Paris was a magnet for groundbreaking artists as the 20th century began. Many of them lived, worked or at least drank in the Left Bank neighborhood called Montparnasse. British art historian Sue Roe chronicles the lives of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp and the gang, outlining their personal rivalries and aesthetic arguments in clear, bright prose. Surrealism was born there, and despite the best efforts of its self-appointed totalitarian leader, André Breton, the unconscious proved too vast for any one artist to govern. In Montparnasse follows developments from the restless bohemianism preceding World War I through the late 1930s when Dalí became the toast of the American elite, and melting watches became a familiar image for the educated public.
