The Picasso Museum has taken a little piece of early 20th-century Paris. Within its four walls, can-can music plays while dancers in voluminous dresses look at the camera; one can even feel the frenzy that must have emanated from the French capital, where all local painters wanted to go for inspiration. The exhibition From Montmartre to Montparnasse. Catalan Artists in Paris, 1889-1914, which can be visited until March 30, aims to X-ray all those who strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens or enjoyed the Moulin Rouge beyond big names like Santiago Rusiñol, Ramon Casas, or Pablo Picasso himself. "It's a journey that tells a story," summarizes its director, Emmanuel Guigon, "a complete immersion, but not in the 3D sense."
More than 250 works make up the multidisciplinary tour through Palau Finestres, coming from about sixty lenders, fewer than curator Vinyet Panyella would have liked to fully illustrate the 80 artists she has dedicated herself to researching. The aim was to portray the city, with its lights and shadows, rather than to collect the trajectory of the painters, but also sculptors, illustrators, or engravers, many of them little known. Three generations of artists coexist with each other in the exhibition, even portraying each other. It begins with the Universal Exhibition of 1889, with the participation of 34 Catalan artists, and reaches the outbreak of the First World War, when many return home and others like Picasso, as well as Louis Jou ---formerly Lluís Jou--- and Juli González stay. A bohemian stroll reminiscent of the one proposed a few months ago by the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC) with the exhibition dedicated to Suzanne Valadon, where the Paris of Casas, Rusiñol, and Miquel Utrillo was also seen, so it is not surprising that the Picasso exhibition includes a portrait of the French painter.
Montmartre and Montparnasse are the two centers where all the painters who come to Paris gather, where the modern life they seek is found. In a Montmartre where Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec have settled, Rusiñol and Casas arrive in 1890 at the Moulin de la Galette, portrayed by the latter in Interior del Moulin de la Galette (1890-1891). Later it is the turn of Joaquim Sunyer or Picasso and his friend Carles Casagemas, who arrive in 1900, for another Universal Exhibition in which the Malaga-born artist already exhibits in the Grand Palais, when he was only 18 years old. Both are protagonists of some of the pieces in the exhibition, such as Carles Casagemas y Pablo Picasso persiguiendo a dos muchachas (1900), which also features the model Germaine, whom Casagemas shot, without killing her, before committing suicide. Even Gaudí went to Paris to show his models of the Sagrada Família and Casa Milà.
Montparnasse ended up becoming more fashionable, with a metro connection to Montmartre from 1910, with the arrival of sculptors like Pablo Gargallo, but where Picasso also ended up going. He settled on boulevard Raspail in 1912, after having spent a long period in the popular Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre. However, Paris does not end there; there is the Latin Quarter, Belleville, the Saint Martin canal, and the nuclei on both sides of the Seine, such as Île Saint-Louis. These settings where they live and have their studios end up becoming the subjects of their paintings, with idyllic postcards such as Notre Dame de París desde el Quai de la Tournelle (1890) by Andreu Solà Vidal, Quartier Latin by Ricard Opisso, or Vendedora de flores en Pont-Neuf (1900) by Joan Sala, although there is also the reality of a city beyond its elegance. There appear Cementerio de Montmartre (1891) by Rusiñol, Los dramas del Sena. La última resolución (1905) by Joan Cardona Lladós, with a woman throwing herself into the river, or the harshness of Un día de invierno en el jardín de Luxemburgo (1900) by Marià Pidelaserra.
It matters where artists live and paint, but one must not forget where they have fun either, which, in the case of Paris, offers endless possibilities. There is the can-can of the Moulin Rouge and the Divan Japonais, but not only that, the night continues with the dance of the Moulin de la Galette or the cabarets of the Chat Noir and the Auberge du Clou, with Eusebi Arnau's sculpture Loïe Fuller (1895-1902) containing all the party within its skirts. And much more, with the circus and flamenco shows, depicted from an orientalist prism, with examples such as Ricard Canals' El baile flamenco (1902-1904) or Un palco en los toros (1904), and Pau Roig's Bailaor (1906), while listening to Isaac Albéniz, who lived in Paris at that time.
The exhibition does not look away and includes another source of distraction for Catalan painters in Paris, the brothels, with Picasso's La espera. Margot (1901) or Ramon Pichot's Interior de burdel (1900). Likewise, the fascination with Parisian women, bourgeois and liberated women who like fashion, cafés, and sports, become icons that even decorate advertising posters such as Casas' Montmartre (1901), for the Cigarrillos París brand. Here, Frou frou, from 1914, plays, although it was popularized by Sara Montiel. The tour culminates in a large room dedicated to the Belle Époque, before the war. Sculpture captures all eyes, with jewels such as Miquel Blay's Eclosión (1905) or Desencant and Pablo Gargallo's Cleopatra (1900). The final surprise is given by Gargallo with his Cabeza de Picasso (1913).