26 rue du Départ

The place, briefly

In autumn 1912, Diego Rivera and the Russian painter Angelina Beloff moved into a studio at 26 rue du Départ beside the old Gare Montparnasse. The trains rattled the windows; the high view opened over workshops and roofs toward the 1900 Ferris wheel. Rivera used that view in his portrait Adolfo Best Maugard and painted Dos Mujeres here in 1914 — the apartment and the city becoming part of the Cubist pictures rather than mere background.

The building held a small international colony. Piet Mondrian worked at the same address in 1912–14 and again from 1919 to 1936, eventually turning his white-walled studio into a three-dimensional composition of movable coloured rectangles. María Blanchard shared Rivera and Beloff’s rooms for a period; Modigliani came through and worked in Rivera’s studio. An address printed in the Salon catalogues became a compact map of the School of Paris.

Rivera’s years here were the hinge between Mexico and muralism. In the rue du Départ studio he absorbed the arguments of Picasso, Braque and the Montparnasse cafés, painted roughly two hundred Cubist works, and built Mexican objects and colours into the movement’s fractured space. He left the address and Paris by 1920; after studying Italian frescoes, he returned to Mexico in 1921 and moved from easel paintings for collectors to walls made for a public.

Nothing of the studios survives. The building was removed during the 1960s redevelopment that replaced the old station and remade this edge of Montparnasse. The rue du Départ still runs beside the rail complex, but the useful way to visit is imaginative: stand near the historic address and look back toward the tracks, the same infrastructure whose noise and geometry entered Rivera’s Paris canvases.