Many of the new art hotels are springing up in the Boulevard Montparnasse area on the Left Bank. During the 1920s, you might have found Picasso drinking at the Café Select, Ferdinand Leger painting in the La Ruche studio complex or Man Ray holing up at the Hôtel Istria. Today, the small lanes around Place Pablo Picasso — famous for Rodin’s statue of Balzac — hide newfangled art havens like the Hôtel des Académies et des Arts.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.
Its pedigree is impressive. According to Henry Mona, the hotel’s director, the building once housed the studio of the celebrated Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita, a friend and colleague of Picasso and Man Ray, and the street was at one time home to Modigliani.
Paying tribute to the spirit of the avant-garde, the hotel hired the French urban artist Jérôme Mesnager, who has gained fame for painting his signature “white bodies” — sinewy humanoid forms — on city walls from Togo to Tokyo, including the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Moscow.
Mr. Mesnager has installed the spectral creatures in each of the boutique hotel’s 20 rooms, on the building’s facade, in the courtyard, on the wall of the lobby (chock full of books about Montparnasse’s artistic heyday) and even the elevator shaft (visible through a glass wall in the elevator).
“They’re the hotel’s permanent guests,” Mr. Mona joked.
(from New York Times, Dec 18 2009)
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