Postcard from Paris: a night at Picasso’s favourite hotel

The myth of the genius artist starving in a garret exerts a timeless potency, not least because it contains a large dollop of truth. Take Pablo Picasso. In 1900, on the eve of his 19th birthday, he journeyed from a comfortable home in Barcelona to Paris and instantly fell in love with the city and with a low-cost way of living in it that combined passionate friendships with sexual and artistic freedoms. Money — let alone heating or water supplies — appeared very much a secondary concern.

During the next decade or so, surrounded by a group of like-minded friends and operating mostly from a dilapidated Montmartre studio that would sway in the wind (and so was nicknamed le Bateau-Lavoir after the washboats on the Seine), Picasso changed the world. Out of physical and moral squalor he conjured his blue and rose periods and oversaw the birth of cubism. Any apparent financial failure only added to the allure.

But critical acclaim belatedly did come his way, followed by a trickle of money, and then by a flood. By 1918 Picasso was still in Paris, now celebrating his marriage to the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova at the grandest of grand hotels, Le Meurice on the Rue de Rivoli, with Jean Cocteau and Serge Diaghilev as his groomsmen.

Such was Picasso’s reputation that when a flying champagne cork damaged a lavish oil painting of Madame de Pompadour in one of the hotel’s opulent reception rooms, the management was savvy enough to know that it was better to retain the mark made by Picasso’s champagne than to repair the painting.

The damaged portrait remains in situ to this day. As do the magnificent reception rooms, drenched in gilt and mirrors à la Versailles, these days punctuated with contemporary art. The appropriately luxurious guest bedrooms still overlook not only the Tuileries Garden, but in a single sweep can also take in, with the tiniest of neck-craning, the Louvre, Notre-Dame, Musée d’Orsay, les Invalides, Grand Palais, Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe.

Unsurprisingly, Le Meurice’s historic guest list is jammed with royalty — Hollywood and actual — but the hotel has always particularly prided itself on its artistic and literary clientele. Dalí was a regular, taking a suite for a month each year, which he adorned with characteristically self-promoting props such as a flock of sheep, a Harley-Davidson chopper or Andy Warhol. Further back Balzac, Thackeray, Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were linked to the hotel. More recently, Bob Dylan and Beyoncé have stayed.

Le Meurice has never been shy about its Picasso connection, but only recently, as Paris appears to be decisively moving out of Covid restrictions, has it introduced a Picasso-themed package, with a night’s stay and a private tour of Picasso’s Montmartre with art historian and writer Marta-Volga de Minteguiaga-Guezala (like the artist, a Spaniard living in Paris). She manages to pull off the remarkable trick of finding some, comparatively, off-the-beaten tracks through a now well-heeled Montmartre that had begun to attract tourists even in Picasso’s day.

My tour with her included a visit to the unprepossessing site of a long-gone cabaret frequented by the artist — the unimprovably named Zut — a scene brought to life as Marta revealed the rags part of Picasso’s story. The original Bateau-Lavoir burnt down in 1970 but the rebuilt version can be seen, as can Picasso’s first Paris studio, on Rue Gabrielle (where he refined the signature on his work from various iterations of Pablo and his paternal surname Ruiz to the more emphatic and brand-friendly Picasso) and which attracts remarkably little tourist footfall.

Zut’s owner, Frédé Gérard, was also proprietor of another Picasso hang-out, the Lapin Agile, that still operates today. The painting Gérard commissioned in 1905, “Au Lapin Agile”, features Picasso himself in the bar as Harlequin alongside the lover of a close friend who had killed himself (and who, all too predictably, Picasso later had an affair with). Gérard himself is in the background playing a guitar and for years the painting acted as Picasso’s “credit card behind the bar” for his wine bill, explained Marta. When it was last sold, in 1989, it fetched $40.7mn.

The hotel’s Picasso package coincides with an important new dual exhibition at Paris’s Musée Picasso, home to the mother lode of his art, that also reflects on the role money ultimately played in his career, and beyond. One half is dedicated to work connected to his daughter with his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, Maya Ruiz-Picasso. It features a series of portraits of Maya made by her father when she was a young child in the late 1930s, as well as rudimentary toys made from studio odds and ends. The other section features work recently donated by Maya to the French state in lieu of tax including a portrait of Picasso’s father, made when the artist was just 14, and a Polynesian tiki sculpture, part of the collection of African and Oceanic art that he began back in his Montmartre days and that had such an influence on his work.

Picasso’s financial affairs are endlessly complex — he died without leaving a will — and just a few months ago there was a public intra-family row about whether his work could be presented in the form of the currently voguish NFTs. But for all that, he lived the bulk of his long life tempering an appreciation of the finer things (expensive cars were a weakness) with more simple pleasures and an overriding commitment to his work. As he recalled 50 years after he and his comrades had left the material poverty of their time in Montmartre: “We had no other preoccupation but what we were doing . . . and saw nobody but each other . . . Think of it, what an aristocracy!”.

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