The Definitive Art Alley in Postwar France

There’s a back street in Montparnasse, the entrance to a hospital morgue, where weeds grow in sidewalk cracks and beer cans rust on the pavement. The only discernible sign of life is a corner cafe, but even that feels more like the backdrop of a Cartier-Bresson photograph than a place to purchase actual coffee. On a clammy afternoon in August, the owner sits outside alone, smoking.

This narrow, nondescript passage — known as the Impasse Ronsin — was once an artery of aesthetic energy that, in no small fashion, defined French postwar art in all its insanity. First the site of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio, Ronsin was later where the likes of Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely all lived or worked for much of the 1950s and early 1960s. For a moment in time, the alley was Paris itself, the lifeblood of an era.

From “The Artists and their Alley in Postwar France” by James McAuley for The New York Times T Magazine, 2016; Photo of Constantin Brancusi, from 1921 courtesy of Paul Kasmin Gallery/Succession Brancusi

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