- Café de la Rotonde
The Café de la Rotonde is a famous
café in the Montparnasse Quarter ofParis ,France . Located on the Carrefour Vavin, at the corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail, it was founded byVictor Libion in 1910. Along with Le Dome and La Coupole it was one of the popular gathering spots for notableartist s andwriter s during the interwar period.Frequented by
Pablo Picasso , who had a studio nearby, in 1914, when the English painterNina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and Jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers fromAmedeo Modigliani , then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.During this creative era, proprietor Libion allowed starving artists to sit in his café for hours, nursing a ten-centime cup of
coffee and looked the other way when they broke the ends from a baguette in the bread basket. If an impoverished painter couldn't pay their bill, Libion would often accept a drawing, holding it until the artist could pay. As such, there were times when the café's walls were littered with a collection of artworks, that today would make the curators of the world's greatest museums drool with envy.La Rotonde continues in operation to this day and is a popular nostalgia spot for tourists.
Life in the cafe was depicted by several of the artists that frequented the cafe, including
Tsuguharu Foujita , who depicted a fight in the cafe in his etching "A la Rotonde" of 1925. A later 1927 versionLe Café de la Rotonde was part of theTableaux de Paris of 1929. [ La vie et l'oeuvre de Leonard Tusguharu Foujita; Sylvie Buisson, Dominique Buisson, Tsugouharu Foujita; pg. 500, 545, 555, 597 - Published by ACR Edition, 1987ISBN 2867701457, 9782867701450 ]References
* Klüver, Billy. "A Day with Picasso" (1997)
MIT Press ISBN 0262112280
* [http://www.iht.com/articles/1998/10/03/vass.t.php October 3, 1998 "International Herald Tribune" newspaper article]
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