Word: lavoir
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...filthiest studio I have ever seen," said a 1908 visitor to the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre, where Picasso worked and lived with his mistress-model Fernande Olivier. Indeed, Picasso's ramshackle tenement had no gas or electricity and only one water tap and a rudimentary toilet. But the studio was an often riotous gathering place for "la bande a Picasso," a self-dubbed group of poets--including Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob--attracted to the Spanish artist's creative orbit. Picasso showed these friends his paintings. One--a large work that absorbed him for six months--elicited only embarrassed silence...
Living in the hatchery of cubism, the expatriates' studio in Paris' Rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir, Gris was not in at the beginning. He started as a cartoonist and illustrator, and did not even start to paint until 1910. His first cubist pictures belong to 1912, five years (a long time in the avantgarde) after Picasso painted his seminal and outrageous Demoiselles d'Avignon, the five women bathers with bodies of planes and angles. Gris' importance to modern art rests on about ten years of productivity. His work weakened into phlegmatic...
...left behind a residue, however: his virtuosity. Around 1918 he found his first public, a small enough group compared with the worldwide fame he would be juggling by 1939, but much larger and more influential than the poets and painters around the studios of the Bateau-Lavoir. It was a public of admiring consumers, the cultivated gratin of Europe, people who needed a modern Rubens. Moreover, there had been a general recoil from extreme avant-garde art, on principle, after 1918. What seemed necessary was reconstruction, not more iconoclasm, or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, a rappel...
...Gonzálèz, and he was the 13th child of a polyphiloprogenitive Madrid businessman. After a brief apprenticeship as a comic illustrator in Spain, Gris got to Paris in 1906 and installed himself as Picasso's neighbor in the now legendary Bâteau-Lavoir, a ramshackle cluster of studios in Montmartre. He painted nothing of importance until 1910, and uremia killed him in 1927 just after his 40th birthday...
Financially this moment was the nadir of Picasso's life. He was living in the Bateau Lavoir, a studio building in Rue Ravignan. "No one," Kahnweiler recalls, "could ever imagine the poverty, the deplorable misery of those studios. The wallpaper hung in tatters from the unplastered walls. There was dust on the drawings and rolled-up canvases on the caved-in couch. Beside the stove was a kind of mountain of piled-up lava, which was ashes. It was unspeakable...