Studios & Sculpture Gardens

Section 01

The ateliers where the plaster still coats the shelves — two hidden museums, one short walk apart.

Section 02The Quarter's Quietest Rooms

The grand brasseries of the boulevard du Montparnasse get the headlines, but a few streets back the quarter keeps a different kind of place: the working studio, preserved exactly as its occupant left it. Two of the finest anywhere in Paris sit within easy walking distance of each other, and between them they account for an extraordinary slice of the School of Paris.

The Musée Bourdelle, tucked behind the rue Antoine Bourdelle near the Gare Montparnasse, is the former atelier of Antoine Bourdelle — sculptor, teacher and, for a time, assistant to Rodin. The building retains its original workshop character: tall north-facing windows, plaster casts crowding the shelves, monumental bronzes standing where they were made. A modern wing extends the space without disrupting the intimacy, and the garden — stone and greenery pressed together — is one of the less-noticed pleasures of the arrondissement. Bourdelle taught Giacometti and Germaine Richier here, and the atmosphere of instruction and experiment still seems to hang in the air.

The Zadkine Studio-Museum, a short walk east off the rue d'Assas, is smaller and perhaps more surprising. Ossip Zadkine, the Cubist sculptor, lived and worked in this house and garden for decades, and the scale is intimate to the point of being startling — the city simply disappears. His carved and faceted figures in wood and stone fill a space that feels genuinely unchanged, a private world opened quietly to the public.

Neither museum draws the queues of bigger Left Bank institutions. That is precisely their value. Come in the early afternoon, move slowly through the studios and out into the gardens, and you understand something about how art was actually made in this quarter — not in galleries, but in cramped rooms smelling of plaster, with the boulevard noise held at bay.

Bourdelle taught Giacometti and Germaine Richier here, and the atmosphere of instruction and experiment still seems to hang in the air.

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