In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sue Roe is the author of several books, including a New York Times bestselling collective biography of the Impressionists and a widely praised work on the artist Gwen John. She lives in Brighton, England.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

List of Illustrations

1. L’Attente (Margot), 1901 (oil on canvas), Pablo Picasso/Museo Picasso, Barcelona, Spain/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

2. Portrait of a woman at the Rat Mort, c.1905–6 (oil on board), Maurice de Vlaminck/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

3. Au Lapin Agile, c.1904–5 (oil on canvas), Pablo Picasso/Private Collection/Photo © Boltin Picture Library/The Bridgeman Art Library

4. The Artist’s Wife in an Armchair, c.1878–88 (oil on canvas), Paul Cézanne/Bührle Collection, Zurich, Switzerland/The Bridgeman Art Library

5. La Joie de vivre, 1905/6 (oil on canvas), Henri Matisse/The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA/© 2014 Succession H. Matisse/DACS, London. Digital image: The Bridgeman Art Library

6. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (oil on canvas), Pablo Picasso/Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

7. The Bathers, 1907 (oil on canvas), André Derain/Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library

8. Caryatid, 1911 (pastel on paper), Amedeo Modigliani/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

9. Paris, Montmartre (18th arrondissement). View of the Scrub, c.1900. Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

10. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), 1904 (b/w photo), French photographer, 20th century/Musée de Montmartre, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library

11. Henri Matisse (1869–1954). The Granger Collection/TopFoto

12. Gertrude Stein with Alice B. Toklas. The Granger Collection, New York/TopFoto

13. Gertrude Stein in her living room with her portrait by Picasso, 1946 (gelatin silver print), André Ostier/Private Collection/Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

14. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920). The Granger Collection/TopFoto

15. Paul Poiret (1879–1944). The Granger Collection, New York/TopFoto

16. Paris, Montmartre (18th arrondissement). The cabaret Lapin Agile, c.1900. Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

17. The Moulin de la Galette, Paris. Alinari/TopFoto

18. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) with her brothers Leo (left) and Michael. Photographed in the courtyard of 27, rue de Fleurus, Paris, c.1906. The Granger Collection/TopFoto

19. Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929). Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

20. The Bateau-Lavoir, Montmartre, Paris. Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

21. Georges Braque. © Ullsteinbild/TopFoto

22. Paris, Montmartre (18th arrondissement). The rue Saint-Vincent on the level of the cabaret Lapin Agile, c.1900. © Roger-Viollet/TopFoto

Introduction

Inside the glowing-red simulated windmill, the girls danced the cancan to Offenbach’s deafening music, tossing their heads, their petticoats raised in a froth of white as they kicked their legs, revealing tantalizing glimpses of black and scarlet. They performed on the dance floor, mingling with the punters – aristocrats, celebrities, artists, boulevardiers and strangers; in those days there was no raised platform in the Moulin Rouge. In the daytime, on a stage rigged up in the gardens outside, there were open-air performances of singing and dancing, including makeshift ballets danced by the young Montmartroises everyone still called the ‘little rats’. To the side of the stage stood a model elephant, an incongruous exhibit left over from the 1889 World Fair, which housed the orchestra. It was at night, however, that the place really came into its own.

When the young Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris in October 1900 he made his way up the hillside of Montmartre to the lodgings he was borrowing from another Catalan artist before heading down to investigate the nightlife. At first, he was dismayed by the Moulin Rouge, finding it tinselly and expensive in comparison with the all-male taverns of Barcelona. He had been expecting artistic bohemia, not cavorting women. His Catalan friends, habitués of Montmartre, usually gathered at the top of the hillside, around the place du Tertre, preferring the shady, cramped little bars where they could drink and talk until dawn. Up there, in the heights of Montmartre, Picasso discovered the other, less outrageous popular dance hall, the old Moulin de la Galette, a real converted windmill where the neighbourhood girls and their beaux still danced into the small hours, as they had in Renoir’s day. Here, artists such as Henri Matisse and the Dutch painter Kees van Dongen (whose portraits of women with elongated limbs, monocles and short haircuts would later earn him a central place among modernist artists) went to sketch the dancers. Nevertheless, it was not long before Picasso succumbed to the allure of the cabarets at the foot of the Butte, where prostitutes spilled out into the streets, strolling along the boulevards. They were among his first Parisian subjects.

A Spaniard, Joseph Oller, had created the Moulin Rouge on the site of the old Reine Blanche. Ingeniously, he constructed it in the shape of a windmill (competition for the old place at the top of the hillside), with eye-catching sails and red electric lighting, opening it under its new name in 1889. He commissioned a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec for the foyer and poached the dancers with the best legs from the Élysée Montmartre. From the day it opened the red ‘windmill’ became Montmartre’s most popular attraction, even in summertime; when Parisians left the city for their country retreats, visitors came in from all over the world, gravitating towards Montmartre in search of cheap cabaret entertainment and lively nightlife. Behind the scenes, the Moulin Rouge traded prostitutes, but the visitors (and their wives) who patronized it saw only the surface gaiety and glamour of the place, enjoying the atmosphere of risqué sensuality without taking any real risk.

As for the performers, they were unforgettable. La Goulue (‘Queen of the French Cancan’) belted out songs celebrating the low life of Montmartre. Her replacement, Jane Avril, had been treated for hysteria by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in his clinic at the Salpêtrière mental hospital before dancing in nightclubs on the Left Bank. She later grew bored of these and came to Montmartre, where she shook off her inhibitions in the Moulin Rouge, spindly legs flying in all directions. She was not interested in material things, she once said, only in l’amour.

The poor, the displaced, those who had known destitution, deprivation and suffering, seemed to find a natural home for their talents in Montmartre; the district was already suffused with its own distinctive melancholy. Higher up the hillside – up the narrow steps, past the small, tree-lined squares – windmills still stood among the gardens and vineyards that covered the steep slopes. Though they no longer milled flour, it was to these that the Butte owed its distinctive, fragile beauty, immortalized in the sketches of van Gogh, who briefly lived there during the 1880s and painted the view from his attic window in shades of greyish blue.

In later years, Picasso looked back with nostalgia on Montmartre, where he lived out the formative years of his career and established the emotional foundations of his work. ‘My inner self,’ he once said, ‘is bound to be in my canvas, since I’m the one doing it . . . Whatever I do, it’ll be there. In fact, there’ll be too much of it. It’s all the rest that’s the problem!’ The ten years following his arrival in Paris, he painted the world of Montmartre, seen through the prism of his inner life, responding, too, to the emotions and...