This quiet little square — Place Emile-Goudeau — is where modern art was born. In a building that had one water tap and no toilet.
The Bateau-Lavoir was a ramshackle wooden structure — a former piano factory, leaning into the hillside. The poet Max Jacob gave it the name. He said it reminded him of the flat-bottomed laundry boats on the Seine, because the whole building creaked in the wind, laundry hung from every window, and everyone shared a single tap on the ground floor. Like going to the river.
Here's the disorienting part — because the building was built into the slope, you entered from the street at the TOP floor. The studios went DOWN. So you'd walk in off the square feeling like you were on solid ground, and then descend into a warren of cold, dark, paint-soaked rooms.
Picasso moved in at twenty-three, in nineteen oh-four. His studio was filthy, chaotic, freezing in winter, suffocating in summer. His girlfriend Fernande Olivier described it in her memoir — canvases piled ev
erywhere, a pet mouse he kept in a drawer, a rusty stove, a yellow bowl for washing. And a smell of paint and dog. He had a dog named Frika. She had a mouse in a drawer.
Picasso worked by candlelight, mostly at night. And in nineteen oh-seven, in this building, on a canvas eight feet by seven — which basically filled the entire studio — he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Five fractured figures
