Manchester DJ, writer and all-round good bloke Dave Haslam continues his Art Decades series of attractively packaged slim volumes, taking psycho-geographical snapshots of various artists and movements in formative periods. Previous subjects have ranged from Courtney Love’s Liverpool odyssey in the early 80s to selling his own enormous record collection, while this seventh of a planned series of eight chronicles Picasso’s love affair with Paris.
Haslam mainly concentrates on life at the sharp end of La Belle Epoque as Picasso found it in Montmartre – now an intense tourist district, then an outlier arrondissement previously populated by artists, writers and musicians such as Manet, Jarry, Satie and Toulouse-Lautrec. At the turn of the 20th century, this was a cheap, dissolute, radical and exciting quarter where Picasso could pay his bar tab with paintings in venues such as the Lapin Agile and Le Chat Noir (and other places not named after animals).
Occasionally, Haslam fast-forwards through a venue’s history or sidebars into the influence of electric lighting on painterly subjects or Picasso’s miserable treatment of his multiple partners. As with the other books in the series, the detail he shoehorns into what is essentially an extended essay is pretty remarkable.
This is not the book to come to for analysis of Picasso’s art – as per his own parameters, Haslam spends longer describing the works inspired by Parisian nightlife than the creation of his masterwork Guernica. He does pay lipservice to the relative tumbleweed of the war years and the now celebrated Picasso’s move to Montparnasse, where he rubbed shoulders with those Haslam describes as “the aristocracy of the avant-garde”.
However, the Montmartre milieu is the thing. Haslam’s interest in this area is personal and he reserves his most poetic writing for the final page when he evokes his own experiences of living in the historic ’hood for a short time in 2019.
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