Montmartre became the birthplace of modern and contemporary art and the artistic center of avant-garde art, literature, and theater during the second half of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. These artists gathered in Montmartre cafés, exchanging ideas and engaging in discourse. The precedent of avant-garde artists both meeting in and depicting Montmartre cafés was established by the Impressionists in the 1870's. The Café Guerbois, the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, and the Café Rat Mort were regular gathering places for Degas, Renoir, Manet, and Monet. Manet's apartment and studio were just south of the Place Clichy, and, between 1875 and 1876, Renoir rented studio space in what is now the Musée de Montmartre at 12-14 rue Cortot. It was there that Renoir painted Bal du Moulin de la Galette, La Balançoire (Paris, Musée d'Orsay), and Le Jardin de la rue Cortot (Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute Museum of Art). The Chat Noir cabaret and its habitués were the principal forces behind the emergence of Montmartre in the early 1880s as the focal point of avant-garde artistic and literary life in Paris. The center of Montmartre café life was the Chat Noir cabaret, which was founded at the end of 1881 by the failed artist, Rodolphe Salis. He proclaimed it a "cabaret artistique" and invited young artists, writers, composers, and musicians to use it as their base of activity. The Chat Noir cabaret and its habitués (especially the proto-Dada/ Surrealist group of artists and writers called the "Incohérents") were the principal forces behind the emergence of Montmartre in the early 1880s as the focal point of avant-garde artistic and literary life in Paris. In the 1880s, Rodolphe Salis promoted the Chat Noir cabaret with its important, proto-cinema shadow theater as "the most extraordinary cabaret in the world" and Montmartre as "the center of the world." He was not completely exaggerating. With their avant-garde themes of cafes, bars, circus, dance halls, prostitutes, and everyday life depicted in seemingly spontaneous strokes of pure pigments of oil, watercolor, or pastel, Montmartre Impressionists such as Manet, Degas, and Renoir exerted their influence on a new generation of Montmartre artists, writers, and musicians who were drawn to and/or generated the activities of the Chat Noir in a bid to be "modern.” When evaluating turn-of-the-century art in France, the artists who stand out as major contributors to Western art - Mary Cassatt, Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Suzanne Valadon, the Nabis, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Amedeo Modigliani - all evolved out of the Montmartre cultural matrix. In fact, when Picasso, Duchamp, F. Kupka, Juan Gris, Kees Van Dongen, and other future 20th century avant-garde artists first came to Montmartre around 1900, they already had knowledge of and were influenced by the styles and subject matter of the previous generation of Montmartre artists such as T.A. Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec. Monochromatic art and conceptual art, which are dominant elements of 20th and 21st century art, derive directly from the art produced by the incredible group of Montmartre artists and writers at the end of the 19th century called the "Incoherents." For at least a quarter of a century, Montmartre was the center of the world for Western art and culture, and its contributions reverberate strongly even today.

PRESENTER BIOGRAPHY: Phillip Dennis Cate is a widely published specialist of 19th century French art whose expertise covers Montmartre, sculpture, and Japonism. He has organized programs for international institutions such as The Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; The National Museum of Japanese Art, Tokyo; and The Imperial Household, Tokyo. Previously the Director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey and a Curator of Special Exhibitions and Consultant for the Collection and Renovation of the Musée de Montmartre in Paris. Cate now works as an independent curator and critic.