Puteaux

Puteaux lives in the tallest shadow in France — the towers of La Défense rise partly on its territory — and yet its place in art history was earned in a garden. In the years before 1914, the studios on the rue Lemaître belonged to Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and on Sunday afternoons their brother Marcel Duchamp, with Léger, Gleizes, Metzinger, Picabia and Kupka, gathered there to argue geometry, motion and the golden ratio. The Groupe de Puteaux, as it became known, staged the Section d'Or exhibition of 1912 — the moment Cubism went public as a movement — which means a leafy suburban street here hosted one of the founding conversations of modern art.

The town beneath the towers is older and gentler than its skyline: a riverside commune on the Seine facing the Bois de Boulogne, with the long green Île de Puteaux in midstream, once painted by the Impressionists' generation and now given over to sport and plane trees. Rebuilt prosperity has made Puteaux one of the best-endowed communes in the country, and it spends like it: parks, a marina, and a full cultural establishment whose stages — among them the Salle Gramont, the hall documented in the concert record — carry theatre and music seasons within sight of the business district's glass. Cubism in the garden, capitalism on the plateau, and the Seine keeping the peace between them: that is Puteaux.