going in reverse order: Montmartre

In fact, I reached Bruskin’s tapestry on foot from Montmartre. It’s not that close, but it was a nice day for walking.

I was in Montmartre because I thought I would surprise our internet colleague Paul Bains by announcing that I had just eaten at Au Grain de Folie, the restaurant he founded before selling it. Alas, their hours are a bit weird and I didn’t feel like waiting around for their strangely late lunchtime. But I’ll try to go back there, Paul, but it will be after Poland.

And since I was there, I couldn’t help but remember that I was just around the corner and down the hill from le Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso’s most important residence. Yes, I know the real one burned down in 1970, and that this one was reconstructed to please the tourists and earn rent from aspiring artists.

However, I often like sitting in that steeply inclined square in front of the house and remembering some of my favorite Picasso stories from that location. One of the more famous is Leo Stein (Gertrude’s patron brother) seeing Les demoiselles d’Avignon there and later calling it “a terrible mess” and dropping his support of Picasso (he had been partial to the Rose Period). But I think the most charming has to be the surprise party the young Picasso threw there for Henri Rousseau. It meant a lot to Rousseau, and there were a lot of big egos there that night, but they let Rousseau dominate the evening as he deserved.

I doubt I would have wanted Picasso as a friend; he did some incredibly bastardly things to friends and lovers alike. But for sheer animal/intellectual energy, continuing non-stop through several different styles, and all by a foreign outsider initially mocked for his poor French before finally owning the world’s greatest city, it’s hard to think of a more inspiring 20th century figure.