Café de la Rotonde

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The Café La Rotonde, general view
The La Rotonde café
The Café La Rotonde at night

The café La Rotonde is an art-historical and literary relevant Café and Restaurant (fr. As a brasserie called) in the Quartier Montparnasse in Paris . It is located on Carrefour Vavin, corner of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail with the address Boulevard du Montparnasse No. 105 in the 6th arrondissement and was opened in 1911 by Victor Libion.

history

Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon in front of Café La Rotonde in 1916
Pablo Picasso, Moise Kisling and Pâquerette at La Rotonde (1916)

The French writer Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 in an apartment in the adjoining building No. 103 , where she spent ten years of her childhood. From 1910, many artists left their studios around Montmartre - Pablo Picasso, for example, had given up his studio in Bateau-Lavoir - and settled in the Montparnasse district.

Amedeo Modigliani: Nina Hamnett , oil on canvas (1914)

La Rotonde became a well-known meeting place for artists and writers after it opened in 1911, much like Le Dôme , Café de Flore , Les Deux Magots , La Closerie des Lilas , Le Select, and La Coupole - they all still exist. For example, Pablo Picasso, André Salmon , Amedeo Modigliani , Diego Rivera , Tsuguharu Foujita and Ilja Ehrenburg were early visitors. Before the First World War , Russian Bolsheviks like Lenin and Trotsky met here to play chess and debate. When the British painter Nina Hamnett came to Paris in 1914 and visited the café, a man from the next table introduced himself to her with the words: "Modigliani, painter and Jew". He portrayed her in the same year. The model Kiki from Montparnasse alias Alice Prin met the American artist Man Ray here in 1921 , who often depicted her in photographs such as Le Violon d'Ingres . The opening scene of Ilja Ehrenburg's novel The Unusual Adventures of Julio Jurenito , published in 1922, takes place in this restaurant; he also portrays it in his memoir People Years of Life .

The owner of the café, Victor Libion, had a heart for poverty-stricken artists and writers who had barely a roof over their heads and little money for their meals. They were allowed to sit there for hours with a 10 centime cup of coffee. If they had no money to pay for their food, he would take their works on commission and return them after the bill was paid. As a result, La Rotonde became the setting for the works of today's famous artists. Nowadays there are only copies hanging on the walls, but they show a good mix of different art styles.

Between the two world wars, members of the Surrealists such as André Breton , Max Ernst and Louis Aragon and American writers living in Paris at the time such as Ernest Hemingway , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were among the guests. In Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises (Eng. Fiesta ) from 1926, the character Jake Barnes states: “No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde ”. (German for example: “If you ask a taxi driver to take a ride from the right bank of the Seine across the river to a café in Montparnasse, he will always take you to the Rotonde”. George Gershwin worked here in 1928 on his composition An American in Paris .

In the 1924 novel Les Montparnos , the author Michel Georges-Michel lets the protagonist, who stands for Modigliani, say about the Rotonde : “Anyone who has set foot in our café once, even if only for one day, is one Infected forever with what we painters call the 'Plague of Montparnasse'. This is not syphilis or any other disease - you will notice that for yourself - but much worse: an uncontrollable, epidemic longing for this place, which is currently one of the most interesting on the globe. "

literature

  • Ernest Hemingway: Fiesta . Authorized transfer from the American by Annemarie Horschitz-Horst. 12th edition. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1999, ISBN 978-3-499-22603-8 .
  • Ursula von Kardorff : Adieu Paris . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1993, ISBN 3-499-13159-5 , pp. 113-118.
  • Billy Klüver: A Day with Picasso. Twenty-four Photographs by Jean Cocteau . MIT Press, 1997, ISBN 0-262-11228-0 .
  • Michel Georges-Michel: Those of Montparnasse. A novel about the big city bohemians . Walde and Graf, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-03774-002-6 . (First published in French in 1924 under the title Les Montparnos )
  • Michael Rössner: Literary Coffee Houses. Coffeehouse literary figures . Böhlau, Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-205-98630-X . ( partly online )

Web links

Commons : La Rotonde (brasserie)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ La Rotonde ( Memento July 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), millerwalks.com, accessed December 15, 2012
  2. ↑ Nina Hamnett , welshicons.org.uk, accessed December 13, 2012
  3. ^ Y. Wells in Nature : The Literary Woman of Montparnasse ( Memento of February 27, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Quoted from the website La Rotonde Montparnasse
  5. ↑ Quoted from website Bonjour Paris
  6. ↑ Quoted from the website La Rotonde Montparnasse
  7. ↑ Oliver Pfohlmann: The most interesting place in the world , literaturkritik.de, accessed on December 21, 2012

Coordinates: 48 ° 50 ′ 32.4 "  N , 2 ° 19 ′ 44.9"  E