Private Air New York Magazine
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www.privateairny.com Private Air New York | Fall 2016 40 ART K nown as L'impasse Ronsin, the venue was an easily forgotten enclave in Paris' 15th arrondissement. At just one hundred and twenty-five meters long by eight meters wide, the space is little more than an alley. Yet it was once an address firmly rooted at the center of scandal - before becoming an epicenter of artistic genius, that is. L'Impasse Ronsin first came to the attention of the public as the home of Marguerite Steinheil, a siren in her day and the lover of French President Félix Faure. It has been noted that Madame Steinheil had a penchant for – shall we say – "short lived" relationships. In 1899, Faure met his end while in the company of Steinheil – allegedly while visiting in her Ronsin abode and in 1908, both Steinheil's husband and stepmother were found murdered in their rooms. Despite such a heavy influx of pointed suspicion and whispered accusation, the seductress was never convicted of the murders. Rather, Madame Steinheil went on to live a relatively anonymous life in England. But for the alley known as L'Impasse Ronsin, languishment in the shadow of abandonment was simply not to be. Artists began to arrive to the neighborhood somewhere around 1910. Not unlike the TriBeca area whose cheap rents and brilliant light attracted artists to New York's Greenwich Village, the squalid spaces of L'Impasse Ronsin were soon transformed into ateliers that boasted proximity to other artists and, most importantly, negligible rents. e preeminent sculptor Constantin Brancusi was among the first to make the down at the heels haven his home. Brancusi was soon followed by the likes of William N. Copley, Max Ernst, Les Lalanne, James Metcalf, Larry Rivers, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jean Tinguely. Over the years, the area continued to attract numerous other seminal post-war artists who found themselves together not by conscious paring, but by virtue of happenstance, a phenomenon that saw L'Impasse Ronsin become the veritable "home address" of art in postwar France. ART BORN OF SQUALOR The Art of L'Impasse Ronsin As Presented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery By: Gina Samarotto