Number 12 – The American Friends Musée Montmartre

Rue Cortot, Paris

Musée de Montmartre

THROUGH THE MUSEUM’S LENS

American Friends of Musée de Montmartre

F ROM THE

President

I am absolutely thrilled to present you with the first edition of Number 12 - a collaborative publication between the American Friends and the Musée de Montmartre. We wanted to create something that allows those who do not live in France or speak French to experience the Musée and the magical world it unlocks. As our editor, Sophie Evans, describes in her piece, Montmartre is a layered city. The ebullient, artistic world of the turn of the century is still there, hidden beneath the Montmartre of present day, but we need the Musée to access it.

The name Number 12 is a reference to the Musée’s address on the Rue Cortot. We chose it because it encapsulates the neighborhood’s layered nature, housing the studios of Renoir, Utrillo, and Valadon long before it became the Musée. It is my hope that this publication can be a guide for our friends – a guide to the Musée, its exhibitions, its gardens ... a guide to Montmartre as it existed over a century ago. Turn the page to hear fin de siècle expert, Phillip Dennis Cate, address the birthplace of modern art and Sophie Evans describe the storied nature of Montmartre. Learn about the “destroyer of paintings,” Charles Camoin, and take in the gorgeous works of Number 12’s own Utrillo, scattered throughout the pages.

Future editions will also include exclusive invitations to Museum events, and contact details and membership information can be found on the back cover.

We’re so excited to share this first copy of Number 12 with you, and I welcome any and all of your thoughts about what’s to come.

Jacqui

MI C HEL

AFMM PRESIDENT

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Balda, Le Cabaret du Chat Noir, around 1880, Musée de Montmartre, Le Vieux Montmartre collection.

The interior and exterior of the second Chat Noir cabaret on Rue Victor Massé.

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the early 1880s as the focal point of avantgarde artistic and literary life in Paris.

In the 1880s, Rodolphe Salis promoted the Chat Noir cabaret with its important, proto-cinema shadow theater as “the most FROM OUR VISITING extraordinary cabaret in the world” and Montmartre as “the center of the world.”

Montmartre became the birthplace He was not completely exaggerating. With of modern and contemporary art and their avant-garde themes of cafes, bars, the artistic center of avant-garde circus, dance halls, prostitutes, and everyday art, literature, and theater during the life depicted in seemingly spontaneous second half of the 19th century and the strokes of pure pigments of oil, watercolor, first decade of the 20th century. or pastel, Montmartre Impressionists such These artists gathered in Montmartre as Manet, Degas, and Renoir exerted their cafés, exchanging ideas and engaging in influence on a new generation of Montmartre discourse. The precedent of avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians who were artists both meeting in and depicting drawn to and/or generated the activities Montmartre cafés was established by the of the Chat Noir in a bid to be “modern.”

Impressionists in the 1870’s. The Café When we evaluate turn-of-the-century art Guerbois, the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes, in France, the artists who stand out as major and the Café Rat Mort were regular gathering contributors to Western art – Mary Cassatt, PHILLIP DENNIS CATE places for Degas, Renoir, Manet, and Monet.

Georges Seurat, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri de Manet’s apartment and studio were just Toulouse-Lautrec, Suzanne Valadon, the Nabis, south of the Place Clichy, and, between Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Amedeo 1875 and 1876, Renoir rented studio space Modigliani – all evolved out of the Montmartre in what is now the Musée de Montmartre cultural matrix. In fact, when Picasso, at 12-14 rue Cortot. It was there that Renoir Duchamp, F. Kupka, Juan Gris, Kees Van painted Bal du Moulin de la Galette, La Dongen, and other future 20th century avantBalançoire (Paris, Musée d’Orsay), and garde artists first came to Montmartre around Le Jardin de la rue Cortot (Pittsburgh, 1900, they already had knowledge of and were Carnegie Institute Museum of Art). influenced by the styles and subject matter of the previous generation of Montmartre The Chat Noir cabaret and its habitués were artists such as T.A. Steinlen and the principal forces behind the emergence of Toulouse-Lautrec. Monochromatic art and conceptual art, which are dominant Montmartre in the early 1880s as the focal point elements of 20th and 21st century art, of avant-garde artistic and literary life in Paris. derive directly from the art produced The center of Montmartre café life was by the incredible group of Montmartre artists the Chat Noir cabaret, which was founded and writers at the end of the 19th century at the end of 1881 by the failed artist, called the “Incoherents.” For at least a quarter Rodolphe Salis. He proclaimed it a “cabaret of a century, Montmartre was the center of artistique” and invited young artists, writers, the world for Western art and culture, and its composers, and musicians to use it as their contributions reverberate strongly even today. base of activity. The Chat Noir cabaret and its habitués (especially the proto-Dada/ Surrealist group of artists and writers called the “Incohérents”) were the principal forces behind the emergence of Montmartre in

Scholar

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THE AMERICAN FRIENDS OF MUSÉE DE MONTMARTRE WERE HONORED TO PARTICIPATE IN A PRIVATE VIRTUAL SALON WITH FIN DE SIÈCLE EXPERT, PHILLIP DENNIS CATE

e Siècle: d in F e h t re at Montmart th of Modern Art The Bir C AT E D EN N I S

P Y PHILLI B D E T S HO

2022 AY 11 , M , Y A SD WEDNE ST 12 P M E

Attendees learned about the hidden world of Montmartre’s artists: the cafés and cabarets they frequented, the story behind the Chat Noir, and how their world became the turn of the century center of Western art and culture.

Phillip Dennis Cate is a widely published specialist of 19th century French art whose expertise covers Montmartre, sculpture, and Japonism. He has organized programs for international institutions such as The Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; The Russian National Library, St. Petersburg; The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; The National Museum of Japanese Art, Tokyo; and The Imperial Household, Tokyo. Previously the Director of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey and a Curator of Special Exhibitions and Consultant for the Collection and Renovation of the Musée de Montmartre in Paris. Cate now works as an independent curator and critic.

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T heMStOoriedN TNatMure Aof R T R E Utrillo, Rue Cortot à Montmartre.

Sophie Evans explores the past and present dualities of the Montmartre cityscape.

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“For the ground floor belongs to the fashionable; the poets, musicians, and painters prefer the third floor, where the piano moans, the violins sing, sonnets burst forth in resonant fireworks…

The second floor, between heaven and earth, between the bourgeois customers on the ground floor and the empyrean artists on the third, is where the journal Le Chat noir is edited.” So wrote Émile Goudeau in 1886, five years after Rodolphe Salis invited him and his group, The Hydropathes, to be the first artists and writers in residence at his new cabaret. The layered coexistence Goudeau describes applies equally well to the entire Montmartre neighborhood.

We can project the three stories of Le Chat Noir onto the natural landscape of Paris, where climbing the hill, “la Butte,” equates to mounting the cabaret’s stairs.

With each step, Belle Époque artists left behind the

bourgeois of Paris’ ground floor in exchange for the studios, cafés, theaters, restaurants, and cabarets that made up the Montmartre heavens.

On la Butte of today, those stories have been inverted.

The world of the artists exists beneath a top layer dominated by tourists and residents – our era’s version of “the fashionable.” Maps of present day Montmartre attempt to present this storied nature, meticulously marking memorial alongside the quotidian. There is the atelier of Fernand Cormon at 10 Rue Constance, where Toulouse-Lautrec studied painting in 1882; the attic room at 6 Rue Cortot, where Erik Satie composed Les Gymnopédies in 1882; the Lapin Agile cabaret at

With each step, Belle Époque artists left behind the bourgeois of Paris’ ground floor in exchange for the studios, cafés, theaters, restaurants, and cabarets that made up the Montmartre heavens.

On the Left and Right, we find Number 12 Rue Cortot, as captured

by Utrillo in a lithographic poster and as it exists today, the Musée.

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ESTA BL ISHMEN TS H AV E DUA L I DEN T I T I ES: W H AT T HE Y ONCE W ER E A N D W H AT T HE Y A R E NOW. 22 Rue des Saules, bought by Aristide Bruant in 1903; and, of course, the Musée de Montmartre at 12 Rue Cortot, where Auguste Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, and Raoul Dufy all had studios.

Street signs bearing names of past and present allow visitors and Montmartrians alike to navigate the neighborhood in the layer of their choosing. Establishments have dual identities: what they once were and what they are now. 22 Rue des Saules, for instance, was previously À Ma Campagne, and it is there that Lautrec drank copious amounts of absinthe. 18 Rue des Saules was Aux Billards En Bois before it became La Bonne Franquette of

today. It is there that Renoir painted La Balançoire and also where Lautrec met up with Van Gogh (and drank copious amounts of absinthe). In other cases, names stay the same, but the nature of the place changes. There is a Chat Noir on the Boulevard de Rochechouart, but it is more tourist-trap than true cabaret.

We might, therefore, think of the maps and of Montmartre itself as a type of palimpsest. Instead of a manuscript featuring layers of primary sources, we have a neighborhood exhibiting layers of establishments over time. In either case, the layers have been bound by a common location that allows them

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to relate to one another. Looking at Montmartre as a palimpsest allows us to explore a place whose past continues into the present. Number 12 is itself a microcosm of this phenomenon, at once a former studio and a museum, whose material extends far beyond the lives of its former inhabitants. We might also think of the Musée as the modern equivalent of Goudeau’s second floor: a space somewhere between heaven and earth that presents the artists’ world to the outsider. While Montmartre’s maps and signs aid in navigating this world, it is only through the Musée that we can first gain entry.

On the Left and Right, we see the Rue Cortot as it is today and as Maurice Utrillo painted it over 100 years ago. Below, we find the Sacré-Coeur, as captured by Utrillo in 1944 and by a tourist in 2021.

Present day images courtesy of The Modern Postcard.

Utrillo, Rue Cortot, Montmartre, 1909.

Utrillo, Rue Saint-Rustique sous la Neige, 1944.

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INSIDE THE

Musée

Valadon, Nu Assis sur un Canapé, 1916.

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Valadon, Portrait de Maurice Utrillo, 1921.

EN T ER T HE WOR L D OF A RT IST SUZ A N N E VA L A DON. Clockwise from Top: Valadon’s restored studio; her portrait of Maurice Utrillo, whose work appears throughout this edition of Number 12; Valadon’s apartment; and the artist herself.

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Jardins

IN THE

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Renoir, Le Jardin de la rue Cortot à Montmartre, 1876.

The Musée hosts members of the American Friends and guests in the Jardins to celebrate the opening of the Weisman & Michel collection, 2019.

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Artist

SPOTLIGHT

CH A RLES C A MO I N

Camoin, Deux Pins dans les Calanques de Piana, Corse, 1910.

- "un fauve en liberté"

The Musée de Montmartre’s new Charles Camoin exhibit appeared prominently in the culture section of April 4’s edition of Le Figaro. Running from March 11 through September 11, the exhibit presents the paintings and drawings of the self-proclaimed wild beast, “un fauve en liberté.” Camoin’s career began at the École des Beaux-Arts in Marseille before he moved to the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, joining the studio of Gustave Moreau, where he met Matisse, Marquet, and Manguin. These artists would form the core of the Fauvist movement, which favored strong color and bold strokes over the impressionist style.

Camoin would remain fiercely independent, spurning the emerging Cubism, until, in 1914, an artistic crisis prompted him to destroy his studio, tearing apart and disposing of around 80 pieces. Those pieces were mysteriously reconstructed and, later, appeared in the sale of Francis Carco’s collection. Camoin’s subsequent legal proceedings in many ways prefigured our modern understanding of intellectual property. Reinvigorated, Camoin returned to his bright palette, and critic Guillaume Apollinaire deemed his subsequent works to be among his most interesting.

The Musée currently houses about 100 of Camoin’s paintings and drawings, whose vibrant style is matched only by the artist’s “wild” life.

Camoin, Autoportrait, 1910.

Camoin, Lola sur la Terrace, 1920.

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ALLOW THE MUSÉE TO INTRODUCE YOU TO CHARLES CAMOIN (1879-1965): ICONIC MONTMARTRE ARTIST, FRIEND OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS, DESTROYER OF PAINTINGS, AND SELF-PROCLAIMED “WILD BEAST.”

Camoin, La Mère de l’Artiste sur le Divan, around 1897-1898.

The work of Charles Camoin returns to Number 12 this year, 114 years after he first rented a studio here in 1908. The exhibit will run until September 11th, 2022.

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A DV I SORY B OA R D Jacqui Michel– President Patricia Nebenzahl – Vice President Phillip Dennis Cate Timothy Hanford Dennis and Adrienne Hensley

Friend

BECOME A

The Musée is the lens through which we gain access to the true Montmartre. Join the American Friends as we explore the world of artists, alcholics, writers, satirists, prostitutes, and patrons as it existed at the turn of the century. Take your first step towards Number 12 today.

M USE U M STA F F Geneviève Rossillon - President of Musée de Montmartre Fanny de Lépinau – Executive Director of Musée de Montmartre Noémie de Laporte – Sponsorship Associate Clément Landeau – Sponsorship Associate E DI T OR I A L Sophie Evans - Editor in Chief Tim Kling - Art Director F OU N DI NG M E M E BE R S

Lisa Adkins and Tom Murphy - Dr. Susan Ascher Betty and Jimmy Baird - Phillip Dennis Cate​- Jim and Mary Clark - Barbara Crocker - Sandy and Cliff Deitch - Daniel Edelman - Victor Figueredo - Michael Joy and Deborah Fischer - Constance Franklin - Spike Fuson - Timothy Hanford - Michele Hartlove - Adrienne and Dennis Hensley - Tracy La Violette - Emmanuelle Le Bigre - Frances Luessenhop Usher - Maureen Macfadden - Cinnamin Malone - Tamsin May - Merck Foundation Matching Grant - Andrea MontoneRinaldi - Patricia Nebenzahl - David Papazian - Krissy Pittman - Debra Principi - Mary Ellen Rotondo - Jill and Fred Schwartz - Janet Shatz - Sidney Stolz - Sara Stone Psihas - Nena Thayer - Allyson Waldrep - Gail and Dale Walsh - Jacqui Michel and David Weisman - Jonathan Weisman - Vicki and Robert Weisman Michelle Welty - Patricia White - Ellen Wilson - Julie Wilson - Gary Zuercher

AMERICAN FRIENDS OF MUSÉE de MONTMARTRE fondation@museedemontmartre.fr MUSÉE DE MONTMARTRE infos@museedemontmartre.fr Museedemontmartre.fr 1 6 A M ER C I A N F R I EN D S O F M U S ÉE D E M O N T M A R T R E