An invitation-only concert by jazz violinist Didier Lockwood in the studio where Pablo Picasso painted Guernica….? Yes, I guess it had to count as a red-letter evening. Only it didn’t feel like that as we reached the fourth-floor landing on the spiral staircase and paused to catch our breath.
Two more flights remained before we attained the space under the roof of the 17th-century Hôtel de Savoie on rue des Grands Augustins where Pablo Picasso made his home from 1936 until 1955, and in which he painted the 11.5 feet by 25.5 feet canvas of a Basque village obliterated by the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion and the Mussolini’s Aviazione Legionaria.
Our complaints about the stairs must have echoed those of the friends, including director Luis Bunuel, whom Picasso cajoled into helping him move the rolled painting down to street level and across town to the new art deco Palais de Chaillot, where it became the most controversial exhibit of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne
But the climb was worth it. Once the spots faded from before our eyes, we had time to appreciate the space Honoré de Balzac, another former tenant, described as "so large that the skylight fails to illuminate the corners" and which, Picasso told photographer Brassaï, made him feel "he was inside a ship with its bridge, its stores, its hold."
Up here, it was easier to sit out the Nazi occupation of Paris. Protected by Spain’s neutrality and his own reputation, he was alternately harassed and wooed by the Germans. His sympathies were never in doubt. Offered extra coal to heat his studio, he snorted "A Spaniard is never cold!", and when a Gestapo officer saw a postcard of Guernica and asked “Did you do this?”, retorted “No, you did.”
If history can be said to drench a space, this surely qualified. Here was the tricolor Ernest Hemingway gave him the day Paris was liberated in August 1944. And he always insisted that an ancient hook screwed into a beam was the very one from which, in 1610, Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV, had been suspended to be comprehensively tortured to death. (Anxious to get in on the publicity, the restaurant opposite proudly advertises that it was here, while Henry’s nine-year-old heir, the future Louis XIII, was eating lunch, that he learned to his father’s demise.)
Since 1926, when the building was declared a national monument, nobody had been quite clear on who owned the ancient pile. The Chambre des Huissiers de Justice - aka the bailiffs – managed it on behalf of its creditors. With no takers for the attic, vast, draughty and unheated, Picasso was welcome to it. After he left, a private cultural organisation, the Comité National Pour l'Education Artistique, moved in, renovating it as a venue for exhibitions. In 2010, their agreement with the managers expired, but, backed by a blue-ribbon group of supporters, including former culture minister Jack Lang, Charlotte Rampling, Bernard-Henri Levy and Didier Lockwood, the committee refused to leave. And so here we were, adding our voice to the calls for the attic studio to become a shrine
On present indications, it didn’t do much good. After squatting there for two further years, the forces of art and culture lost out to the dubious claim that what Paris needed was another overpriced hotel. The new owners promise that the studio will be “available for cultural events” but it isn’t hard to see Pablo’s old home refurbished as a companion to the ersatz Hemingway Bar at the Ritz : the penthouse Picasso Room, Paris’s trendiest cocktail bar, with a pianist at a black Steinway playing Porter and Gershwin, and Guernica as a photo mural.
I walked there last year but didn’t realize that it is being used. Thanks for this post. It piques my curiosity. I’m going to research it. Any suggestions?