Martin Gayford

Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?

A review of In Montmatre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900 – 1910, by Sue Roe. This rollicking read is at its best when describing the bacchanalian squalor

‘La Guingette à Montmartre’ by Van Gogh (1886) [Getty Images] 
issue 30 August 2014

What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds most appealing: the perfect recipe for a bohemian life, dreamed up by a supreme master in the art of having it both ways. To begin with at least, however, Picasso had to make do only with the half of his formula: living like a pauper with scarcely any cash at all. La vie de bohème, this enjoyable book makes clear, might have been romantic but was also hard.

Sue Roe has written a portrait in words of an era, through which are threaded the stories of the various people who passed by — painters, models, collectors, dealers. But her book takes its main title from a place: Montmartre. It’s an address that still has allure. Although for the best part of a century it has been a kitschy tourist attraction, it was for a few years the epicentre of the budding movement known as modern art.

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