Welcome to the Impasse Ronsin – the artists’ colony to beat them all

Of all creatives, visual artists are perhaps the least likely to work in isolation; the atomised life of garret-installed solitude is not for them. Artists have always bounced off one another, whether in colonies, studios, collectives or co-operatives. The YBAs would not have been a thing, let alone a now-unfashionable acronym, had a significant group of them not chosen to hang out together. There are outliers, of course, but for the most part artists seem to like rubbing along together, perhaps in the belief that the fumes of oil from one studio can inspire brushwork in the one next door.

The Impasse Ronsin, a tiny cul de sac in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, was the artists’ colony to beat them all. It had everything: fame, obscurity, money, poverty, radicalism, outrage. It no longer exists but work created there and the very spirit of it, in dazzling eye-witness accounts, can be experienced at the Museum Tinguely in Basel this summer. Fat lot of good that is, you might think (unless you are reading this in Basel), but the accompanying catalogue goes a long way to transport you to the wildly bohemian world of the Impasse, now lost.

At its heart was the studio of Constantin Brancusi, who arrived at what was already a thriving artists’ colony in 1916. The Impasse was infamous as the site of a double murder that had occurred eight years earlier. ‘The widespread notoriety of this crime cannot be underestimated, and its lure is still obvious,’ says the show’s curator, Adrian Dannatt. The French president (and fabled shagger) Félix Faure had died in 1899, apparently while being orally pleasured by his mistress Marguerite Steinheil, who lived, and ran a salon, at No. 8, Impasse Ronsin. Rumours abounded that she had killed the president. Nine years later, her husband and mother were found murdered at No.