ARCADE DIARY ARCHIVE:
In early September I made my first pilgrimage to the place where Picasso and his friends, Apollinaire and Stein, Giroult and Fernande and Marie would often meet.
Just around the corner from this cobblestone hillside staircase landing, where the city quickly slopes in steep inclines to maximize the street views down to the Eiffel Tower below, is the first studio of Picasso. It is at this studio era in that first decade of the 1900’s the band of artists came to meet.
Pablo had a friend named Braque, who like Pablo with his isolated square houses from the Spanish countryside, had devised a geometric style of drawing landscape, helped launch the cubist movement. Looking down at the same city, I can understand why Pablo felt Paris was too ephemeral on its own to focus under the shifting skies.
Between Picasso and Braque, and their band of painter friends, a new addition to the post-impressionistic age would begin to resonate from the beacons of Paris.
Paris. In the twentieth century a movement churned through the European art world. The camera was changing everything overnight. No Longer were the artists bound to their devices tracing the outside world through a whole in the wall. Nor were they bound to the mimetic diegetic that had tasked them with bringing the mythological horizon into every picture frame that hung inside on their wall.
Suddenly through photography and the extension of theatre and manufacturing and female suffrage, woman were back in the forefront of their own industries again.
FrenchWomen, as both survivors of the Industrial Revolution, and the sacrificial lamb of the courtly ones prior, saw to it that decorative arts had retrofitted Paris into a people’s playground, a paradise on earth, and cemented itself as the illustrious gateway to the the underworld.
In this afterlife, art nouveau furnishings eradicated the mundane long prior to bombs over Paris ever dropping. As the world was overthrown into the napoleonic hellhole once imagined to be a course to greatness once more, the twentieth century exhaled a final sigh of release, as the matador overcame the staggering bull, and laid the wild animal down to die.
Then came to a natural end of the long line of histories final greatest artists to have lived, up until the dawning of the age electric, as we somehow have come to know it.
An accordion plays
Picasso’s First Studio
I have heard whispers that one of the Ladies of Avignon was based on Picasso’s roommate Guillaume Apollinaire’s partner Marie Laurencin.
They met Marie through fellow founding cubist painter and classmate Braque, who she danced with into the early hours of Montmartre in another Moulin’s windmill ballroom, around the corner from the Rouge.
Paris Descends
