Dali House

“Homage to Friends from Montparnasse”, a 1962 painting by Marie Vorobieff-Stebelska (1892-1984), a Russian cubist whose nickname was Marevna, after a fairy princess, reputedly bestowed on her by Maxim Gorky. It shows a caped Amedeo Modigliani surrounded by (top row from left) Diego Rivera, Ilya Ehrenburg, Chaim Soutine, Amedeo’s wife Jeanne Hébuterne, Max Jacob, gallery owner Leopold Zborowski, (bottom row) Marevna, her and Rivera’s daughter Marika and Moise Kisling.

The best thing about poking 72 thumbtacks into Google Earth’s satellite imagery of Paris to indicate places of interest in art history is that it gives other viewers something to look at besides Metro stations and the thousands of placemarks suffocating the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

It’s amazing to me that Google Earth users who obviously know the City of Lights well – certainly far better than I do, since I’ve never been there – are only interested in “complete” sets of subway, bus and train stops. Scant attention is given to the capital’s incredible history. The Moulin Rouge is well marked, but mostly because of the Nicole Kidman movie. Toulouse-Lautrec was, after all, just a minor character in the film.

So, with the help of online walking tours from Jack-Travel.com, BonjourParis.com and MetropoleParis.com, I had a good gawk at the city when it was being rebuilt by individual creativity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, even as it was being refashioned by Baron Haussman.

Following are some of the highlights, in a travelogue broken up into three parts because it’s quite a hike. All of the Hemingway components, though, have been surgically removed, wrapped in butcher’s paper and delivered to Dorseyland, because they’re more into Google Earth over there than in art.

Geeks.

If you do want it, the Google Earth post is here.

The painting above notwithstanding, we begin in Montmartre, a name that derives from the Roman “Mount of Mars”, but the Christian French preferred “Mount of Martyrs”. There are still a lot of artists plying their trade in the streets – the tourists expect nothing less – but fortunately all the artists we’ll be meeting are dead.

Le Lapin Agile is a cabaret at 22 rue des Saules and it remains largely as it was when Pablo Picasso was a regular customer, complete with the 1875 depiction of an agile rabbit on the exterior, leaping from a saucepan with a bottle of wine. (The artist’s name was Andre Gill, so it was a play on words as well. Huh.)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did his share of sketching and elbow-bending here, as did Amedeo Modigliani.

Once, in 1905, Picasso paid Frédéric (Frédé) Gérard, the bartender, for his and his friends’ food and drinks with a painting, “At the Lapin Agile”, seen here. It was nailed to the wall until 1911, hopefully by the frame.

Frédé is the guitarist, Picasso the harlequin and the woman is Germaine Pichot, who had spurned Pablo’s friend Carlos Casagemas, prompting him to commit suicide and Pablo to memorialise him in several paintings. Germaine went on to marry another of Picasso’s pals.

Another time a group of imbibing Lapin customers tied a paintbrush to a donkey’s tail and had him whip up some broad-stroke masterpieces. Buyers were fooled and so were some critics, who found the results “interesting”.

The bar – this is Maurice Utrillo’s version – had earlier been named le Cabaret des Assassins because of a painting on display here showing a serial killer, though the more fetching legend has it that it a band of assassins once broke in and killed the owner’s son.

These days if you Google “Lapin Agile”, the buzz is all about comedian Steve Martin’s 1993 stage play, of which director Fred Schepisi is making a movie due for release in 2008. (Whoops! See comments below.) Ryan Phillippe is slated to play Picasso and Kevin Kline “Freddy”, and they’re joined by Jason Biggs as Elvis Presley and Elijah Wood as Einstein. When Steve Martin had a first reading of his play at his Beverly Hills home, Tom Hanks took Picasso’s part and Chris Sarandon Einstein’s.

Set at the Lapin Agile in 1904, the story has Picasso and Einstein encountering one another on the eve of their greatest breakthroughs – the former with “Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon” and the latter with his theory of relativity. I have no idea what Elvis is doing there, but somehow can’t wait to find out.

Maurice Utrillo (1883-1955), a Montmartre native, is buried here in St Vincent Cemetery. You can see the roof of the Lapin Agile from the spot he finally came to rest. He was one of the truly wild men of the art scene, nurtured as such by a grandmother who soothed him as a baby with wine.

His mother, Suzanne Valadon, was a painter who survived by modelling for other artists, including Degas, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and she slept with many of them, too, to the extent that she wasn’t sure which one was Maurice’s father. One, Miguel Utrillo, told her to go ahead and give the boy his name. “I’d be glad to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!” he supposedly said.

In the 1920s Maurice’s mother, having seen him drift in and out of numerous detox centres, finally got him out of the city, baptised and married. He didn’t come back until 1955, when he played himself onstage in “Si Paris m’était Conté” by the theatre and film actor and director Sacha Guitry (1885-1957), who’s also buried here.

Utrillo was well on his way to being a psychotic when he lived at 11 Hameau des Artistes after World War I, gloomy that all his Montmartre buddies were migrating to Montparnasse. He wasn’t trendy anymore.

Maurice had taken up painting at his mother’s urging to try and ward off the mental illness that seized him in youth. He came up with odd landscapes that people were keen to buy, prompting other artists to rethink their own approaches. Utrillo ended up receiving the Cross of the Legion of Honour, not bad for a guy who used to expose himself to ladies in the street. Seen here is his painting of Place Pigalle.

And here in Montmartre Cemetery, not far from St Vincent (many dead people to accommodate in the neighbourhood) lies Edgar Degas, who was proud of his family and his aristocratic origins but found the “de Gas” spelling of his surname pretentious.

In the same boneyard is the celebrated Kiki. Born Alice Ernestine Prin in 1901, Kiki de Montparnasse had been modelling nude for artists since she was 14, among them Chaim Soutine, Tsuguharu Foujita, Francis Picabia, Jean Cocteau and Alexander Calder.

Man Ray, her companion for most of the 1920s, made hundreds of portaits of her, including “Le Violon d’Ingres”, seen here, and “Noire et Blanche” below.

A nightclub owner, raunchy performer and expressionist painter as well, Kiki also acted in nine films, such as Fernand Leger’s “Ballet Mecanique”. She even did a screen test for Paramount Studios in New York. At age 28 she was declared “Queen of Montparnasse”.

Hemingway and Foujita were among those who provided profiles of Kiki for her memoirs, published in 1929. They came out the following year in the US but were promptly banned by the government and stayed so until 1996 (though the book circulated in the 1950s under the title “The Education of a French Model”).

She died on April 29, 1953, her Paris funeral and procession to the cemetery drawing a huge crowd. Foujita said the glory days of Montparnasse were buried with her.

The last home that Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) had in Montmartre, from 1890 to ‘97, was here at 6 l’Allée des Brouillards. This is where Jean Renoir, the future filmmaker, was born.

Renoir Senior, most famously of allwho tried, captured the spirit of the Sunday afternoon dances at the Moulin de la Galette, the courtyard dappled in sunlight among the acacia trees. He’s depicted a tumult of his friends and acquaintances, as seen here in a detail from “La Moulin de Galette”.

Van Gogh’s view of the neighbourhood, from the top of the Rue Tholozé, was shared by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne and Camille Corot, but it was the goings-on inside that supplied the chief inspiration.

This is Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s “At the Moulin de la Galette”.

And here, Pablo Picasso’s “The Moulin Galette”.

Too much fun. A break now, before Part 2.

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