Wassily Kandinsky
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.
Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Still standing
Outside only
Still the same
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.
- 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière, 75006 Paris
- Founded 1904; still operating
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
- 1904
- Pay for the session, draw from the model, no entrance requirements
- Open to foreign artists shut out of the École des Beaux-Arts
- Modigliani, Giacometti, Calder, Bourgeois, Zadkine; Bourdelle taught
- A working school — exterior, unless you are enrolling in a session
Timeline
The academy opens off the boulevard du Montparnasse.
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
Within walking distance
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
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 place103 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
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 placeThe Friday Letter
Paris, one address at a time.
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.