Montparnasse Revisited. - video recording reviews

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 1994 by Robert S. Rothenberg

During the first three decades of the 20th century, as avant-gardism succeeded impressionism and the Cubists began to revolutionize the world of art, Paris' Montparnasse was the spiritual heart of the movement. This stunning video series salutes the famed painters and sculptors of the era, as well as the writers, musicians, composers, and photographers who flocked to the City of Light in this golden age. Narrated by art historian Edwin Mullins, it combines interviews with surviving artists, models, gallery owners, and others involved in the milieu with vintage photography and silent film footage to set the scene and illustrate why Paris was the mecca for such a roster of talent.

Emulating Paul Gauguin and Paul Cezanne, artists turned to the evolving avant-garde movement, and the list of those it produced is overwhelming: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Rousseau, Franco Modigliani, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, and dozens of others cross the screen. Viewers not only get an art appreciation course as renowned paintings, sculpture, and photographs are shown to mesh with the narration, they get to see the works being created thanks to the historical still and motion pictures that have been amassed to illustrate this series. The cost of the 10-video set perhaps may put it out of reach for all but serious scholars, but it is well worth renting by appreciators of art.