1.WITH THE CATALANS OF MONTMARTRE
There is very little difference […] between the poet or artist and the hoodlum, when one considers the anarchist, more or less a poet or artist himself. Consequently, for both the anarchist and the hoodlum, the Butte de Montmartre is a fabulous shelter.1
—Louis Chevalier
With Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris,2 and with the first attempts at introducing electric lights in 1878, first to the Avenue de l’Opéra and then to the Grands Boulevards, the charm and magic of Montmartre resided in its obscurities, its mysteries, in its quiet streets illuminated by gas lamps, against which—in Francis Carco’s beautiful phrase—“the splash of light from the Moulin Rouge appeared suddenly in the night.”3 But there was more. “The churchy types took up residence on Rue Saint-Rustique,” writes Roland Dorgelès, “while the beardless pimps hunkered down in the bars of Rue des Abbesses, where they spent their days reading their futures in slot machines. Only the artists were at home everywhere they went, drinking hot chocolate with pilgrims and aperitifs with ruffians, eating lunch at the local café with house painters.”4
Paris, October 25, 1900. When the young Pablo Ruiz Picasso arrived in Paris for the first time, accompanied by his friend Casagemas, he was leaving behind the effervescent city of Barcelona, where he had lived since the age of fourteen. His father was the dean of the École des Beaux-Arts there and, although Andalusian by birth, was sufficiently influenced by the political and cultural fever that gripped the Catalan capital in those crucial years to spend his free time rubbing shoulders with the city’s intellectual and artistic avant-garde. In Barcelona, inspired by the regular columns in Desde el Mulino (“from the Moulin de la Galette”), Pablo would dream of the view from La Butte Montmartre, with “the immensity of pale, diaphanous Paris stretching out in the background as if vanishing into a silver sea,” from which “emerge the pale colors of broad domes and high spires.”5
Just after their arrival in Paris, still euphoric and intoxicated from their journey, Casagemas and Picasso together wrote letters to their friends the brothers Jacint and Ramon Reventós. These letters were strange documents in which the two authors took turns writing in Catalan and Spanish and illustrating their words with pictures. “Peyo is here and the day he arrived he sent us a pneumatic letter telling us to meet him at midnight […]. We stayed for an hour, then Utrillo and Riera turned up and the party went on into the early hours. Picasso made puppets and I wrote verses in 11, 13 and 14 syllables and we sent it all to Marquina […]. Tomorrow there’ll be a big meeting of Catalans of varying degrees of illustriousness, who will all eat together at the restaurant […]. We met this Catalan bastard called Cortada, rich as Croesus but stingy as a whore. We have often eaten dinner with him […]. He pretends to be an intellectual but he’s really a pain in the ass and a brown-nose to boot. Among all the pseudo-intellectuals here, we hear more gossip than in Barcelona. They make stupid schoolboy jokes and they don’t approve of anyone. […] When it comes down to it, though, none of them are capable of making valid arguments against the others.”6
Today, we have forgotten the names of the people who welcomed Casagemas and Picasso to Montmartre. We have forgotten Peyo (Pompeu Gener i Babot), Miquel Utrillo Morlius, Alexandre Mos Riera, Eduard Marquina, Alexandre Cortada. “The story of migrations is always partly that of the networks that take care of the new arrivals, encircle them, support them […] and help them settle into their new surroundings,” write the urban sociologists Alain Faure and Claire Lévy-Vroelant.7 It should come as no surprise, then, that the two friends proudly boasted about their trump card, the powerful Catalan network that had been growing for decades in Montmartre. “Do you know Nonell?” Casagemas went on. “He’s a really nice guy; in fact, he and Pichot are the only two agreeable people here. Although we met Iturrino today, and he seems a good sort too […]. What news of Perico? Is he bored? Tell him to come to Paris, and tell Manolo the same thing. Tell them there’s enough space here for everyone and money for those who work […]. If Nonell hadn’t been travelling down there [and delivering the letter] we wouldn’t have written such a long letter, because they’re pretty expensive to mail. If you see Opisso, tell him to come…”8
In addition to Isidre Nonell i Monturiol, Ramon Antoni Pichot i Gironès, Francisco Nicolàs Iturrino González, Santiago Rusiñol i Prats, Perico (Pere Romeu i Borràs), and Manuel Martínez i Hugué (a.k.a. “Manolo”), there were also Pau Cucurny i Guiu and Ricard Opisso Vinyas: these painters, illustrators, collectors, poets, writers, or café owners composed the Catalan colony in Paris. Organized, united, dynamic, as exuberantly convivial as if this were Barcelona, the exiled Catalan artists—of all generations and all different types—had for years been exchanging recommendations and addresses, in the grand tradition of mutual aid that characterizes immigrants the world over, creating the ideal framework for organizing places to live and to work. Three years earlier, Isidre Nonell (ten years Picasso’s senior) had told his friend Casellas about his enthusiasm for Monet and Degas, for the Durand-Ruel gallery, and for Paris in general. In October 1900, it was Nonell who sublet his studio on Rue Gabrielle to Casagemas and Picasso, who procured models (Germaine and Odette, who both spoke Spanish) and even an art dealer (Pere Mañach from Barcelona) for them. Nonell, Germaine, Odette, and Mañach would be their first guides, the first intermediaries between the young artists and the new world of Paris.
At 49 Rue Gabrielle, between Rue Chappe and Rue Ravignan, Casagemas and Picasso—who would soon be joined by their friend Manuel Pallarès in a studio that would sleep six (three men and three women)—set up their headquarters on a bucolic hillside scattered with trees and gardens, small squares, cafés and bars in a quarter that clung to the steep slopes of the Butte: long flights of steps connecting each street and each cul-de-sac, solid iron handrails helping pedestrians avoid falls, allowing for life to exist in this world of disequilibrium and vertigo. It was a remote place, a far cry from the heart of the metropolis. “A few steps from Place Blanche, astonished tourists would discover ancient trees, noisy henhouses, farmhouse porches, a game of pétanque,” wrote Roland Dorgelès. They were in the countryside, but they were overlooking the city; it was always there below them, an all-encompassing presence, a permanent backdrop.
Picasso didn’t write much. Why would he? In a few seconds, a few pencil lines, three daubs of pastel, he could capture a moment, sketch an instant, snatch up a shred of life, and say everything there was to say. The long figure of a redheaded woman with her hair in a bun, snub-nosed and smiling, in an orange dress with a bold pattern, very thin black straps pushed to the sides. A plump woman in a blue suit, a small white dog trotting beside her, orange scarf, straw boater tipped slightly forward, and again that snub nose, signifying a likable, sophisticated personality: that was how Picasso saw Parisian women. A scene in a tiny café packed with people and action, à la Toulouse-Lautrec—a raw, spirited document, like an anthropologist’s notebook. Right away, in the artist’s pencil strokes, you can see the people of Montmartre—“Picasso’s people”—appearing on paper, the same people that would haunt his works for the next six years: young prostitutes, old lesbians, drug addicts, and others.
“We’ve already started work,” Casagemas wrote jubilantly. “We even have a model. We’re going to the theater tomorrow and we are having to work like demons because we are already thinking about the paintings that we will send to the next salon. But we are also preparing for the exhibitions in Barcelona and Madrid. We’re working hard. As soon as there’s enough light (daylight, I mean, because there’s always artificial light), we go to the studio to paint and draw. We’re going to make it, just wait and see!”9 One of the first Parisian canvases signed P.R. Picasso—a total contrast to Last Moments, his academic painting shown within the Spanish pavilion at the Exposition Universelle—was finished around November 11, 1900. This was Moulin de la Galette: a dark room flickering with electric lamplight, a formless mass of elegant couples embracing as they dance—bourgeois men in top hats and tailcoats, prostitutes in hats, cropped jackets, long pale skirts—with that mischievous, seductive lesbian couple in the foreground, at the table to the left, one of them dressed in red, kissing in public. Driven by his fascination for eroticism in public places, which had haunted him ever since his arrival in Paris, the young Picasso chose a theme already marked out by his elders (Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet), demonstrating his sympathy with the world of pleasure in the French capital, but he imbued everything he painted with mastery and a unique new perspective.
Public kisses, private caresses, couples hugging under gas lamps: once in Paris, Picasso painted many works with the theme of the embrace. And Montmartre—with its cafés bringing together high society and the underworld, welcoming adulterous couples and forbidden loves—undoubtedly exercised a powerful erotic influence on the young artist. “We decided we were getting up too late, that we were eating at unearthly hours, and it was all starting to go to the dogs,” Casagemas announced in a heavily sexist passage. “Not only that, but […] Odette got into the habit of drinking herself into a stupor every night. So we decided that neither the women nor we should be going to bed any later than midnight and that we’d finish eating lunch before one o’clock every day, and that after lunch we’d devote ourselves to our paintings while the women would deal with feminine tasks—knitting, cleaning, kissing us, and letting us fondle them. So, my friend, we’re living in a sort of obscene Eden or Arcadia.”10 Alcohol, sex, work … the two friends seemed on the point of mastering the Parisian reality; soon, in another letter, Casagemas would even describe his girlfriend Germaine as “the queen of my thoughts, for now.”11
Mañach would sell Moulin de la Galette to the gallery owner Berthe Weill who, for 250 francs, found a buyer in Arthur Huc, the editor of a Toulouse newspaper—a record price for such a young artist. Later, Mañach, who took a 20 percent commission, would sell Mrs. Weill three pastels of bullfighting scenes brought from Barcelona and offer Picasso monthly payments of 150 francs. Despite these early successes, despite the debauched atmosphere, the next four years would prove a veritable odyssey for the young Picasso: Casagemas’s suicide, three years of hardship, two more wasted trips between Barcelona and Paris, conflicts with his dealer. But in 1900, he had a simple plan that would become his guiding principle in life, his only and absolute priority: to work. “The Exposition Universelle is about to close and yet the only thing we’ve seen is the painting section.” They might have rushed to the Louvre (“to see the Poussins”), to the Musée du Luxembourg and to certain galleries; they might have had endless encounters with other Catalans in their Montmartre bubble, but Picasso and Casagemas neglected the Exposition Universelle, with the sole exception of a visit to the Grand Palais. In a charcoal sketch called Leaving the Exposition Universelle, Picasso drew himself (ridiculously small) on the Place de la Concorde, beside Ramon Pichot (ridiculously big), Carles Casagemas, Miquel Utrillo, Odette, and Germaine (all dressed up, with hats and fur collars)—four mismatched Spanish artists and two Parisian women—arms linked, dancing drunkenly, flanked by two scampering dogs, far from the extravagant, colossal Exposition and even farther from the great metropolis as it wakes to greet the advancing century.
2.THE MOVING WALKWAY AND THE “GENIUS OF FRANCE”
Let particular congratulations be addressed in the name of the Republic to those among our fellow citizens who, in the multiple domains of its activity, have so perfectly represented the genius of France!1
—Émile Loubet, president of the French Republic
In one of his memorable speeches to celebrate the Exposition Universelle, on August 17, 1900—two months before Casagemas and Picasso arrived in Paris—the president of France, Émile Loubet, declared: “The eminent representatives of other nations were able to observe how France, faithful to her history, has remained the country of bold initiatives tempered with common sense, of generous progress prudently conceived and methodically prepared, the country of peace and work […]. The congresses that have gathered and that will continue to gather in great number have provided scientists, artists, farmers, and workers from all over the world the opportunity to get to know one another, to hear one another, to communicate the results of their experiments and to discuss, with an exceptional support network of knowledge and skills, problems concerning the material and moral improvement of individuals and societies.”2
In Montmartre, far from the French president’s perorations, Picasso and Casagemas would eat dinner with Ramon Pichot, get drunk with Miquel Utrillo, Alexandre Riera, the writers Pompeu and Eduard Marquina, and—according to them at least—visit the whorehouse only once. No, during their first trip to Paris, Picasso and Casagemas would not have any opportunity to encounter artists from all over the world, as the president had pompously suggested; in fact, they didn’t do much more than go to see Picasso’s painting. They had little time to discover the great new wonders of Paris—electric lights, the new line of the Métropolitain that had recently connected Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes, or the new Pont Alexandre III that spanned the Seine between the Champs-Élysées and the Esplanade des Invalides, not to mention the recently inaugurated Grand Palais and Petit Palais. Above all, what Picasso and Casagemas were able to observe during their first Paris trip, from the moment they alighted at the Gare d’Orsay with the magic of its electric trains, was the fragmentation of the composite city, the juxtaposition of these “little worlds that touch without intermingling,” the breakup of these heterogeneous “Parisian countries” with their varied customs and myriad dialects.3 These striking contrasts were reproduced, and even highlighted, within the walls of that manifestation of excess—the Exposition Universelle would last eight months, attract fifty million visitors, and present the largest exhibition of works of art ever assembled in the world up to that point—with its historic pavilions such as “Old Paris” facing off against glimpses of the future, including the “moving walkway” and the “electricity pavilion.”
“I took refuge in Old Paris,” wrote the journalist André Hallays. “It’s a melancholy place. Those medieval alleys, those darkened Chat Noir–like cabarets, those low-ceilinged shops selling random objects such as fans and napkin rings […] amid houses occupied by entertainers from the great fair, evoke the settings of operas and historical dramas.”4 Later, faced with the moving walkway that ran alongside the southern bank of the Seine—one of the highlights of the Exposition—Hallays, who clearly perceived the inconsistencies brought together by megalomania and the “genius of France,” went on: “The rolling platform is the base, the continuous base of the entire Exposition. On top of this loud, relentless noise, this regular rhythm, we hear the din of workers hammering nails, the fiddles of Gypsies, the whistles of passing tugboats, the flutelike sounds of Oriental orchestras, the racket of the electric train, the metallic clanking of the Eiffel Tower elevators. But this ceaseless roar is the very expression of the Exposition’s formidable iron and cardboard city. It deafens us, dazes us, puts us in the ideal cerebral state to stroll endlessly through these extraordinary, incoherent, mismatched miracles and follies.”5
These discrepancies between Old Paris and the moving walkway, these gaps between the official speeches full of pompous nationalism and the obvious geopolitical reality, were also highlighted by a Montmartre-based Catalan, a bicultural man educated in Paris, a globetrotter who had lived in the United States, Cuba, Germany, and Belgium, the artist and critic Miquel Utrillo, with whom Casagemas and Picasso (though both twenty years younger than him) spent a great deal of time. In his columns for the newspaper Pèl & Ploma, he refused to be hoodwinked by President Loubet’s grand words and stated unambiguously that “if […] Paris has taught us nothing new during the seven months of the Exposition Universelle, it will, in the medium or long term, pay the consequences of its greed by losing more and more of the influence that it still enjoys in the major cultivated countries.”6 It was not by chance that each of Utrillo’s articles was informed by the aesthetics of the Nouvelle Peinture against the strictures of the academic school of painting: “We said it in May and we will repeat it at every opportunity: in France there is a clear divide between the great artists and public opinion. While the public stares in rapt fascination at the cold, impeccable works of Meissonier, the beautiful colors of Bouguereau, Detaille’s painted wax figures, and Bonnat’s overpopulated portraits, the genuine art lovers, the real connoisseurs, recognize in Manet, Corot, Monet, Degas, Whistler, Millet, and others those who, despite the public’s negative reactions, have followed the true path of art.”7 With great assurance, Utrillo went on to describe the deadly way that France’s official and institutional classes continued to stifle radical new artists. “And so it is that Rodin, the greatest of sculptors, has only two works in the official exhibition. To understand the full scope of his production, you must visit his private exhibition, organized in a semiofficial capacity.”8
Utrillo’s articles are a world away from the trumpeted speeches delivered by the institutional representatives of all nations, such as at the farewell dinner for foreign officials given under the arbor at the Hotel Continental, in the presence of His Excellency the Duke of Sesto, royal commissary general of Spain, when Dr. Max Richter, commissary general of the German Empire, saluted a “demonstration of the noblest of human activities in all areas of intellectual and material life,” a demonstration that, “as much for its general imprint as for the value and perfection of the exhibited objects, [had] far exceeded all its European and non-European predecessors.”9 And yet, for several years, certain French institutional figures had quietly begun to express their anxieties. In an official report to the government dated 1850, Léon de Laborde, an archaeologist and member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, alerted to the international expansion of the industrial arts, emphasized the “threat to French superiority,” with the country in danger of being left behind by Great Britain.10 A few years later, in his report on the fine-arts budget, Antonin Proust determined that the Exposition Universelle of 1878 had shown that “the people of other countries” had become “no longer imitators but rivals.”11
Did the young Picasso, during his first stay in Paris, even hear about the moving walkway? During all those Catalan dinners in Montmartre, did he join in with the criticisms that Miquel Utrillo must have made of the endless boasts about the “genius of France”? In any case, if he had visited the retrospective of French art at the Petit Palais, he would have seen another example of the French system’s rigidity: the strict hierarchy established by the commissioners Émile Molinier, Roger Marx, and Frantz Marcou between the fine arts (painting and sculpture) and the “minor arts” (bronze, iron, ceramics, tapestry, fabrics and embroideries, leather, gold and silver, enamels, wood, and furniture), whose “less than dazzling history in the nineteenth century” they contemptuously dismissed. In the next seventy years, Picasso would affirm his own aesthetic language and impose his own conception of what made a masterpiece—in direct contradiction to this traditional academic classification. Very soon, with his first cubist experimentations, the arbitrary distinction between the “fine arts” and the “minor arts”12 would be joyfully transgressed. In the city where the kings of France all left their mark, in the capital refashioned by Baron Haussmann and magnified by the splendors of the Second Empire, in the triumphant city of the Exposition Universelle of 1900, Pablo Ruiz Picasso entered through the back door, the servants’ entrance, and for several years his encounter with Paris would retain the bitter taste of a missed opportunity.
3.“THE RIDE FROM COACH DRIVER BECKER REMAINS UNPAID”
That was when Casagemas shot at her but missed. Thinking he’d killed her, he put a bullet in his own right temple (testimony of Dr. Willette, 27 Rue Lepic). (The ride of coach driver Becker remains unpaid.)1
—Logbook of the police station in the 18th arrondissement, Grandes Carrières quartier
As the French nation, with its delusions of grandeur, glided smoothly and ironically into the future on its moving walkway, the path trodden by the two hotheaded young artists, freshly arrived in Montmartre, proved far slower and bumpier. Their access to the Parisian art world, through the intermediary of a Catalan art dealer, remained precarious, but what choice did they have? What a strange couple they must have made, Casagemas and Picasso! With his wounded expression, his long nose pointing up to the sky, and his receding chin, Casagemas was a sickly-looking young man, too tall, too skinny, too frail, his helmet of black hair topped off with a hat. He towered over his stocky, dynamic, muscular sidekick. The two of them left Paris together in December and went back to Barcelona. A few weeks later, in February 1901, Casagemas returned to Paris alone. And a few days after that, he killed himself. Although Picasso was not in Paris at the time, many of his paintings are haunted by morbid themes, circling obsessively around the image of Casagemas on his deathbed.
Imagining that this event must have been recorded by the French police, I returned to Le Pré-Saint-Gervais. The logbooks of the police stations, divided by quartier, led me on an interminable paper chase: for the 18th arrondissement, I had to choose between Goutte-d’Or, Grandes Carrières, and Clignancourt.
As I searched through these musty black folders, I read the policemen’s steady, elegant handwriting and learned some extraordinary stories: of secret prostitution, vagrancy, suicide, armed robbery, insanity, abandoned children, betrayal of trust, abortion, submissive women, indecent exposure, arson, begging, infractions of the Law of August 8, 1893 (regarding foreigners), death threats, a dead horse, a biting dog, suicide by hanging, pimping, adultery, etc. This was a chronicle of the daily life of a working-class quartier at the beginning of the twentieth century, tales worthy of Eugène Sue. On the page for December 28, 1900, I discovered an incident reported at 49 Rue Gabrielle: “Manach Pedro [sic]: Aggravated assault, damage to property, and insulting behavior.”
“Manach Pedro”? This was Pere Mañach, Picasso’s first art dealer, whom the two young artists met on arrival in Paris through the Catalan network. “49 Rue Gabrielle”? This was the address of the studio that Isidre Nonell rented the two artists during their first stay in the French capital. “December 28”? This was the day after they set off on their return to Barcelona. I kept reading, and it became a veritable playbill, with each character introduced in turn: “Schuz, David, 58 years old, concierge at 49 Rue Gabrielle; Manach Pedro [sic], 30 years old, born in Barcelona on March 28, 1870, son of Salvador and Maria Jordi, single, art dealer, 27 Rue des Entrepreneurs—interviewed; Moncoyoux, Jean, 38 years old, police officer; Giordani, Antoine Joseph, 25 years old, student, Rue Du Sommerard; Vaillant Jacques Émile, 21 years old, student at the Beaux-Arts, 7 Rue de la Cerisette.” And now came the story itself, told in a breathless and not especially literate style: “Arrested at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Rue Gabrielle on charges of damage to property, at the request of the concierge at 49 Rue Gabrielle. This individual had been invited into the house by one of the tenants, Mr. Pailleret, a Spanish national;2 since this man was absent from Paris, Mr. Manach took various objects into the night. Entrance to the house had been prohibited to him by said concierge, who had padlocked the door. Around 3 o’clock, he arrived and was determined to enter said room and he broke the padlock and was leaving with a painting at the moment when he was arrested at this moment he broke an umbrella and smashed windows and violently attacked the concierge and then the tenants who came running and he caused him harm. He punched police officer Moncoyoux in the face. He also called the police officers pigs.”3
There can be no doubt that on December 28, 1900, Mañach attempted to break into and enter Picasso’s first Paris studio. Was Picasso ever made aware of this incident? Did he ever find out that as soon as he left Paris, his own dealer had tried to rob the paintings from his studio? According to all his biographers, Picasso quickly grew suspicious of Mañach. And yet he had to stay at the dealer’s home in May 1901, during his second trip to Paris for his exhibition at the Vollard gallery, which Mañach himself had organized. Later, Picasso would paint him looking stiff and arrogant—in a white shirt and red tie—for an ironic portrait that is now exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Thanks to the testimony of Jaume Sabartés, who was already a close friend of Picasso’s at this point, we know the circumstances of the artist’s split with the art dealer in the winter of 1901: “We spent the night in Durrio’s studio and we were in the street at a very early hour. Picasso wanted to go to [Manach’s] studio […]. When Picasso opened the door […] Manach was lying face down on the bed, fully dressed, and talking to himself, as if delirious […]. Picasso glanced at him contemptuously […]. There was now no doubt that he could no longer work here.”4
As for evidence of Casagemas’s suicide, I tracked it down to another quartier of the 18th arrondissement, Clignancourt, in a folder marked October 1, 1900, to June 4, 1901. On February 19, 1901, the police captain noted (misspelling the dead man’s name): “Casajemas: Attempted murder and suicide.” The protagonists were listed as: “Casajemas, Charles, 20 years old, born in Barcelona, Spanish, artist, 130 b Blvd de Clichy; Florentin, Laure, 20 years old, model, 11 Rue Chiappe; Lenoir Louise, model, 11 Rue Chiappe; Pallarès, Manuel, 28 years old, artist, Blvd de Rochechouart, Spanish national; Huguet, Manuel, 26 years old, artist, 130 b Blvd de Clichy.” And then his description of the incident: “On February 17, around 9 o’clock in the evening, at the wine tavern located at 128 Blvd de Clichy Mr. Casagemas shot at the lady Florentin […] with a revolver, but missed. Turning his weapon against himself, he then shot a bullet into his right temple. Transported initially to the Dojour pharmacy at 81 Blvd de Clichy, then to the Bichat hospital in the carriage belonging to the tenant Theis, 116 Rue de Crimée, driven by the coach driver Becker Michel (no5/915) accompanied by police officer Prat of the 18th arrondissement, he died in that establishment the same day around half past 11 at night. He was in love with the lady Florentin née Gargallo Laure, 20, who was not his mistress. He had eaten dinner with Pallarès, Huguet and the two women at the wine merchant’s at 128 Blvd de Clichy. At the end of the meal, he gave the lady Florentin a packet of letters and begged her to read them. She became frightened and drew away. That was when Casagemas shot at her but missed. Thinking he’d killed her, he put a bullet in his own right temple (testimony of Dr. Willette, 27 Rue Lepic). (The ride of coach driver Becker remains unpaid.)”5
Copyright © 2021 by Annie Cohen-Solal
Copyright © 2023 by Sam Taylor