A community of about 200 painters and sculptors flourished in the first half of the 20th century on two remarkable blocks — Washington Mews and MacDougal Alley — sandwiched between Eighth Street and Washington Square North, and extending west from University Place to MacDougal Street. A show at La Maison Française of New York University, at 16 Washington Mews (a former stable at the corner of University), surveys these studio spaces and the creative artists who inhabited them. Called “Left Bank New York: Artists Off Washington Square, 1900–1950,” the exhibition opens tonight and runs through December 15.

On these secluded blocks lined with picturesque, mainly two-story houses, one can imagine strolling by sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi or Daniel Chester French, who created the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. Between 1917 and 1921, the art deco sculptor Paul Manship rented a studio at 42 Washington Mews, the current site of Deutsches Haus at NYU. He lived next door with his family at number 44. While there, his major project was a large limestone tablet, “John Pierpont Morgan Memorial,” which is now in the vestibule of the Metropolitan Museum. In Manship’s studio, Jack Dempsey once shadow-boxed with Charlie Chaplin.

“One finds a strange mixture of bales of hay and enormous blocks of marble, boxes of plaster and barrels of oats littering the roadways,” wrote a New York Tribune reporter in 1903. “Truckmen in greasy jumpers touch elbows now and then with the sculptors in their clay spattered working garb.”

In a 56-page catalog that accompanies the show, containing an essay and 36 illustrations, a researcher in the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Virginia Budny, has uncovered who lived where and has drawn the links between the artists and institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, the City & Country School, and the Sculpture Center, which developed on these blocks during those years.

An art historian whose specialty is the Italian Renaissance, Ms. Budny had been researching the French-born sculptor Gaston Lachaise when she became interested more widely in “the dense community of creative artists”north of Washington Square Park. Ms. Budny has discovered that Donald Deskey, famous for the art deco interior of Radio City Music Hall, designed the interior at 46 Washington Mews, including the front door. The building is a former stable, and the original iron beam used to haul hay to the loft remains overhead today. Deskey’s interior, designed after Prohibition was repealed, featured a chair with a pushbutton that enabled a bar to pop out.

As affluent New York residents migrated farther north around 1880, the area was ripe for artists to begin to move in. The Illinois-born sculptor Frederick Ernst Triebel found studio space at 6 MacDougal Alley in 1899 or 1900. His artist friends moved in near him, and soon their families moved in as well.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought what is now 17-1/2 MacDougal Alley in 1907 and turned it into a sculpture studio. She later expanded the property, first buying 8 W.8th St. behind her to the north, as well as other property, eventually opening the Whitney Museum, on Eighth Street, in 1931.

In her studio, Whitney created the Washington Heights Inwood War Memorial, a bronze sculpture, which is at 168th Street and Broadway.

Daniel Chester French first had a studio at 11 MacDougal Alley between 1909 and 1912, and then moved to 12 W. 8th St., where his work space extended back to 17 MacDougal Alley to the south. In a photo in the show, one can see two working models of “Manhattan,” a personification of the island as a seated woman. The completed sculpture now sits in front of the Brooklyn Museum.

Isamu Noguchi, whose eponymous museum is in Long Island City, lived at 33 MacDougal Alley between 1942 and 1949. Ms. Budny has shown that this location was behind 4 W. 8th St., the location of what was then the Clay Club. In 1944,the show’s catalog relates, Noguchi “had begun to shape slabs of marble and slate into interlocking parts by means of pneumatic tools.”

Ms. Budny said, “There was an enormous permeability between MacDougal Alley and Washington Mews” to the east. In 1916, the owner of the land on the eastern end of Washington Mews, Sailor’s Snug Harbor, a seaman’s retirement home, transformed almost all of the northern half of the block with shutters, flowerboxes, and iron gates. “The effect, in a word, is to be Parisian,” said the architect Julius Franke.

Edward Hopper lived at 3 Washington Square starting in December 1913 until his death in 1967. The show contains a previously unpublished photo of Hopper by the photographer George Platt Lynes, in which the tower of Judson Memorial Church appears on the south side of the park. Bathed in winter light, Hopper appears meditative. “The photo looks like one of his paintings,” Ms. Budny said.

In 1950, construction began on what is now 2 Fifth Avenue. The large residential building separated Washington Mews from MacDougal Alley and changed the streetscape forever.