A "folly" in the middle of Paris

"You enter through a little door which leads into a green space. You push a door which peals. An old-fashioned dovecote adorns the garden which smells of salad leaves. A little grass, a well and right at the bottom, the large one-storey cottage with piles of objects which can just be made out through the windows.

Paris lies beyond a large wall covered in ivy. Somewhere a church is tolling the hour. Everything is forgotten. You want to put on your clogs and wait for the sun to rise in the lime tree (…) Then you are absorbed by the world of materials and volumes."

The art critic, Pierre Courthion, supplied this description of Zadkine's studio in the Rue d’Assas in 1929, for the magazine Variétés.

Today, after passing through the door of the museum, the visitor is also drawn in by the atmosphere of this old house-studio, nestled in its island of greenery, a stone’s throw from the Luxembourg Gardens and the district of Montparnasse.