from the beautifully informative wikipedia:

The name Montparnasse stems from the nickname "Mount Parnassus" (In Greek mythology, home to the nine Greek goddesses — the Muses — of the arts and sciences) given to the hilly neighborhood in the 17th century by students who came there to recite poetry

Like its counterpart, Montmartre, the neighborhood of Montparnasse became famous at the beginning of the 20th century, referred to as the Années Folles (the Crazy Years), when it was the heart of intellectual and artistic life in Paris. Between 1921 and 1924, the number of Americans in Paris swelled from 6,000 to 30,000. In the years between 1910 and 1940, Paris' artistic circles gradually moved from Montmartre to Montparnasse.

Virtually penniless painters, sculptors, writers, poets and composers came from around the world to thrive in the creative atmosphere and for the cheap rent at artist communes such as La Ruche. Living without running water, in damp, unheated "studios" often as not overrun by rats, many sold their works for a few francs just to buy food. Jean Cocteau once said that poverty was a luxury in Montparnasse. First promoted by art dealers such as Henry Kahnweiler, today works by those artists sell in the millions of dollars. (how romantic! i wish i lived there..)

They came to Montparnasse from all over the globe, from across Europe, including Russia and Ukraine, from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and from as far away as Japan. Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Camilo Mori and others made their way from Chile where the profound innovations in art spawned the formation of the Grupo Montparnasse in Santiago. A few of the other artists who gathered in Montparnasse were Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ossip Zadkine, Moise Kisling, Marc Chagall, Nina Hamnett, Fernand Leger, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, Chaim Soutine, Michel Kikoine, Pinchus Kremegne, Amedeo Modigliani, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Fort, Juan Gris, Diego Rivera, Marevna, Tsuguharu Foujita, Marie Vassilieff, Léon-Paul Fargue, Alberto Giacometti, Andre Breton, Pascin, Salvador Dalí, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Joan Miró and, in his declining years, Edgar Degas.


Montparnasse friends. In the 1915 photograph in front of La Rotonde seen here, is (left to right): Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Henri-Pierre Roché (in uniform), Marie Vassilieff, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso


Montparnasse was a community where creativity was embraced with all its oddities, each new arrival welcomed unreservedly by its existing members. When Tsuguharu Foujita arrived from Japan in 1913 not knowing a soul, he met Soutine, Modigliani, Pascin and Leger virtually the same night and within a week became friends with Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In 1914, when the English painter Nina Hamnett arrived in Montparnasse, on her first evening the smiling man at the next table at La Rotonde graciously introduced himself as "Modigliani, painter and jew". They became good friends, Hamnett later recounting how she once borrowed a jersey and corduroy trousers from Modigliani, then went to La Rotonde and danced in the street all night.