Bernard Quentin arrived in Paris around 1940 to study painting, sculpture and architecture at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. Active in the Resistance within the “Manipule” 1 network between 1942 and 1944, Bernard Quentin attended the Maison de la pensee française in 1945 where he became friends with Pablo Picasso. He was in existentialist and surrealist circles, and was part of "the band at Boris Vian" with Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Anne-Marie Cazalis and Juliette Gréco.

Bernard Quentin, then living with Juliette Gréco in a room under the roofs of No. 7 rue Servandoni, remembered: “We went out every evening. We went to bed so late that I never got ...