An intimate and lovely setting, a bistronomic cuisine revisiting tradition with the right twist and on top of that, a lovely team treating each customer as regulars. There are actually loads of them, as well as many foreign tourists who come back there during their Parisian stay. Booking advised.
The most illustrious café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It was the favourite spot of the intelligentsia of the 30’s, from Surrealists to editors, artists and filmmakers and it became the meeting point of post-war Existentialists. There gathered Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, writers and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, Juliette Gréco Brigitte Bardot, Roman Polanski, Françoise Sagan, Romain Gary as well as the world of fashion. Nowadays the Café de Flore still caters for a subtle blend or artists, writers, intellectuals, politics and anonymous people.
Created in 1926 by Christian Zervos, the Cahiers d’Art review belongs to the legend of SaintGermain-des-Prés. Picasso, Giacometti, Matisse, Léger, Beckett and Miro took part in it before it became slightly neglected. ‘Les Cahiers’ were purchased by the Swede Staffan Ahrenberg and are now headed by Samuel Keller and Hans-Ulrich Obrist and back to their former place and lustre.
Philippe Bismuth worked as a 20th century painting and sculpture expert for ten years before teaming with Vincent Amiaux, a specialist of Cubism to open the gallery in 1998. Works by Giacometti, Foujita, Dubuffet, Lhote, Picabia, Utrillo, Picasso, Warhol and 20th century masters are regularly on show.
Since 1958, the gallery has offered a vast selection of graphic and photographic editions of the greatest figures of the Surrealist movement, namely Hans Bellmer, Giorgio De Chirico, Salvador Dali, Leonor Fini or Wassily Kandinsky. It also exhibits Pre-Columbian art focusing on the cultures from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
The gallery is dedicated to the major painters of the “Nouvelle Ecole de Paris” (a term coined in the 50’s) including : Karel Appel, Jean-Michel Atlan, Jean René Bazaine, Roger Bissière, Camille Bryen, Serge Charchoune, Chu Teh-Chun, Corneille, Olivier Debré, Jean Dubuffet, Maurice Estève, Jean Fautrier, Otto Freundlich, Hans Hartung, Jean Hélion, Auguste Herbin, Asger Jorn, Wifredo Lam, André Lanskoy, Alberto Magnelli, Alfred Manessier, André Masson, Georges Mathieu, Serge Poliakoff, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gérard Schneider, Pierre Soulages, Nicolas de Staël, Victor Vasarely, Bram van Velde, Geer van Velde, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva or Zao Wou-ki.
