Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art

"This book offers you a sweeping vista of bohemian Paris. It sets the scene. It tells you who was who, how they got there and the circumstances of their existence. You have to remember that the bohemian sets in London, Paris and Berlin—the world of modern art at the beginning of the 20th century and until the outbreak of the First World War —was very small. Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, said that there were about 160 people in the world that were interested in modern art during that period. Some of those were artists and a few were collectors, but it wasn’t a very big world. It was very incestuous and everybody knew each other. As with London, people went to Paris to escape their provincial background. Paris was full of foreign nationals, people like Modigliani, Brancusi, Nina Hamnett, Augustus John, Picasso etc. It was a real melting pot of talent. People from all over Europe wanted to go there because they felt it was somewhere they could express themselves and where anything was possible. They lived in incredible poverty on the margins of society. There was a whole bunch of people living in very shabby, very poor accommodation, which they had taken over because the area itself had been ‘left behind’ and degraded to the point where it could be colonised by artists. “Bohemia itself is a fabled land. It’s an idea that people have.” Most books about the period are incredibly boring because they’re written by academics and the problem with an academic treatment is that it doesn’t actually capture the spirit of what people were going through at the time, where their camaraderie came from and how they fought against adversity. The residence where many of these figures lived in Paris, Bateau-Lavoir , was almost like a commune or a students’ hall of residence, with people coming and going all the time. It had that kind of feel about it. And that’s why this book is so good. It really captures the spirit of what was going on. It brings it to the forefront in a way that you feel as if you’re actually there yourself. It’s won lots of awards and been much praised on both sides of the Atlantic. If you are interested in that period and you want to read just one book, this is the one. It’s full of wonderful stories—a real rollercoaster of a read. It’s incredibly well written. They mainly lived in extreme poverty. They weren’t managing to sell their art, or they were selling it very cheaply. When Nina Hamnett first went to Paris she bought one of Modigliani’s drawings and she wasn’t a rich artist. Lots of the people who bought his work were other artists, who had a few more francs in their pockets than Modigliani did. They weren’t doing very well at all. But, as often happens, suddenly someone realizes that there might be a profit to be made. And if a few artists in the group die, that helps to create a market. Picasso’s dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, was a German. After the First World War , German assets, which had been confiscated at the outset of the war, were sold off by the French government to raise money to pay the war debt. So, all Picasso’s great cubist paintings that were in Kahnweiler’s gallery were taken away and put up for auction. Picasso attended the auction with Kahnweiler. His paintings were being auctioned for a few francs, but he didn’t bid for them. Kahnweiler told Picasso if he was mad, not bidding for his own work. Picasso smiled and bided his time until the Cezannes came up for auction, again also for a few francs. Picasso bid and bought all the works by Cezanne and inadvertently became one of the biggest collectors of Cezanne in the world. That’s how small the art market was in Paris. There was no one else who was going to buy all these works. Picasso, to some extent, made the reputation of Cezanne as an artist. They really did create their own market, in a way. It was the Americans who changed things. Once the Americans decided they wanted Picassos, he couldn’t produce enough work. He was making prints in the morning and then painting in the afternoon. A one-man art factory with multi-millionaires sitting in the foyer of his office building where he had his studio, waiting for days on end to talk to him because they wanted to buy one of his paintings before they caught the ocean liner back to New York. In the 1950s. He was already making money by the 1930s, but after the Second World War he became huge—everybody wanted a piece by him and he could name his price. In the end he never paid for anything because, if he decided he wanted to buy a chateau or a car he just left a painting in the bank as collateral. He’d really left bohemia soon after the end of the First World War. His lover was a ballet dancer called Olga and he started moving in much more exalted and wealthy circles."