The sculptor and painter Alfred Boucher was among the early artists of Impasse Ronsin. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more and more artists from America began to arrive. The American «animaliers» Eli Harvey and Alexander Phimister Proctor, the Mexican sculptor Fidencio Lucano Nava, or the painter Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Côté and the sculptor Alfred Laliberté, both from Canada. They gave Impasse Ronsin an international reputation as a creative place at the heart of Paris.

The most prominent inhabitant, who was also among the longest-standing, was the Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brâncusi. He lived and worked on Impasse Ronsin from 1916 until his death in 1957, by which time he had five connecting studio spaces where he not only made his works but also created a lasting monument to his art and to the artists’ colony. Today, a reconstruction of Brâncusi’s studio can be visited outside the Centre Pompidou.

After World War II, a new generation of American artists came to Impasse Ronsin. Young abstract expressionists like Reginald Pollack or Oscar Chelimsky, often funded by the G.I. Bill, enlivened not only the cul-de-sac but also, with artist-run spaces like Galerie Huit (1950-52), the Parisian art scene. Together with artists already living in the city, like Joseph Lacasse or Marie-Thérèse Clément, they made a lasting impact on the life of the colony in the 1950s and ’60s.

The American sculptor James Metcalf arrived on Impasse Ronsin a year after Tinguely and stayed until 1965. With his exuberant creativity and his well-founded material and technical skills, he became an important figure by inspiring his artist friends (who included the Lalannes, Tinguely and later Larry Rivers) and introducing them to new techniques. Claude Lalanne first practiced the technique of galvanization in Metcalf’s studio – and her early models included the hand of Jean Tinguely.

Life at Impasse Ronsin was captured among others by Joggi Stoecklin, a young photographer from Basel who followed Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely to Paris in 1955 and took many pictures of the two artists, their works, their studios, and the colony as a whole until the end of the 1950s. His photographs document life, art and creativity over these five years from the viewpoint of a flatmate – as in this image of Eva Aeppli «slaughtering» a cabbage.

From 1954 until the final demolition of the last studios in 1971, the sculptor André Almo Del Debbio ran a studio where he taught students from around the world the various techniques of sculpture. Taking place in the immediate vicinity of Constantin Brâncusi and James Metcalf, this teaching activity epitomized the image of Paris as a city of art.

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely became a couple in 1960. As well as for her first shooting actions, the Impasse became the setting for other art actions such as Arman’s destruction of a violin (1961) or Marta Minujín’s burning of her entire oeuvre (1963) and was perceived as a lively home of the avant-garde.