70 bis entrée des artistes

Born of a two-handed investigation into the building at 70 bis, rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, in the heart of Montparnasse, this book brings together texts, images and archival fragments to revive two centuries of artistic neighborliness — the comings and goings of writers and painters, from George Sand to Picasso and Ezra Pound. It is an urban “excavation notebook” whose origin lies in a chance discovery: a crate of documents unearthed from a cellar at 70 bis and entrusted to Christian Mazzalai (guitarist, composer and founding member of the band Phoenix), who drew Modiano into tracing the leads of this documentary book, itself part of a mapping of places and of the history of artists’ households in his own neighborhood.