Book 8 - Sue Roe "In Montmartre"

[jazzy_dave]

Sue Roe "In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse, and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910"(Penguin)




Gertrude Stein: "But it doesn’t look like me."
Picasso: “It will.”
- on viewing the Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906)

Sue Roe’s “In Montmartre” is a terrific introduction to not only the art world but also to other parts of Paris life and culture from 1900 to 1910. It centres around Henri Matisse (then in his 30’s) and Pablo Picasso (then in his 20’s) with alternating chapters, which include contacts with other painters but also models, gallery owners, and art collectors esp. Leo and Gertrude Stein.

The book is full of anecdotes and trivia about not only artists and paintings but such things as the handmade sandals by Raymond Duncan (brother of Isadora) which were the favoured footware of the Steins, the beginnings of Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russes with Vaslav Nijinsky, the notorious Bal des Quat'z'Arts etc.


In fact, this is a wonderful, colourful book about the second coming of Paris as the centre of avant-garde art. Between 1900 and 1910, artists of the calibre of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Braque, Vlaminck and hangers-on like, Max Jacob, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas swirled around the decaying shacks and ramshackle windmills of Montmartre. The narrative is centred around the competition between the bourgeois family man Matisse and the womanizing vagabond Picasso, but in actual fact, Picasso's much more interesting lifestyle receives more attention than Matisse's button-down mojo. Picasso's life in his ramshackle, messy garret, where he domiciled with his mistress Fernande Olivier, who was determined to live a completely idle lifestyle, is described in intimate detail. Meanwhile, he moves through his Blue Period, to the little-known Rose Period, through African-inspired art to the beginnings of Cubism. You will rarely find a better description of avant-garde Paris, the meticulous description of the places and the people is wonderful.