Dali House

One hundred years ago Amedeo Modigliani painted “Beggar Woman”. He’d only been in Paris a short time and had done his share of scrounging too.

Seen up close, the oil looks as though it’s gone begging as well, which won’t sit will with collectors, who have of late been willing to part with a routine $6 million for a Modigliani (in good condition) and as much as $30 million if it’s really got something to say for itself.

Don’t expect “Beggar Woman” to climb that social ladder, but surely she’s got something to say behind the scars of a century’s neglect.

Modigliani turned 25 in 1909, but he was still a poke-about adolescent in Paris, fresh off the train just three years before. He still hadn’t found his way out of the sticky goo of bohemian chaos, swapping Toulouse-Lautrec for Cezanne and then being talked into Africanesque chisel-work.

The son of a money-changer who’d lost all his money, sickly since childhood, fond of hashish, in 1906 Modigliani nevertheless had gusto to go, and rolled up in Montmartre spewing lines from Nietzsche, Dante and Lautreamont’s “Les Chants de Maldoror”, and wondering why the great Picasso dressed like a junkman.

He squatted in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a real dump, but got a nice studio in Rue Caulaincourt and tried to maintain a semblance of Venetian poshness. Fine clothes. Clean fingernails. Then he went nuts.

By 1909 the studio was a shambles, and Modigliani had shredded his old paintings and couldn’t be trusted with the new ones. He’d get drunk at parties and then get naked, afloat on absinthe and hash. Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Apollinaire and Cocteau tried not to look.

Ah, but that’s what made him a genius, said the art critic Andre Salmon, not the first and certainly not the last to sanction stimulants as the stepping stones to creative transcendence. Had Salmon met Rimbaud, do you suppose? See the rest.

Reading about Chaim Soutine going to a slaughterhouse and dragging a side of beef back to his studio at La Ruche in Paris so he could spent several odorific days painting its pageant of festering colours made me hungry for more, so I called up Rembrandt to order a whole “Slaughtered Ox” and he recommended a few other butchers with brushes.

If you missed the reasoning behind Russian expressionist Soutine’s blood-soaked creativity, so did I, but the basic story is here. Pictured is the result, “Carcass of Beef”, which fetched a fatty £7.8 million at auction earlier this year.

Since then meat’s been mostly a matter of angry art. Gabriela Rivera, at the top of this post and the top of her form, chilled a gallery in Chile a few years ago with her “Silence of the Lambs” impressions.

“My work is a metaphor for the relationship that people have with themselves every day when they look in the mirror,” she said from a cloud of appreciative flies, which couldn’t help also noticing her videos of women urinating in the street and smashing boiled eggs with their hands. See the rest.

The Auberge de la Bonne Franquette at the corner of Rue des Saules and Rue Saint Rustique was called Aux Billards en Bois in the 1890s, when Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Monet and Zola were among the clientele. The owners still take pride in the fact that Van Gogh painted its garden in “La Guinguette” in 1886.

At the Montmartre Museum at 12 Rue Cortot there are art exhibits, musical performances and many valuable documents, but no visitor can ignore the fact that this 17th-house was the home at different times of Renoir, Raoul Dufy, Erik Satie and Emile Bernard, and then a café that provided lodgings for Maurice Utrillo and his mum.

The main house is the “maison de Rosimond”, so named for its one-time owner, Rose de Rosimond, a stage actress in Molière’s troupe who died onstage in mid-scene, just as Molière had done. Not much to look at out front, but it has a lovely garden in the back.

The Brasserie des Martyrs, once situated at 75 Rue des Martyrs, was the place to be seen in the days of Courbet, Baudelaire, Proudhon and Gauthier, and remained so for the generations that followed.

The great Renoir – whose “Seated Female Nude”, also known as “After the Bath”, is seen here – was among those who had their own designated tables in the huge, three-storey restaurant. Monet and Pissarro would hover around his, trying to muster the courage to speak to him. See the rest.

“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. See the rest.

Where everybody knows your name: Fernand Leger comes to grips with Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso while Henri Matisse and Georges Braque wisely look for hiding places.

Ah, the Musee du Montparnasse – genteel, meditative, scholarly. Actually, this quiet little pile of bricks in south central Paris is where the post-impressionists posted some very, very bad impressions with nightly piss-ups early in the last century. That was long before it became a museum, of course.

The gendarmes were summoned more than once to 21 Avenue du Maine, seen here in a Google Earth view, most memorably one night in January 1917 when they had a party there for Georges Braque, who’d just been drummed out of the military on account of having a hole in him. See the rest.