So what is it about Belleville and Menilmontant?

The 20th arrondissement of Paris, especially around Belleville and Menilmontant, is what you might call the spiritual heart of Paris street art. It's here that it really took off and here that a lot of artists came from and in fact several of them, including the great Nemo, still live and paint there. They love the area. What is it about Belleville/Menilmontant that seems to inspire so many popular artists and that arouses so much affection?

Well, Belleville and surrounds have always had a pretty amazing reputation as far as real grassroots style art is concerned, in all sorts of artistic disciplines, not only visual art. Belleville's the heart of what people call 'Paris popu' , short for Paris populaire, or working-class Paris, if you like. It was where poor people went after they were pushed out of the Seine-bank areas by Baron Haussmann's radical changes to Paris architecture in the nineteenth century. It soon became known as a lively area with lots of sly-grog bars and was also quite radical, being at the centre of the Commune insurrection in Paris in the late 1870's. Independent and feisty, it has always had a huge sense of community, despite its shabby and run-down look and it's in that environment that great art has been created.

Belleville was the birthplace of France's greatest singer/songwriter, Edith Piaf. Piaf, which was her stage name, means 'sparrow' in Parisian slang--she took it because sparrows live on the street and she was a street kid herself, who ran wild in childhood. (She was also known as La Mome, which means, 'The Kid'). Her songs of heartbreak, tough philosophy and loving portraits of Paris and its characters, sung in her distinctively Parisian-accented smoky voice, are huge classics and are still loved very much today all over the world, decades after her death. For many people, she is the voice of Paris.

Belleville was also the setting for the beautiful 1950's film Le Ballon Rouge, or The Red Balloon, directed by Albert Lamorisse, which was filmed entirely on location there. A picture book of the same name with stills from the film was also produced. Those of us who know and love Nemo's Black Silhouette's red balloon are sure it comes from there!

Another fabulous work of art set in Belleville is the 1950's children's classic, Le Cheval Sans Tete(published in English as A Hundred Million Francs)which tells of the amazing adventures of some poor but very resourceful Paris kids after they discover a toy horse filled with money at a dump. It's still in print 50 years down the track.

A recent weird and wonderful French animated film, The Triplets of Belleville, (2003)is set there too, while nearby Menilmontant features in a famous song by another great French singer/songwriter of the past, Charles Trenet, who paid tribute to its tough working-class spirit in Les Gars de Menilmontant, which in turn inspired an exuberant street painting by Jerome Mesnager!

Today Belleville and Menilmontant continue to inspire fantastic popular art, with wonderful works by Nemo and Mesnager and Mosko et associes and others enjoyed by locals and visitors alike. It's also an interesting and lively area with people from everywhere, some great cheap places to eat, a fabulous park with some of the best views over Paris and if you're in Paris, you've just got to check it out!