ADAM (Paris, Montparnasse)

ADAM opened in Montparnasse in 1898, beginning as a general hardware and drugstore trade before the artist studios clustering around it pulled the business toward fine-art materials — a shift the shop's own history describes as driven by its neighbors rather than a founding plan. The turn toward artists went further under Édouard Adam, the founder's grandson, who broke with the era's convention of keeping supplies behind a counter and let customers handle products directly, and who built out a dedicated fine-arts department.

The shop's best-documented distinction is a single formula: Édouard Adam developed the fixative medium that let his friend Yves Klein achieve the ultramarine now known as International Klein Blue, the pigment behind Klein's IKB paintings. ADAM's own account also credits the shop with custom products supplied to Alexander Calder, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages and César — a run of mid-century artists whose signature materials the shop had a direct hand in.

ADAM now trades from 11 Boulevard Edgar Quinet in the 14th arrondissement as part of the Ets. Lavrut group, more than 120 years after it first opened as a Montparnasse hardware store. It remains a working art-supply retailer rather than a preserved storefront, still selling to the working artists whose studios first pulled it into the trade.