MONTMARTRE : THE BIRTHPLACE OF MODERN ART

By Saskia Ooms, Phillip Dennis Cate, David E. Weisman

Published by D. Giles Ltd. 279 pages. £45. ISBN 978-1-913875-87-9

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Montmartre has a special allure about it. It doesn’t matter that Montparnasse replaced it as the area of Paris known for its concentration of writers, artists, bohemians, and others. Nor does it matter that Montmartre is now probably more dedicated to mass tourism than anything genuinely creative. For me, it has always been a pleasure to go there, dodge the crowds, visit the splendid Montmartre Museum, step back in time, and imagine what it must have been like when Montmartre was the centre of attention for painters and poets, and had its own special brand of irreverent humour towards the pretentious and those who wanted to lay down strict codes of behaviour. And when a great deal of inventive work was being produced.

Without dismissing the presence of individuals who may have been in Montmartre  prior to 1870 or so, the authors make a case for the influence of the ill-fated and short-lived Commune: “The 1871 Paris Commune and its revolutionary spirit was an appealing and liberating attraction to Montmartre’s independent artists, writers, and musicians, and the Butte Montmartre became a major geographical symbol of rebellion against power”. It might also be said that anarchist ideas, in their various forms, were then widely circulating, and additionally played a part in the way that the creative spirits, who began to gather in Montmartre, calculated their opposition to authority no matter what form it took. Defying the government, or mocking the official line in what was considered artistically acceptable, became part of the same pattern. In 1919 people were taken aback when Marcel Duchamp gave the Mona Lisa a beard and moustache. It seemed a deliberate send-up of the tastes of the elite. The idea was not new, and in 1887 Eugene Bataille had shown her smoking a pipe.   

The government had loosened restrictions on the press in the early-1880s, and this “combined with newly invented, inexpensive systems of printing journals, books and publicity material”, including posters, to provide opportunities for a greater freedom of commentary and criticism. Posters soon became an art form in themselves and in time had exhibitions devoted to them. The best-known artists associated with poster art were Jules Cheret (“the father of poster art”) and Toulouse-Lautrec. His name is almost synonymous with Montmartre, the Moulin Rouge, the Chat-Noir, and other establishments that have gone down in history as the haunts of the bohemians, though as Montmartre became more widely-known they also attracted the bourgeoisie who liked to be shocked and even insulted. Aristide Bruant made a reputation, and not inconsiderable earnings, by singing songs that satirised bourgeois conventions and tastes.

 It’s noted that Impressionist artists “gathered in Montmartre haunts such as the Café Guerbois” and that other meeting places for artists were the Elysee Montmartre and the Moulin de la Galette. They weren’t just locations for socialising : “Montmartre also became an ideal place to find new subject matter to represent everyday life : performance artists such as singers, clowns, and actresses became popular artistic subjects”. Toulouse-Lautrec’s name is prominent again, along with Theophile Alexandre Steinlen (famous for his cat illustrations), Henri-Gabriel Ibels, and Adolphe Willette whose “Spare, Lord, spare your people: Be not angry with us forever”, is a large mural showing a man with a pistol leading a merry band of dancers and others towards some unknown destination.

Prominent though the Impressionists now are, it might be that artists like Steinlen and Ibels better represent the spirit of Montmartre in the years concerned. I ought to add that one of the typical Montmartre artists, in the sense of reflecting its love of colour, dancing, and pleasure, was Auguste Renoir. It always struck me that there was something about his canvases, with their bright colours and attractive women, that had the feeling of its streets, even if they weren’t set there. His “Dance at the Moulin de la Galette”, dating from 1876, was located in Montmartre, but his equally impressive ”Luncheon of the Boating Party”, though clearly an event taking place outside Paris, still comes over to me as full of the same delight in a group of people enjoying themselves. It can be argued that Renoir was only showing one side of bohemian life and was ignoring the hunger, disappointment and tragedy that often went with it. That may be so, and he perhaps was contributing to a myth that has almost become a reality we now prefer to believe in. But his paintings are beautiful and if they only capture occasional moments of happiness they do it successfully.

I mentioned tragedy as a component of bohemian life, and a classic example of it occurred in Montmartre in 1901 when the young Spanish painter Carlos Casagemas shot himself. He had come to Paris with his friend Pablo Picasso, and at some stage met a model named Germaine Gargallo with whom he became infatuated. There are various accounts of what happened, but briefly it would seem that, at a restaurant in Paris, Casagemas, addicted to drugs and alcohol, not for the first time asked Gargallo to marry him. She refused and he took out a pistol and fired at her. He missed and then turned the gun on himself. He died in hospital later the same day. Picasso, who wasn’t present at the restaurant, painted several pictures of Casagemas, including one of him on his death bed. I recall an exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery in 2013, Becoming Picasso, Paris 1901, focusing on this part of his life, and what art historians now refer to as Picasso’s Blue Period, one of my own favourite areas of his artistic activity. To round out the story, Picasso later had an affair with Germaine and used her as a model or more likely (the faces perhaps not being closely identifiable) an inspiration, for one of the women in his groundbreaking “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, a key painting of the modern movement.

One of the advantages of Montmartre is that it doesn’t only refer to well-known artists. The Spanish painter Ramon Casas was in Montmartre some years before Picasso.  Casas had arrived in Paris with another Spanish artist, Santiago Rusinol, who painted a picture of the pianist and composer Erik Satie in his rather Spartan studio. and both produced scenes from around Montmartre. There is a fine Casas painting, though it’s not in the book, called “Madeleine” which shows her seated in a bar (probably the Moulin de la Galette), wine glass on the table in front of her, and a cigarette (more likely a cigar of some sort) in her hand. She’s looking confidently at the viewer. It seems to me an expression of the freedom of Bohemia. I can remember being impressed when I saw it in the exhibition, Bohemians, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2012.   

I don’t suppose freedom extended to a lot of women in Montmartre, bohemian or not. But there were some free spirits who were also talented artists. I’m thinking particularly of Suzanne Valadon and Marie Laurencin. The authors are rightly assertive about Valadon when they say, “In Valadon’s artwork, a connection to Montmartre comes to life. Her family portraits were painted in the space of her studio on Rue Cortot, and the gardens served as a powerful leitmotif throughout her oeuvre…..Valadon played a unique role in Montmartre, paving the way for women artists who came after her”. Interestingly, they mention the American painter Alice O’Neel, someone whose work I like very much, as having identifiable similarities to Valadon in her figurative work. It’s yet another personal recollection, but an exhibition in Paris some years ago featured Valadon’s paintings alongside those of her son, Maurice Utrillo. It occurred to me that, although his popular street scenes have their charm, she was much more wide-ranging and imaginative in her creativity.

There is a striking self-portrait by Marie Laurencin, painted in 1904, and another from 1905 which shows her with an almost-defiant look, as if challenging the viewer, “Well, what are you looking at?”. Like Valadon “she   had grown up with a single working-class mother”. Her father “was a member of the bourgeoisie  and generous towards them, but he was already married to someone else”.  His support did enable Laurencin’s mother to provide her daughter with a bourgeois education. She attended art classes and met Francis Picabia, Georges Braque and Georges Lepape. Later, she encountered Picasso, Apollinaire, with whom she had a relationship, the poet Max Jacob, Kees van Dongen, and others who gathered at the Bateau-Lavoir, the somewhat ramshackle establishment which provided studios for artists. It was there that Picasso painted “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, though the initial inspiration for it was “the vibrant yet challenging world of Carrer d’Avinyo in Barcelona, home to a brothel and the complexities of human experience that unfold through the lives of the women who work there”.

Before leaving Marie Laurencin I ought to mention her “Group of Artists”, a painting from 1908 which shows her with Apollinaire, Picasso, and his then-mistress, Fernande Olivier. Later, she “began to develop an aesthetic that adopted certain aspects of the Cubist style, with an almost exclusively female iconography of elegance, along with more creamy pastel colours”. Her time at the Bateau-Lavoir had placed her in the context of “a site that nurtured collaboration and exchange among artists (and) laid the groundwork for modern and avant-garde art. It transformed the art world”.

Laurencin would probably have met the Dutch-French painter Kees van Dongen, another of the group associated with the Bateau-Lavoir. His early work placed him alongside the Fauves because of his use of colour, which has sometimes been described as “garish”, and once more I’m reminded of an exhibition in Paris and of being immediately struck by the bright colours that seemed to almost shout out from the canvases. He became popular among fashionable women and was in demand to paint their portraits, though he may have been less than honest and accurate when he did so. He is said to have remarked, “Painting is the most beautiful of lies”.

It would be possible to carry on selecting names from this narrative of the large cast of characters in the Montmartre of the late-1800s and early-1900s. Not all of them were artists. Picasso painted a portrait of Bibi-la-Puree, whose real name was Andre Joseph Salis. He was a “former actor (who) “became a local eccentric – a true dandy and flaneur. He made a living by shining shoes, selling flowers, newspapers, and postcards, or posing as a model. He was also known to the police for stealing umbrellas, engaging in petty theft, and creating public disturbances”. He claimed to be the poet Paul Verlaine’s secretary, which most likely meant helping the poet home when he was drunk. Picasso’s portrait of him doesn’t show a dandy but a rascally-looking character who you might find fascinating but think twice about trusting.

Montmartre: The Birthplace of Modern Art is a wonderfully entertaining book about a time, a place, and the people in it. It’s also informative about what the artists were doing as they developed new ideas about painting. It is liberally illustrated with paintings, drawings, and photographs, and there are notes, a bibliography, and an index. Reading it reminds us that Montmartre played an important part in the history of modern art, as well as providing the basis for colourful stories about bohemians.