In 1900, the year that Sargent took the lease on No 31 Tite Street, another émigré artist, newly arrived in Paris from Barcelona, was looking for digs in Montmartre. Pablo Picasso pitched up at the Bateau Lavoir, so called because the building looked like the laundry boats moored along the Seine. The walls were damp and the place reeked of cats and mildew. There was no heat, no light, no running water and no loo, and the farmer who leased the cellar stacked his rooms with onions in the winter and mussels in the summer. Picasso kept a pet mouse in a drawer and smoked opium in his studio. When Juan Gris, the artist and a fellow Spaniard, moved into the Bateau with his lover and baby, they suspended the little boy in a sling from the studio window. You imagine him dismissing concerns with a Gallic shrug and the popular local phrase: “It’s the Montmartre way.”
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris 1900-1910 is written with the energy and abandon of a can-can at the Moulin Rouge. What pinwheeling fun it is.
Roe doesn’t just give us Picasso and Matisse, but Juan Gris; Amedeo Modigliani (who, being fastidious about his cuffs and collars, picked up girls in the laundries rather than the brothels); the collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein; the dealer Ambroise Vollard; the designer Paul Poiret (recruited by the couturier Charles Worth to design fashionable “pommes frites” outfits to attract a younger clientele, while Worth made the “gateaux” for established clients); Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes; Vaslav Nijinsky; Igor Stravinsky; and Monsieur Henri, the bouncer at the Lapin Agile, who would bump miscreants off the dance floor with his enormous belly.
Roe sets the action against the circus and the cinema, the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Rouge, and the opening of the funiculaire, which brought the first tourists to the still partly rural Montmartre, with its vineyards and scrubland.
You didn’t even have to get past Henri the Bouncer to see the artists at play; Montmartre life spilled out of the bars and cabarets onto the street. Maurice de Vlaminck was nicknamed the “bougre des guinguettes fleuries” — the bloke from the open-air bars. Carles Casagemas, a poet and painter who had arrived in Paris with Picasso, shot himself in front of a local restaurant in despair over unrequited love for his Gabrielle, a Montmartroise model. Wine, Sue Roe reminds us, was tax-free in Montmartre.
Like Cox, Roe makes the place as arresting as the people. She darts from the Bateau Lavoir to the aerodrome at Issy-les-Moulineux, where Picasso and Braque made papier colle flying machines, to the Moulin de la Galette, where for four sous you could dance the polka all night.
On second thoughts, forget the garage in Tite Street — I’m moving to Montmartre.
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris 1900-1910 is written with the energy and abandon of a can-can at the Moulin Rouge. What pinwheeling fun it is.
Roe doesn’t just give us Picasso and Matisse, but Juan Gris; Amedeo Modigliani (who, being fastidious about his cuffs and collars, picked up girls in the laundries rather than the brothels); the collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein; the dealer Ambroise Vollard; the designer Paul Poiret (recruited by the couturier Charles Worth to design fashionable “pommes frites” outfits to attract a younger clientele, while Worth made the “gateaux” for established clients); Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes; Vaslav Nijinsky; Igor Stravinsky; and Monsieur Henri, the bouncer at the Lapin Agile, who would bump miscreants off the dance floor with his enormous belly.
Roe sets the action against the circus and the cinema, the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Rouge, and the opening of the funiculaire, which brought the first tourists to the still partly rural Montmartre, with its vineyards and scrubland.
You didn’t even have to get past Henri the Bouncer to see the artists at play; Montmartre life spilled out of the bars and cabarets onto the street. Maurice de Vlaminck was nicknamed the “bougre des guinguettes fleuries” — the bloke from the open-air bars. Carles Casagemas, a poet and painter who had arrived in Paris with Picasso, shot himself in front of a local restaurant in despair over unrequited love for his Gabrielle, a Montmartroise model. Wine, Sue Roe reminds us, was tax-free in Montmartre.
Like Cox, Roe makes the place as arresting as the people. She darts from the Bateau Lavoir to the aerodrome at Issy-les-Moulineux, where Picasso and Braque made papier colle flying machines, to the Moulin de la Galette, where for four sous you could dance the polka all night.
On second thoughts, forget the garage in Tite Street — I’m moving to Montmartre.
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