Man Ray's Montparnasse. This item is unavailable.Man Ray's Montparnasse

For the first 30 years of the 20th century, Montparnasse was a hotbed of artistic activity and the centre of avant-garde Europe. Man Ray was there to document it. He photographed the artists, writers and poets. Within a year of his arrival, he was invited to be Gertrude Stein's official portraitist and to record the image of Marcel Proust on his deathbed. He photographed Picasso and Peggy Guggenheim, made films alongside Andre Breton and played chess with Marcel Duchamp. Man Ray's colourful biography is merged with his black-and-white images to create an intimate perspective on the legendary Left Bank of Paris in the years between the two World Wars.

Herbert Lottman was born and raised in New York City, but he has lived most of his adult life in France. He first came to Paris as a Fulbright fellow in 1949; when he returned it was to open a European office for an American book publisher. Over the years Lottman has contributed to a number of American newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, and Harper's Magazine; he is now international correspondent of the book trade journal Publishers Weekly, which has taken him to Asia, Africa, Latin America, nearly everywhere in Europe, and even at times to the United States. Lottman has published a dozen books in the Unites States, the best known of which are Albert Camus: A Biography, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War, and biographies of Philippe Petain, Gustave Flaubert, Colette, and Jules Verne. Most of them have also been published in the United Kingdom and translated into French and Spanish; a number have also appeared in German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Czech.