Marc Chagall
Chagall lived and worked at La Ruche from 1912 to 1914, in a wedge-shaped studio in the rotunda, alongside Modigliani, Soutine, Leger and Zadkine. The building is still an artists' residence.
La Ruche, 2 passage de Dantzig
Still standing
Outside only
Still the same
The circular studio building in Vaugirard — a wine rotunda from the 1900 Exposition rebuilt as cheap ateliers — where Marc Chagall lived from 1912 to 1914 alongside Modigliani, Soutine and Léger, and painted the pictures that made him.
- 2 passage de Dantzig, 75015 Paris
- Artists' studios since 1902; Chagall lived here from 1912 to 1914
The place, briefly
La Ruche is a three-storey rotunda, built from a wine pavilion salvaged from the 1900 Exposition Universelle and re-erected in Vaugirard by the sculptor Alfred Boucher as cheap studios for artists with no money. The wedge-shaped rooms radiating from a central stair gave it its name: the beehive.
Marc Chagall arrived in Paris from the Russian Empire in 1911, aged twenty-four and nearly destitute, and moved into La Ruche the following year. He stayed until 1914. His neighbours over those years included Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine — an extraordinary concentration of people who were, at the time, uniformly broke.
The conditions were genuinely bad: unheated, insanitary, and so short of materials that painters worked on bedsheets and tablecloths. What came out of it was the work Chagall is known for — the floating figures, the Vitebsk villages remembered from a distance, the colour he always said Paris had given him after the darkness he arrived with.
The building survived demolition proposals in the 1960s and is still an artists' residence, which means it is not open to the public. It is one of the very few places in this Atlas doing in the present exactly what it did in 1912.
Key facts
- A rotunda of cheap artists' studios, opened 1902
- A wine pavilion from the 1900 Exposition Universelle, re-erected here
- Lived and worked here 1912 to 1914
- Modigliani, Soutine, Léger and Zadkine
- Unheated and insanitary; painters worked on bedsheets for want of canvas
- Still a working artists' residence — not open to visitors
Timeline
Alfred Boucher opens La Ruche as cheap studios, using a salvaged Exposition pavilion.
Chagall arrives in Paris from the Russian Empire.
He lives and works at La Ruche among Modigliani, Soutine and Léger.
He leaves for Vitebsk and is trapped there by the war for eight years.
On the map
Questions before you go
Can you visit La Ruche?
No. It is still a working artists' residence and the studios are private. The rotunda and its garden can be seen from the passage de Dantzig.
Why is it called the beehive?
The building is circular, with wedge-shaped studios radiating off a central staircase — the plan looks like a honeycomb.
Who else lived at La Ruche?
Among many others, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, mostly in the same years Chagall was there.
People who knew this place
Within walking distance
8 rue Carcel
The Vaugirard house Gauguin moved his family into in the late 1870s — the first of his homes with a studio in it, and the subject of the 1881 painting named after the street.
Visit the placeCité Falguière
A narrow lane of nineteenth-century artists' studios in Vaugirard, worked in by Paul Gauguin and later by Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine — cheap, cold and almost unchanged.
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.