In Search of Picasso’s Paris
Your visits to Montmartre will never be the same again…
Where could a modern visitor go to get a flavour of Picasso’s Paris nightlife? What are the key sites? What remains of bohemian, creative Paris? Here’s the guide!
Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris for the first time in 1900, aged 19, having travelled from Barcelona, optimistic, with a head full of exciting rumours about the city. He soon discovered it was exactly as he’d hoped; Paris was the capital of the avant-garde art world, with a high-octane nightlife.
Tracking Picasso through modern day Paris requires a lively imagination. Shopping for food in the basement of Monoprix at 53, boulevard du Clichy gives up no clues to what was once on that site; L’Enfer, an outlandish hell-themed nightclub Picasso visited in October 1900.
Picasso settled permanently in the city in 1904 and remained over forty years, before moving to the South of France. His first base was a studio owned by the Spanish painter Isidro Nonell two thirds of the way up the Montmartre hill near the rough working-class dance hall, the Moulin de la Galette; there’s a plaque marking this location (49, rue Gabrielle). The Moulin de la Galette (83, rue Lepic) featured in his very first painting in Paris.
Montmartre was on the edge of the city; until 1860, it was actually beyond the city walls. Especially higher up the hill and the north west of Sacré-Coeur, the area was semi-rustic, unsafe, bandit country (when in those neighbourhoods at night, Picasso would carry a revolver for protection). Now, most of Montmartre is invariably packed with tourists, especially in the streets around Place du Tertre.
On the groundfloor of the Hotel Du Tertre the restaurant-café Bouscarat had a clientele which included artists and dancers from the Moulin Rouge (before Picasso’s time, Erik Satie had a room in the hotel). The Bouscarat was where Picasso sourced his opium. That particular corner of Montmartre (2, place du Tertre) is now occupied by the restaurant La Bohème; a name very much at odds with the restaurant’s present day tourist-crowd ambience.
Picasso’s first long-term residence was the Bateau-Lavoir (3, rue Ravignan at Place Emile Goudeau), a run down, multi-occupancy warren of a building two-thirds of the way up the hill and popular with penniless artists and poets. The site is marked by a window display of photographs and explicatory material.
It was at Bateau-Lavoir that he met Fernande Olivier, who had already spotted him in the area – he was “small and worried-looking”, she recalled. They lived la vie bohème together at the Bateau Lavoir, sharing with friends years of avant-garde art, absinthe, opium, poetry, poverty, and habitual infidelities.
Picasso took infidelity onto levels that were cruel and brutal and evidenced over and over in his life. In 1914, he was living with Eva Gouel when she became seriously ill. Each day he’d visit her in the clinic and then spend the night in bed with a neighbour, Gaby Lespinasse. In the mid-1930s he would engineer situations to humiliate his lover Dora Maar, destroying her mental health. Picasso had a favourite brothel, on rue Londres, thought to be at 2, rue de Londres. On the site now? A friendly bistro, le Vert Tulipe.
In my recent short format book, I describe life at the Bateau Lavoir, L’Enfer, Moulin de la Galette, and other Picasso-related sites. One, a cabaret/restaurant on Place Pigalle called the Rat Mort, also has the distinction of hosting the Orchestre du Cabaret Rat Mort, an in-house group of musicians who featured on the first ever commercial recording of a tango. The Rat Mort is now a branch of the LCL bank.
In his first years in Paris, Picasso’s drinking buddies included the poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Andre Salmon. One of their favourite spots was the Lapin Agile (22,rue des Saules) which still operates today. In 1904 the owner, Frédé Gérard, commissioned a painting from Picasso, perhaps in lieu of settling a bar bill. The work ‘Au Lapin Agile’ includes Frédé in the background playing his guitar.
On the edge of Pigalle, on the corner of boulevard de Rochechouart, and rue des Martyrs, there’s a dull concrete apartment block and a branch of the Carrefour supermarket chain (61-65, blvd Marguerite de Rochechouart). It’s where, in the early twentieth century, the Medrano circus was situated.
Harlequins, acrobats, and other performers intrigued Picasso, and made frequent appearances in his work, often serving as a version or a representation of the artist himself. With Fernande, he’d go drinking with many of the circus people at the Café de la Place Blanche.
Café de la Place Blanche later became one of the bars most favoured by the Surrealists. It’s been through many changes but the basic shell of the building is intact; it’s now a Five Guys hamburger restaurant.
Picasso and Fernande moved from the Bateau-Lavoir, to the top floor of a building that survives still, at 11 Boulevard de Clichy. They were moving up in the world, employing the services of a maid. In was at this apartment that Georges Braque would visit Picasso when the two were creating the works that became labelled ‘Cubism’.
So much of the iconography of Cubism emanated from the surrounding nightlife - wine glasses, absinthe bottles, dancers, musicians, mandolins, and guitars. Appropriately enough, the groundfloor of 11 boulevard de Clichy is now a shop selling guitars.
After the death of Eva Gouel, Picasso was soon engaged to Olga Khokhlova; in the Spring of 1918 they took a room in the Hotel Lutetia (45, boulevard de Raspail). The Lutetia is now a luxury hotel and restaurant; recently, the hotel hosted the stars of the reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Incidentally, it’s also where Sylvia Plath went for dinner with Gary Haupt (the context is explained in a previous post here; https://davehaslam.substack.com/Plath)
By the end of the Great War, Picasso was a regular in the smoke-filled back room of La Rotonde in Montparnasse. It wasn’t a particularly chic café bar (Jean Cocteau found it a little unrefined for his tastes), nevertheless some of the artists would covet the cutlery and crockery. According to one account, when hosting a party at home, Modigliani once served dinner to the café’s owner with dishes and silverware pinched from La Rotonde. It’s worth a visit (105, boulevard du Montparnasse).
After the marriage of Picasso and Khokhlova, the couple moved to a wealthy neighbourhood close to the Champs-Élysées. One of Picasso’s haunts was Le Boeuf sur le Toit (28, rue Boissy d’Anglas) which attracted big names in the fashion world and the monied art brigade. Jazz was the soundtrack to evenings there, although Picasso used to insist that flamenco was the only music he enjoyed.
Le Boeuf sur le Toit left its original home and is now operating as a restaurant and music hall at 34, rue du Colisée, although at times of civil unrest it’s best to phone ahead; it closed for the evening earlier this year when a car was set on fire just outside the front door.
The marriage ended when Olga discovered Picasso had fathered a child by his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter. In the midst of an increasingly toxic love life, he began a relationship with photographer Dora Maar. This was at the time he produced the painting ‘Guernica’; he was living at 7, rue des Grand-Augustins, where there’s a plaque outside the building. Close by, on Square Laurent Prache, there’s a Picasso sculpture which pays tribute to Apollinaire, although it’s a likeness not of the poet, but of Dora Maar.
Picasso and the community around him in the early years of the 1900s were genuine outsiders, living beyond established morality, on the edge of the city, heads full of mad ideas about painting, poetry, and theatre.
You can’t expect the atmosphere around the artists and poets of Montmatre and Pigalle to have survived the subsequent decades. Bohemian and creative neighbourhoods don’t last long; we know that’s the case in cities around the world. Big business moves in, a generation moves on, and the next creatives take root somewhere else, in cheap spaces usually further out of town.
In the last decades, cells similat to those of Picasso and his allies have come together in cities all over the world fuelled by the persistent emergence of generations displaying youthful resourcefulness and rebellion. I believe that’s still the case right now, although identifying them isn’t easy. By the very nature of their status as make-shift and provisional, the newly emergent cells, sites, movements, are identified and acknowledged belatedly; their value can only be claimed and proven in retrospect.
Dozens of Picasso works can be seen at the excellent Musée National Picasso-Paris at 5, rue de Thorigny. But if you’re also after the shock of the new, 2023-style, it’s also worth visiting some of the venues where the spirit of challenging art lives on in contemporary Paris, including the Halle Saint-Pierre at 2, rue Ronsard (which houses the Musée d'Art Brut & Art Singulier), the forward-looking 3537org (35-37, rue des Francs-Bourgeois). And, just beyond the periphery of the city, Le Cent Quatre, a huge communal arts centre at 104, rue d'Aubervilliers.
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My short format book Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife is available here https://www.confingopublishing.uk/product-page/picasso-paris