Molnár’s Paris: Rue de Gergovie Apartment and Studio

With both young artists desperate to leave Belleville, they got creative. “This can’t go on; we can’t live there any more; it’s filthy; we’ll find a studio,” Vera remembers François remarking at the time. Leveraging the area’s bad reputation, they orchestrated a flat swap with “drunks” eager for proximity to bars. The move landed them in a seventh-floor Rue de Gergovie apartment with a studio and panoramic Paris views. Together, Vera and François, dubbed a “two-headed painter,” collaborated until 1960, when François shifted to a research career. In the late '50s and early '60s, Vera explored solo creativity, first investigating the machine imaginaire.