gift to France offered the day after the 1918 Armistice and installed to his design.
Painter · Illustrator
Marie Laurencin
Painter of pale, dark-eyed women who entered Picasso's Bateau-Lavoir circle in 1907, was Apollinaire's companion, and designed Les Biches for the Ballets Russes; the Musée de l'Orangerie holds six of her works.
Painter
Chaïm Soutine
École de Paris painter of carcasses, pastry cooks, and convulsed landscapes — nearly unsellable until the 1922 Barnes purchase, and now the Orangerie's largest Soutine collection in Europe.
Painter
Berthe Morisot
Founding Impressionist who showed in seven of the group's eight exhibitions — more than anyone but Pissarro — and whose largest collection now hangs at the Musée Marmottan Monet.
Painter
Camille Pissarro
The eldest of the Impressionists and the only painter to show in all eight of the group's exhibitions, 1874 to 1886.
Painter
Edgar Degas
Painter of dancers, racecourses, and café interiors — among the founders of the independent exhibitions that became Impressionism, though he preferred the word 'independent' himself.
Painter
Henri Rousseau
The self-taught 'Douanier' feted by Picasso's circle at the 1908 Bateau-Lavoir banquet; he painted Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin as The Muse Inspiring the Poet, and nine of his canvases hang in the Orangerie.
Painter
Paul Cézanne
Painter between Impressionism and everything after — shown in the independents' exhibitions, emulated by the Cubists, and present at the Orangerie through 15 works in the Walter-Guillaume collection.
Painter · Sculptor
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Porcelain painter turned co-founder of Impressionism — the painter of the Moulin de la Galette dance and the Luncheon of the Boating Party, whose later classical turn reached Picasso and Matisse.
Painter
Alfred Sisley
Landscape painter of the suburban Seine — one of the four who met in Gleyre's studio in 1862, and among the steadiest exhibitors of the independent shows.
Painter
Édouard Manet
The admired elder of the independents — he painted beside Monet, befriended Morisot, and refused to show in all eight of the group's exhibitions.
Painter
Frédéric Bazille
The movement's lost founder — met Monet, Renoir, and Sisley in Gleyre's studio in 1862 and was killed in the Franco-Prussian War four years before the first exhibition.
Painter
Georges Seurat
Painter of A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, the systematic canvas whose arrival at the 1886 eighth exhibition announced that Impressionism's successors had come.
Painter
Gustave Caillebotte
Painter of Haussmann's geometry and the group's organizer-financier; his bequest of Impressionist paintings forced the French state to take the movement in.
Painter
Mary Cassatt
American painter of modern women looking — invited into the independents by Degas, she showed from the fourth exhibition on and said the group let her work 'with absolute independence.'
Painter
Jean Kronski
Poet, painter, and the third point of the Millers' Brooklyn triangle — Vanya in Crazy Cock, Stasia in Nexus. She died by suicide in a New York asylum; word reached the Millers in 1929.
Painter
Beauford Delaney
American painter of light and portraits who took the teenage James Baldwin under his wing in Greenwich Village, moved to Paris himself in 1953, and remained the person Baldwin credited with teaching him how to see.
Painter
Lucien Happersberger
Swiss painter James Baldwin met in Paris in 1949; his family's chalet in the Alps is where Baldwin finished his first novel, and Giovanni's Room is dedicated to him.
Painter
D. H. Lawrence
English novelist and poet out of a Nottinghamshire coalfield. A court destroyed The Rainbow in 1915, the police took his paintings off a London wall in 1929, and he came to Paris that March to get Lady Chatterley's Lover cheaply into print.
Painter
Gustave Courbet
The Realist who insisted that ordinary people were worth painting at the scale reserved for history, and made that a political position.
Painter
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
The landscape painter whose silvery, observed countryside stood between the academies and Impressionism, and whom Pissarro treated as a first teacher.
Painter · Illustrator
Lucien Pissarro
Camille Pissarro's eldest son, who carried Neo-Impressionism to England and ran the Eragny Press.
Painter · Sculptor
Paul Gauguin
Stockbroker turned painter who came into art through Camille Pissarro, showed with the Impressionists, and left Europe for Polynesia.
Painter
Paul Signac
Co-founder of Neo-Impressionism with Georges Seurat, and one of the two younger painters who talked Camille Pissarro into painting in dots.
Painter
Adolf Hitler
Refused twice by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he made a living from 1909 to 1914 copying postcard views of Vienna and Munich in watercolour, then gave the trade up. He later led Nazi Germany.
Illustrator
Djuna Barnes
American writer and illustrator (1892–1982). She was a New York newspaper reporter for eight years before she was a novelist, spent the 1920s and 1930s in Paris, and wrote Nightwood, the 1936 novel T. S. Eliot took to Faber and introduced.
Sculptor
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
French poet and novelist from Honfleur who wrote the love poems of Nos secrètes amours to Natalie Clifford Barney, and was among the writers Barney's Académie des Femmes honoured from 1927.
Painter
Romaine Brooks
American painter who spent her career on portraits of the women around her, worked almost entirely in greys, and gave most of what she made to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
The rest of the room
The artists are the newest wing of the atlas — the writers they painted, published, and argued with are already on the shelves.