The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The lovers and landmarks of Picasso’s Paris
Nick Trend seeks out the spirit of the 20th century’s greatest artist, in the districts where he thrived
Picasso was one of art’s great hoarders and recorders. As a new exhibition at the Royal Academy shows, he kept every scrap of paper, every sketch, every torn piece of cardboard. Usually signed and dated, they provide extraordinary insights into his brilliantly spontaneous creative process.
His life too, is recorded in great detail, with anecdotes, photographs and memoirs. But when, inspired by the forthcoming exhibition, I headed to Paris to try to coax his ghost from his old haunts, it proved elusive. In the city where he lived, loved, partied and painted for more than 50 years, none of his studios and apartments are open to the public. There are a few plaques on walls of his former homes, but very little other information.
In some ways, however, the quartiers where he thrived at the beginning of the last century have changed relatively little. Montmartre may now be the most chichi of tourist districts, but the vast majority of the buildings have survived, and exploring the cobbled back streets around Rue Cortot and Rue Lepic you can still get a sense of some of the old village atmosphere of the early 20th century.
Many of the cafés Picasso frequented are still open; you can see the church where he got married and the cabarets where he spent his evenings. Despite the lack of formal tourist attractions, a tour of the landmarks of his artistic life is remarkably rewarding. And, with the Pompidou Centre and the Musée Picasso, the city is home to two of the greatest collections of his art. Here is my guide to Picasso’s Paris.
MONTMARTRE
The epitome of a radical young impoverished artist, Picasso was only 19 when, in 1900, he first arrived in a city which had – largely through the revolutionary paintings of the impressionists – established itself as the world’s capital of art. Inevitably he ended up in Montmartre. Then a backwater at the edge of the city looking out over countryside to the north, it had offered artists cheap accommodation and plenty of risqué entertainment since the 1870s.
He moved into a ramshackle former piano factory divided into a series of dingy workshops. The building was so decrepit that, when the wind got up, it creaked and rocked like the laundry hulks which then lined the banks of the Seine. And so it was christened the Bateau Lavoir – the wash boat.
The roll-call of artists and poets who lived and worked here in the first decade of the 20th century is extraordinary. As well as Picasso, it included Matisse, Braque, Cocteau, Utrillo, Derain, Rousseau and Dufy. And they were often visited by key literary figures such as Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s great friend, the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire. For a decade until the outbreak of the First World War, this was one of the most important and influential gatherings in the history of art. It was the crucible where modernism and cubism were fashioned in the dying days of the Belle Époque, and Picasso was at the centre of it.
Sadly, the original building burned down in 1970, but the facade survived and the rest was rebuilt in similar style a few years later. The main window has a display of photos and
memorabilia from its heyday (13 Rue Ravignan, 75018).
Another curiously village-like building further up the hill has survived. Au Lapin Agile – the setting for Picasso’s most famous Harlequin painting (1905) – is just behind the Musée de Montmartre (museedemontmartre.fr), Renoir’s former home in the city. The nightly cabarets here were a particular favourite and this was where Picasso met his first serious lover, Fernande Olivier – who was probably one of the models for his great early painting, the infamous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Far removed from the updated glitz of the Folies Bergère or Moulin Rouge, Au Lapin Agile is still in business, with a nightly offering of traditional French songs and cabaret (€28 admission including a drink; au-lapin-agile.com).
After Fernande came Olga Khokhlova, the glamorous Russian ballerina. Picasso – by now famous and reasonably prosperous – met her when working with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russe. They married in 1918 in a society wedding held, rather bizarrely perhaps, among the glimmering gold icons of the Cathédrale SaintAlexandre-Nevsky de Paris (12 Rue Daru; cathedrale-orthodoxe.com), the main Russian Orthodox church in the city. The couple moved into a smart apartment nearer the centre, at 23 Rue La Boétie (it’s still a private flat). His base for nearly 20 years, it was to play host to Picasso’s break from cubism and the renewal of his interest in classicism and surrealist art.
ST GERMAIN
Picasso left Rue La Boétie in 1937 for the Left Bank. He was world famous, wealthy and had a new lover – the artist and photographer Dora Maar, whom he met at the café Les Deux Magots on Place Saint-Germain des Prés (lesdeuxmagots.fr). This and the adjacent café, the Flore, are still open, and in the small square opposite is the only public sculpture by Picasso in Paris, the sculpted head of Dora Maar (1941), installed in 1959 as a memorial to Apollinaire.
Picasso’s new accommodation was a couple of minutes walk away at 7
Rue des Grands Augustins – a narrow atmospheric street redolent of old Paris, which leads from the river towards the Boulevard St Germain. He had developed more grandiose tastes and his new studio was in the attic of the Hôtel de Savoie, a 17thcentury mansion used by Balzac as a setting for his story “The Unknown Masterpiece”. The mansion is closed to the public, but you can see the attic windows through the iron gates.
Within weeks of moving in, Picasso heard of the bombing of Guernica, and it was here that he produced his famous response – the huge canvas wedged under the attic beams and documented in photographs by Maar. Picasso lived and worked here throughout the German occupation and into the Fifties, when the warmth and light of Provence became an ever-stronger draw.
Plans were announced in 2015 to open the hotel and studio to the public, but little progress seems to have been made. It stands rather neglected, ignored by tourists, but haunted by the spirit of the greatest artist of the 20th century.
opens at the Royal Academy on Jan 25; tickets £18-£22, book at royalacademy.org. uk. Our expert guide to Paris is at telegraph.co.uk/ tt-paris. For Eurostar fares, see eurostar.com.