Picasso in bohemian Paris

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Picasso in Paris 1900–1907

Marilyn McCully, Nienke Bakker and Peter Read

Picasso’s formative years, before the development of Cubism, were spent in bohemian Paris. Picasso made three trips to the city before he settled there. For the first, setting off from Barcelona with his friend, Carlos Casagemas, the 19-year-old Picasso visited the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, in which he showed his painting  Last Moments, a work he would later paint over. He recorded the joie de vivre of the visit in his charcoal  Leaving the Exposition Universelle, capturing their youthful high spirits.

Since the 1890s successive waves of Catalans had come to the capital; Ramon Casas, Santiago Rusiñol, Isidre Nonell, Ricard Canals, Joaquim Sunyer and Ramon Pichot being among the best known. Drawn to this community, then based in Montmartre, Picasso, Casagemas and their friend Manuel Pallarès, with their girlfriends took over Nonell’s studio. The colourful detail of their raucous nights are caught in Casagamas’ letters home.

Picasso made his second trip to Paris the following year. He was to have an exhibition at Ambroise Vollard’s gallery, together with the Basque painter Francisco Iturrino. Vollard, himself a major figure in the Parisian art world, had previously shown the work of Cézanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Parisian Catalans often painted Spanish subjects, but Picasso soon shifted away from this to depict ‘Modern Life’, the underside of life that he observed. McCully points out that Picasso’s response to the art he discovered in Paris was also seen in themes in Emile Zola’s novels: poverty and social alienation as a concept of Naturalism. Picasso drew on earlier painters’ work: Renoir, Toulouse- Lautrec and Degas. The flat planes and patches of colour in his portraits of Vollard, Gustave Coquiot, who wrote the exhibition catalogue, and Pere Mañach, his first dealer, evidence the influence of Gauguin and Van Gogh.

Nienke Bakker examines what Picasso might have seen of Van Gogh’s work and his reputation in Paris around 1900. She concludes it was probably Van Gogh’s significance as a brilliant, innovative artist rather than the works themselves that appealed to Picasso. Van Gogh was someone to rate himself against. Picasso sought out the work of French painters he considered advanced, later saying: ‘They said when I began in Paris that I copied Toulouse-Lautrec or Steinlen. Possible, but never was a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec or Steinlen taken for mine’.

The colourfulness of Picasso’s early Parisian work gave way to his more sombre Blue Period. Widely associated with paintings done in Barcelona in 1902–3, its beginnings were French, as McCully indicates. Picasso specifically painted prostitutes and their babies from Paris’ Saint-Lazare prison, works triggered on a personal level by Casagemas’ suicide in February 1901.

Picasso’s third trip to Paris began in October 1902. He shared the tiny room of the poet, Max Jacob. A companion both literate and amusing, Jacob helped Picasso to learn French and introduced him to French literature and the Symbolist poets. By now Picasso was drawing on a wide range of influences, ancient and modern. Ardengo Soffici saw him studying antiquities in the Louvre. He sketched Puvis de Chavannes’ paintings in the Panthéon.

Picasso returned to Paris to live there permanently in 1904. He moved to the Bateau Lavoir with its vibrant community. While McCully points to the painters who caught Picasso’s attention, Peter Read examines the intellectual environment. Between 1853 and 1870, under Napoleon III (Bonaparte’s nephew), Baron Haussmann had modernized much of Paris, cutting fine new boulevards through what had once been narrow mediaeval streets. The Montmartre response to Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris was nostalgia for what had been lost. Read describes the cabarets feeding this increasingly dated theme, indicating that it underlay Picasso’s Blue period. The artist’s new group of friends, Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, helped break this mould, reconnecting Picasso with  ‘a trail blazing spirit that had brought him to Paris in the first place’. Salmon and Apollinaire were anti-establishment figures whose articles and poems expressed anti-imperialist views. Picasso, in his turn, would develop an interest in African art.

Read also interprets Picasso’s Rose Period Harlequin’s Family with an Ape, and Boy with a Pipe, in a political context, connecting them to religious art and the controversial theories on race of Joseph Deniker, librarian at the Jardin des Plantes. Thus, these paintings may reflect the hotly contested issue of 1905, the French government’s plan to separate the Church and State. Deniker’s theories on race, Read argues, may underpin Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, so this ground-breaking painting contravenes not only canons of beauty but ‘philosophical and political systems, which are racially hierarchical and culturally divisive’.

The authors of this book examine the period and milieu Picasso found in his first years in the French capital in great detail, focusing on the artistic and intellectual influences he found there, writing in a style that is genuinely accessible. As the main author, McCully has a keen eye throughout for the materiality of Picasso’s work. But it is the many high-quality illustrations, especially the detailed, double page spreads between each essay, that show every brushstroke, texture, hue, crack and nuance of surface. There could be no better way to draw attention to what it is that a painter does – paint.

Picasso in Paris 1900 – 1907  by Marilyn McCullyis published by Thames & Hudson, 2011, to accompany the exhibition of the same name at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and the Museu Picasso, Barcelona. 256pp., 275 colour illus. ISBN 978-0-500-09355-9.