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School · Montparnasse (6th) · 6e arrondissement

Académie de la Grande Chaumière

The buildingStill standing
Getting inOutside only
What's there nowStill the same

Still a working drawing school running open life-drawing sessions. It is a place of work rather than a monument; visitors should not expect a tour.

The Montparnasse drawing academy founded in 1904, where anyone could pay for a session with a model and no one asked for qualifications — the school that trained a substantial share of the École de Paris.

Address
14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière, 75006 Paris
Years
Founded 1904; still operating
IllustrationBright present-day view of the Académie de la Grande Chaumière entrance beneath a blue sky

A close color reconstruction of the documented façade; all students and passersby are newly generated.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The Académie de la Grande Chaumière opened in 1904 on a short street off the boulevard du Montparnasse and worked on a simple principle: you paid for the session, you drew from the model, and nobody required an entrance examination or a nationality. For the foreign artists pouring into Montparnasse in the first decades of the century, that was decisive — the École des Beaux-Arts was competitive and French; this was open and cheap.

The list of who worked in these rooms is long and disproportionately made of people who could not have got in anywhere else: Modigliani, Giacometti, Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Zadkine, and a great many students whose names did not survive. Bourdelle taught here for years.

Wassily Kandinsky used it in the 1930s to keep contact with the international student population and with the other painters working around the quarter, at a point when his own professional footing in Paris was uncertain.

It is still running, still holding open life-drawing sessions, and still on the same street. It is a working school and not a museum.

Key facts

Founded
1904
How it worked
Pay for the session, draw from the model, no entrance requirements
Why it mattered
Open to foreign artists shut out of the École des Beaux-Arts
Who passed through
Modigliani, Giacometti, Calder, Bourgeois, Zadkine; Bourdelle taught
Access
A working school — exterior, unless you are enrolling in a session

In images

The working academy's entrance today at 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière.Editorial illustration
A close color reconstruction of the documented façade; all students and passersby are newly generated.Editorial illustration
Historically informed reconstruction of the academy entrance around 1935.Artistic reconstruction
The surviving façade and documented school activity in natural color; exact plaques, colors, people and actions are interpretive.Artistic reconstruction
A present-day studio reconstruction based on the academy's documented open life-drawing practice; the people and studies are newly generated.Editorial illustration
An evidence-led reconstruction of a working sculpture session, with generic unfinished studies and newly generated students.Editorial illustration
A plausible present-day passage between working studios; this is not a promise of public interior access.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1904

    The academy opens off the boulevard du Montparnasse.

  2. 1930s

    Kandinsky uses it to stay in contact with the quarter's artists and students.

On the map

Questions before you go

Can anyone draw at the Grande Chaumière?

That was the founding principle and it still largely holds — the academy runs open life-drawing sessions you pay for by the session.

Who studied there?

Among many others, Modigliani, Giacometti, Calder, Louise Bourgeois and Zadkine. Antoine Bourdelle taught there for years.

Writers who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Russian-born; French from 1939 · Russian painter, celebrated as a pioneer of abstract art, who gave up a Moscow law career at thirty to study painting in Munich, co-founded the Blue Rider group in 1911, taught for eleven years at the Bauhaus, the German design school — and spent his last eleven years in a flat in Neuilly-sur-Seine that the French artist Marcel Duchamp had pointed him towards, painting soft cell-like forms nothing like the hard geometry Germany knew him for.

Frequented by

Kandinsky used the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in the 1930s to keep contact with the international students and artists working around Montparnasse.

— Where Did Kandinsky Live?

People who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil

Amrita Sher-Gil

Hungarian-Indian · Painter

Sher-Gil was admitted to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in April 1929 and studied there under Pierre Vaillant before entering the École des Beaux-Arts.

Illustrated portrait of Augusta Savage

Augusta Savage

American · Sculptor, Educator

Savage studied sculpture briefly with Félix Benneteau-Desgrois at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière after arriving in Paris on a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1929.

Within walking distance

Bright present-day color view of 13 rue de la Grande-Chaumière

Restaurant · Montparnasse (6th)

Madame Charlotte's crémerie, 13 rue de la Grande-Chaumière

The tiny dairy-restaurant run by Charlotte Futterer on the rue de la Grande-Chaumière, where broke artists ate on credit and sometimes settled the bill with a canvas — and where Paul Gauguin met Alphonse Mucha.

Visit the place
La Rotonde at night, red awnings and glowing red neon over a terrace of red-backed chairs on a wet pavement

Café · Montparnasse

La Rotonde

The café every taxi driver delivered Americans to — the novel's driest Montparnasse joke, and before that the painters' living room, where the patron took drawings for drinks.

Visit the place
Color street view of the UGC Rotonde corner building at 103–105 boulevard du Montparnasse

Apartment · Montparnasse (Notre-Dame-des-Champs)

103 boulevard du Montparnasse

Where Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 and grew up with her sister Hélène — in the middle of Montparnasse, the quarter she would spend most of her life within a few streets of.

Visit the place
Le Dôme today, its terrace and awning under the plane trees of the Boulevard du Montparnasse

Café · Montparnasse

Le Dôme

The noisy common room of Montparnasse and the setting of 'With Pascin at the Dôme' — the café for watching the show, not for working.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1Where Did Kandinsky Live?

    Website
    Centre Pompidou, via Google Arts & Culture
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière page.

    View source

  2. 2Kandinsky — dossier pédagogique (exhibition education dossier)

    Website
    Centre Pompidou, service éducatif, 2009
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière page.

    View source

  1. 3Vasily Kandinsky — artist biography

    Website
    Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière page.

    View source

  2. 4Inside Kandinsky's Studio in Neuilly

    Website
    Centre Pompidou, via Google Arts & Culture
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Académie de la Grande Chaumière page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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