The Académie de la Grande Chaumière
Two women opened a Montparnasse studio in 1904 where you paid by the session, drew the model, and took correction only if you asked. It still sells sessions.
The Académie de la Grande Chaumière was founded in 1904 by two women painters, the Swiss Martha Stettler and Alice Dannenberg, who had met at the art school in Bern and wanted to teach differently from the École des Beaux-Arts. What they built institutionalized what the Académie Suisse had improvised: professional models and serious hours, with instruction optional. Admission was a drop-in transaction. One session's fee bought the model, with no examination, no portfolio, and no advance payment, which is what the Académie Julian required. The structure was two workshops, painting and drawing where a morning pose could hold all week, and croquis, where poses ran minutes. Antoine Bourdelle taught sculpture from 1909 until his death in 1929 on the principle that "the only system is not to have one," and Giacometti worked under him for five years. It still runs both workshops, but not in the same building: the academy was forced out of 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière on 26 July 2025.
How the system worked
Drop-in, from the founding to today: pay the session or buy a pass, take a place. No examination, no portfolio, no advance payment, and fees deliberately under the Julian's. Angela Gregory, who arrived from Louisiana in 1925, described the mechanism exactly: a concierge at the door sold her small aluminium admission tickets for the modelling and sketch classes. One ticket, one session.
Two standing workshops, unchanged in shape for over a century: painting-and-drawing (the long-pose room) and croquis (the sketch room), plus evening classes. The founders directed it jointly with the painter Lucien Simon from 1909. Visiting masters came to advise rather than preside, and the studio ran on a massier, the student-monitor who kept the stands, the clay, and the model's schedule in order.
None imposed, and none offered. The school sells time, models, and the room's standard. Gregory found students who kept their own hours or failed to keep them, brought their own materials, and came for a place to work, access to models, and the chance to have the work corrected by an established artist. What you climb is your own.
None. No concours, no medals, no juries, no diploma. Correction existed as an offering rather than a requirement, which was the founders' stated argument against the École des Beaux-Arts and its ladder of competitive examinations ending at the Prix de Rome.
The long pose in the mornings, croquis in the afternoons and evenings, a pattern the school still runs. Its current published schedule puts the free painting and drawing atelier Monday to Friday from 9 to 12, and croquis Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 12.15 to 15.00 and 15.15 to 18.00, Wednesday evenings 19.00 to 22.00, and Saturday afternoons 13.00 to 17.00.
Optional and advisory, and that is still how it works. The current painting and drawing atelier lists corrections on Mondays and Thursdays only, with a named artist, which leaves three mornings a week where a painter works with a model and nobody at their shoulder. Bourdelle's sculpture teaching was the great exception that proved the rule: a master worth seeking out, inside a school that required seeking.
Low by design and payable per session without advance commitment, which was the founders' clearest break from the Julian. Early and mid-century schedules are not documented. The current published rates are 22 euros a session for the painting and drawing atelier and 19 for croquis, with student rates of 19 and 13. From 1946, when the United States embassy in Paris began processing G.I. Bill applications, American veterans had their fees paid and drew a monthly stipend of about 75 dollars, and their enrolments became a steady income for the school.
The curriculum, in training order
The painting-and-drawing workshop's spine: a single pose held across the week's mornings for sustained painting or a finished drawing. The school still runs this atelier Monday to Friday, 9 to 12.
The rapid-sketch sessions of afternoons and evenings: runs of short poses for hand and eye, mixed with longer ones so the exercise changes inside a single session. The format survives in the current schedule, six sessions a week.
The sculpture workshop, which is what drew students from across Europe once Bourdelle had it. Clay, the stands the massier kept, and the living figure. Giacometti spent five years in it.
The optional critique: visiting masters advising rather than directing. Bourdelle's weekly sessions worked on structural analysis of the body and on construction, and he described his aim as being an intellectual midwife, waking a student up rather than handing down a method.
Materials, models, and the room
- The aluminium tickets. The admission system, and the whole business model in one object. A concierge sat at the door selling small aluminium tickets for the modelling and sketch classes, which is how Angela Gregory got in during her Paris years from 1925. No register, no term, no contract. A ticket bought a session.
- Whatever the painter carried in. Students without masters brought their own materials and came for a place to work. The school supplied the room, the stove, the stands, and the model. Sennelier opened on the same street in 1936, which put oils, gouache, and plaster a few doors from the easel.
- The room, as a student found it. Gregory walked into a studio filled with students of every nationality, cigarette smoke thick enough to make seeing hard, and a strong spotlight levelled at one of the best models she had seen in Paris. That is the atmosphere the school sold: light on the model, and nothing else arranged for you.
- The models. Professional models who often worked the other Paris schools as well. By the early twentieth century the salaried state model had given way to occasional models hired by the session, and the group life-drawing rooms like this one are reported to have improved their terms. Pay records for the school's own models do not survive.
- The building, and its loss. Number 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière held the school for one hundred and twenty-one years, with high ceilings, large north windows, and stools worn down by use. The owner died in 2017, the property was put up for auction in 2018, and the academy was made to leave on 26 July 2025. It now works from 2 rue Jules-Chaplain, a few streets away.
The people
Who taught
Martha Stettler · founder and director, 1904 to the 1940s
A Swiss painter born in Bern in 1870, trained partly at the Julian, who ran the school she founded for four decades and died in 1945. The academy's own account of its origin describes a studio for painting and sculpture from the living model, made for women artists, at a moment when the École des Beaux-Arts had admitted women for only seven years.
Alice Dannenberg · founder and director, 1904 to 1945
Born in Mitau in 1861, then in the Russian Empire and now Jelgava in Latvia. She met Stettler at the art school in Bern, exhibited with her in Paris from 1901 in the group called Les Quelques, and co-directed the academy until her death in 1948. The pair's stated aim was instruction unlike the strict rules taught at the École des Beaux-Arts.
Antoine Bourdelle · sculpture, 1909 to 1929
Rodin's former assistant, and the reason sculptors came. His motto was that the only system is not to have one. He taught structural analysis of the body and construction, called himself an intellectual midwife, and left handwritten lecture notes that the Musée Bourdelle still holds and has published.
Lucien Simon · joint director from 1909
The painter who directed the school alongside its two founders, and one of the teachers already working with them before the 1904 move.
André Lhote · painting, in the early 1920s and again in the 1950s
Cubism's pedagogue, teaching composition, colour, and the underlying geometry of a picture, in an academy of volunteers. His tenure came in separate stretches and is not fully documented.
Ossip Zadkine · sculpture, 1946 to 1958
The postwar sculpture teacher, whose Friday morning critiques drew a crowd of foreign students in the G.I. Bill years.
Claudio Castelucho · from the school's beginnings
The Catalan painter who taught from the start, and whom some accounts credit with founding the school outright.
Walter Sickert and Fernand Léger · dates not documented
Both are recorded as teachers here. Léger's professorship in particular has no documented dates, so neither is given a tenure in this record.
Who trained here
Alberto Giacometti · 1922 to 1927
Came to Paris in 1922 specifically to work under Bourdelle in this sculpture workshop, and stayed five years. He left in 1927 for a small studio on the rue Hippolyte-Maindron, having already begun setting the academic training aside for what he was seeing in Brancusi, Lipchitz, and African sculpture.
Louise Bourgeois · the 1930s
Took classes here during the Paris years when she was moving from mathematics at the Sorbonne into art, and studied with Fernand Léger, who told her that her sensibility leaned toward the three-dimensional. She is also reported to have worked as the massière, the studio monitor, in Yves Brayer's atelier here.
Angela Gregory · 1925 to 1928
The Louisiana sculptor whose memoir is the best surviving account of how the room actually worked. She bought her aluminium tickets from the concierge, worked in the classes, and in the spring of 1926 knocked on Bourdelle's door and talked her way into his private studio, the only American to work there.
Augusta Savage · from 1929
The Harlem Renaissance sculptor came on a scholarship, six years after an American programme rejected her on racial grounds. She exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon de Printemps before returning to the United States in 1931.
The G.I. Bill generation · from 1946
American veterans whose fees and materials the United States government paid, on a stipend of about 75 dollars a month, filled the postwar sessions. Their enrolments were a reliable income for a school that had never asked anyone to pay in advance.
Modigliani, Chagall, Miró, Soutine, Calder, Noguchi, Lempicka, Münter, Zao Wou-Ki and others · dates mostly not documented
The academy's own roll of names is long and international, which is what open admission and low fees produce. For most of these painters and sculptors no enrolment dates survive, so they are listed as the school lists them, not as documented attendances.
The primary record
- Antoine Bourdelle, Cours & leçons à l'Académie de la Grande Chaumière, 1909-1929, edited by Laure Dalon (Paris-Musées / Éditions des Cendres, two volumes): the teaching itself, compiled from the manuscripts held in the Musée Bourdelle archives.. The single richest primary record of what was said in these rooms, because Bourdelle wrote his lessons down.
- Angela Gregory and Nancy L. Penrose, A Dream and a Chisel: Louisiana Sculptor Angela Gregory in Paris, 1925-1928 (University of South Carolina Press, 2019): the concierge and the aluminium admission tickets, the smoke, the spotlight on the model, and students who kept their own hours or failed to.
- The Musée Bourdelle's account of Bourdelle as a teacher: the 1909 to 1929 tenure at the academy, the motto "the only system is not to have one," the structural analysis of the body, and his description of himself as an intellectual midwife.
- The academy's own current schedule and rates: the free painting and drawing atelier Monday to Friday 9 to 12 at 22 euros a session, croquis six times a week at 19 euros, corrections on Mondays and Thursdays only.. The 1904 arrangement, still on sale, which is why this record has a present tense at all.
- The record of the 2025 departure: the school closed its historic address at 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière on 26 July 2025 and moved to 2 rue Jules-Chaplain, after the building was sold following the owner's death in 2017.
Open questions
- Who founded it is not settled. The French record and Alice Dannenberg's own biography credit Stettler and Dannenberg, and the school's own history names Stettler. The English record instead credits the Catalan painter Claudio Castelucho with the 1904 founding and makes Stettler, Dannenberg, and Lucien Simon joint directors from 1909. This record follows the two founders, because two independent accounts support them and because Castelucho appears in every account as a teacher.
- The founding date has a shadow. Dannenberg's biography dates the pair's school to 1902, and the research describes a modest operation running from that year that moved to 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière and took the name in 1904. The 1904 date is used here as the school's own.
- The end of the founders' tenure is given as 1944 in one account and 1945 in another. Stettler died in 1945 and Dannenberg in 1948.
- A student quotation carried in the earlier version of this record, beginning "nobody leaned over your shoulder," is attributed in the research to Angela Gregory's memoir with a page number, but the wording could not be checked against any locatable source. It has been dropped in favour of Gregory material that can be checked.
- A croquis fee of fifty centimes dated 1902 appears in the research. It predates the school's 1904 founding at this address and is not stated here as this school's fee. Fee schedules between the founding and the modern era are undocumented.
- Fernand Léger taught here, but no dates for his professorship survive. André Lhote's tenure is confirmed for at least two separate stretches without a complete timeline.
- Louise Bourgeois's classes here are confirmed by the Easton Foundation. The further report that she served as massière in Yves Brayer's atelier from 1936 is not confirmed by the foundation and is stated here as a report.
- No central public archive of the school's twentieth-century records is known. A century of private ownership, then the 2018 auction and the 2025 eviction, make a surviving unified archive unlikely.
Common questions
What is the Académie de la Grande Chaumière?
A Montparnasse art academy founded in 1904 by two women painters, Martha Stettler and Alice Dannenberg, and still running: the institutional form of the Paris open studio. Drop-in admission, session pricing, professional models, a long-pose workshop and a croquis workshop, and instruction that is optional. Visiting masters advise, nobody presides.
Who founded the Grande Chaumière, and why?
Martha Stettler, a Swiss painter from Bern, and Alice Dannenberg, born in Mitau in the Russian Empire. They met at the art school in Bern and exhibited together in Paris from 1901. They opened the academy to teach differently from the École des Beaux-Arts and its strict rules, and the school's own account describes its origin as a studio for painting and sculpture from the live model, made for women artists. They directed it into the 1940s.
How does the Grande Chaumière work?
You pay for the session and draw. Mornings run the long pose, traditionally one pose across a week, and afternoons and evenings run croquis, series of short poses mixed with longer ones. Correction is available on set days if you want it. Angela Gregory, who came in 1925, bought small aluminium tickets from the concierge at the door, one ticket per session, which is still roughly how it works.
What did Bourdelle teach at the Grande Chaumière?
Sculpture, from 1909 until his death in 1929, on the principle that the only system is not to have one. His weekly critiques worked on structural analysis of the body and on construction, and he called himself an intellectual midwife, meaning he tried to wake a student up rather than hand down a method. Giacometti came to Paris in 1922 to work under him and stayed five years. Bourdelle wrote his lessons down, and the Musée Bourdelle has published them.
Is the Grande Chaumière still open?
Yes, but not where it was. The building at 14 rue de la Grande-Chaumière was sold after its owner died in 2017 and went to auction in 2018, and the academy was made to leave on 26 July 2025 after a hundred and twenty-one years. It now works from 2 rue Jules-Chaplain nearby, running the same two workshops on the same terms: 22 euros a session for painting and drawing, 19 for croquis, models on the stand, correction two days a week.
How much did the Grande Chaumière cost compared to the other Paris schools?
Less than the Académie Julian, and without the Julian's requirement to pay in advance, which was the point. The founders built the school as the cheap serious alternative to both the Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts. Historic fee schedules are largely undocumented, but the modern rates hold the same shape: 22 euros a session, or 19 for a student, with croquis cheaper still.
Part of the Academies atlas, how painting was actually taught, system by system. The living version of this question: atelier vs online course, and the painters themselves in the Painter Atlas.