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I n his new book, 'Adventure Everywhere' author Dave Haslam takes us to 1900s Paris, a city steeped in music, art, sex and revolutionary new ideas. These were among the attributes that enticed and fired the mind of Pablo Picasso, who aged 19 first arrived from Barcelona, in the autumn of 1900. He would stay for decades to come.
In Paris, Picasso found the tools, freedom and inspiration his quicksilver mind needed to launch himself headlong into an era of massive creative growth. Once resident, the artist quickly surrounded himself with like-minded adventurers, numerous lovers and fellow artists, writers and poets with whom he navigated the carnival of Paris's chaos and creativity, from the opulent art galleries and salons, to the sleazy cafés and nightclubs around Montmartre. And within a few years, Picasso himself had become an integral part of the city's cultural fabric, a symbiotic relationship that would endure throughout his life.
To mark the publication of 'Adventure Everywhere', Sotheby's spoke to British DJ legend and author Dave Haslam - no stranger to the creative fertility found in a vibrant nightlife - to reflect on what fascinated him about Picasso's early years in Paris and that mercurial synergy between nightlife and art, that can produce epochal creative moments. We also discuss Picasso's relationships, his peers, the enduring appeal of Paris, and of course, the art and ideas that emerged from this electrifying era in Modern art. Dave's book, 'Adventure Everywhere', is out now.
What first drew you to writing about Picasso?
Well, I’ve always had an interest in Picasso and his contemporaries, particularly those in the first 20 or 25 years of his time in Paris. Apollinaire, Gertrude Stein, Erik Satie - those people whose world he was a part of.
And then there’s my interest in life after dark, clubs, cabarets, bars. I’ve always had that. I mean, that’s part of my world. I'm aware that, for example, somebody like Keith Haring in New York in the early 1980s was similarly part of a very fertile nightclub scene and his art reflects that.
So, I had an inkling that if I researched that angle, of Picasso; his nightlife, what he enjoyed doing, as well as what influenced him and his contemporaries and collaborators, create a kind of snapshot, a thematic version of Picasso, it would be a way into his story.
You know Paris well and have extended stays there most years. What was it like to delve back into the city’s history?
There’s a quote from Miró saying all Spanish artists will go to Paris at some point in their lives. And I wondered why that was so - what made Paris so attractive to Picasso.
Because as a young man, it was almost a mythological place to him. He’d been part of an art scene in Barcelona briefly, he knew artists who were slightly older than him, like Ramon Casas, and he had heard from them about what was going on in Paris, and in Montmartre particularly. He was aware it was the avant-garde art capital of the Western world at that point, but he was also aware that, as an 18- or 19-year-old young man, it had a very intense and exciting nightlife.
So, he was very keen to meet like-minded artists and enjoy the nightlife!
Picasso the artist was very drawn to the idea of being among creative people, and Picasso the young human being was very keen on the idea that he’d be able to stay up late and visit all these cabaret bars! He entered Paris at a time when that nightlife well established, so he was immediately thrown into a ferment of artistic activity and an incredibly exciting nightlife. And he knew the work of artists like Toulouse-Lautrec, obviously, but also Manet, van Gogh and so on. There was already a momentum behind the art scene, a radical impulse, a sense of experimentation. But it was only small, the mainstream was still very strong. Artists such as Satie, Apollinaire, and Picasso, in each of their various disciplines, all found some resistance among the mainstream to what they were doing. You know, even Ravel said that Satie’s work was nonsense. So there were people who didn't understand what they [Picasso and his cohort] were doing, but then there were other people who championed them.
From your research, what sort of young man emerged? How would you describe the 19-year-old Picasso who packed up his life and moved to Montparnasse?
I think, like most people of that age, he was still looking to find his identity as a person. Artistically speaking, by 1900, he wasn’t yet an artist with his own style - but there was an element of what was to come. Take a look at one of the first paintings, in fact the first painting he produced in Paris; of the Moulin de la Galette. The Moulin de la Galette had been somewhere that Renoir had painted and it’s almost iconic now. It’s mid-1870s, the Belle Époque, with well-dressed, young people sitting outside on a summer’s evening. It looks very civilised, very bright. But then, in Picasso’s painting of the same Moulin de la Galette in the autumn of 1900, Picasso brought in an element of darkness, including a sense of the predatory men that were present at a venue like that. And the colours were almost Spanish. So, he was pushing a little bit against tradition, but he still was a long way from creating a revolution.
'It was a sense of identity that Picasso was looking for, personally and artistically when he arrived in Paris. And I think he knew that Paris was the place that would give him space to do that'
And he would have been soaking up influences from the artists around him, too?
He certainly didn't want to be the kind of painter that copied other people. Picasso had lots of inspirations, but he wanted to be his own person. It was a sense of identity that he was looking for, personally and artistically when he arrived in Paris. And I think he knew that Paris was the place that would give him space to do that.
What sort of trends and fads would have been prevalent in the Paris of 1900 when Picasso first arrived?
In that Paris of the 1900s, it was almost like every few months, there would be a new idea or an imported look. There was the Japanese influence at the end of the 19th century, or the African masks that influenced early Cubism. So, in that period, he seemed a lot more porous, he absorbed experience, other cultures, and ideas into his work.
As an artist who absorbed incredibly quickly, who assimilated disparate influences and ideas, this must have been incredibly stimulating…
Yes, and I wanted to emphasise how important it is to nurture and keep that mindset in your life, your creative life, hence the title of the book, ‘Adventure Everywhere’, which is taken from one of his friend Apollinaire’s final poems in 1918, when he’s talking about a particular forward-looking, experimental, radical mindset. And Apollinaire’s partout l'aventure was a preferable position to the status quo, the mainstream. It was like a counter-cultural call to arms. Apollinaire was very good at summing things up; you know, he was also the first person to popularise the name 'Cubism'. So, in the book, I’m thinking of that sense of adventure, not only in terms of venturing out at night, but adventure in terms of artistic practice – and I’d argue Picasso began to lose this later on in his life, compared to the absolute frantic nature of the first 15 years of his time in Paris.
I remember reading Gertrude Stein recounting a conversation with Picasso many years later, where they were nostalgically trying to remember things that had gone on between about 1905 and 1914. And Picasso couldn’t believe all the things that he’d done. She was reminding them, ‘Oh, then you did this and then you did that. And he was like, I did that all in one year? And she’s said, ‘Yes - all in one year.’
'You can see that inspiration in his work from the time, there was a lot of new, Cubist iconography - guitars, mandolin, absinthe bottles, sheet music'
Twin sets of adventures! Artistic and carousing. How did the latter help shape the former?
Well, I think young people generally find their life after dark as being somewhere that they potentially transform themselves. You go out at night, and you dress up, you can get intoxicated, meet new people, have new experiences. When you're 19, you're quite fearless. So, Picasso tended not to go to the Moulin Rouge for example, even though at that point it was run by a Spanish guy who would allow him in for free. He was going to edgier places, cafés, cabaret clubs and so on. And you can see that inspiration in his work from the time, there was a lot of new, Cubist iconography - guitars, mandolin, absinthe bottles, sheet music - they all come from those cabaret clubs and bars and nightclubs.
So, Picasso was like a painter who suddenly discovers a scene or a landscape, and they want to pin it down and keep coming back to that landscape. It’s almost like their default position. With Picasso, it was objects from those nightlife venues that kept coming back into his work. Like the sculptures of absinthe glasses in 1914 - a landmark moment.
Yes - this is the visual language of those early years, ciphers and symbols which drove his development towards Cubism.
It’s endless; man with guitar, woman with guitar, all through that brief period of Cubism. So yes, it was almost as if nightlife had given him an iconography in the same way as, say, break-dancing gave Keith Haring an iconography. Somebody dancing, that kind of body shape, that sense of movement, that kind of sense of group collective, was very important to Keith Haring.
Interesting, especially as when I read the book, something I was a little surprised to discover, was that Picasso wasn’t particularly interested in music.
Yes, I especially wish that he’d been more interested in jazz. Because obviously, by the mid-1920s, jazz was the soundtrack that the international jet set liked to have at their nightclubs. But Picasso had this attitude that everything, apart from flamenco, was pretty much a waste of time. There’s a painting from that period, The Three Dancers, which in my mind was almost like a jazz trio. But he didn't collaborate with the jazz musicians of the 1930s, 40s or 50s. It would have been great to have put Picasso and John Coltrane together!
But still, he recognised the symbolism of music and guitars as being a powerful tool.
Yes, for Picasso, the guitar represented flamenco, represented his roots and, Picasso being Picasso, the curves of the guitar also gave him an opportunity to mould female shapes. Interestingly, one of my favourite moments from when I was researching the book and walking around the streets of Paris, came when I was looking for the apartment that Picasso was living in, at the height of Cubism. One of the few times he really collaborated with other people on an equal footing was when Georges Braque would go to his studio, where there would be guitars. And Braque was even more interested in guitars, he was a gifted musician. The ground floor of that apartment block, which is still there on Boulevard de Clichy, is now a guitar shop. And it was the only moment really in the whole of my tramping around Paris where the present day contemporary use of a building had anything which reflected or related to Picasso. And I thought that was perfect.
Reading the book, you’ve clearly enjoyed the process of researching and writing it - it really does paint a rich, thrilling tapestry of the city’s demi-monde at the time, but I noticed that the narrative is weighted very much towards the earlier years and less post World War One. Was this a deliberate decision?
Obviously, when the First World War started, that was a break. Venues had to close; restaurants were put on a curfew. And at that time, Picasso was approaching his mid-30s when a person’s hunger for new experiences tends to begin to drop off anyway.
If I'm honest, I also found that his story becomes a little bit less interesting once we get in to the mid-1920s. By this time, he’s in his 40s, he’s very well known, he’s part of an international art set, a very high-end fashion crowd. And I also think, that in some senses, his initial moment as an explosive new force in art had happened by that time. He was a wealthy guy; he was hanging out with the aristocracy. That sense of him being a hungry, angry young man was hard to sustain once he’d got there. So that’s why I concentrate, I think, on the early part of his time in Paris.
'Gertrude Stein has said of people’s love lives in Paris at that time, they were faithful ‘in the Montmartre fashion’... Infidelities galore!'
As a young man moving to Paris where there was freedom to behave exactly as he pleased, you also write about his vigorous and multi-layered love life. Would you say this was typical behaviour for the time?
There were a lot of women in his life at that point. Gertrude Stein has said of people’s love lives in Paris at that time, they were faithful ‘in the Montmartre fashion’. Which means, they were not monogamous, they would take other partners. Infidelities galore! And everyone was involved - his then-partner Fernande Olivier took lovers too, but Picasso did have a particularly brutal way of moving on from one relationship to the next. But given the context at that time, that was pretty much the way a lot of artists in that culture treated women.
Yes - it seems heartless.
Yes, and the way Picasso looked at women was also how a male artist looks at a model, it was a contingent relationship. In the Paris of 1900, models would gather on a Monday morning, or afternoon, at the fountain on Place Pigalle, and wait for artists to come and pick them out so they would model for them for a week or so. It was like a market, a cattle market. Artists would pick them out and then take them to their studio. And everyone knew the line was blurred; the women were aware that the relationship that they would be getting into that week with that artist could become a physical relationship, and she would be treated as a possession. So, I think that culture obviously was not the kind of culture that would encourage respectful behavior towards women. So, while the context is important, it would be nice if he’d been the champion of enlightened behavior, but he wasn’t.
Also, it seemed that with every new significant relationship, he would move house to a new neighbourhood, underlining a new beginning.
Yes, he tended to move to different part of Paris with different women. When he found a new woman, he would move on and in a sense, kill the previous relationship, start afresh. So, he moved from Montmartre and Pigalle to Montparnasse and then to the area round the Champs-Élysées and then back to the Quartier Latin. Each move was marked by a new relationship.
'I personally think that there can't be an actual artist on the face of this earth who hasn't at some moment, been inspired by something that at some point Picasso did'
Your book explains really paints a vivid tapestry of Picasso’s Parisian life, in all its smoky decadent, squalor and genius. But to bring him to the here and now, what do you think Picasso stands for today?
Well, I think every generation creates its own version of an iconic cultural figure. I mean, there are times when nobody was interested in William Shakespeare.
This is what can happen with somebody who’s a giant in our creative world. And I do feel like our some of the current generation’s version of Picasso is about identifying the problematic aspects of his personality.
If you look at a lot of the exhibitions that are happening around the world, timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death, many of them have what you might call a #MeToo analysis built in to the exhibition. So, I think we have to accept that that a period of reflection about his personality is possibly overdue and is what is currently happening, but I think the next generation may find something completely different about Picasso in terms of their perception of him.
I personally think that there can't be an actual artist on the face of this earth who hasn't at some moment, been inspired by something that at some point Picasso did. And I would like to think that, most of all, it would be the restless incessant search for the perfect way to express yourself, the perfect form, the perfect colour. And that really was what I think his art was about.
