Le Bateau-Lavoir: The Laundry Boat Where Cubism Was Born

Why is it significant?

Find the green Wallace fountain on this tilted little square, then look at the low, plain façade at number 13, its windows filled with old black-and-white photographs. It looks like almost nothing.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Find the green Wallace fountain on this tilted little square, then look at the low, plain façade at number 13, its windows filled with old black-and-white photographs. It looks like almost nothing. But behind it the building drops down the slope for several storeys... and in one of its cold, cramped studios, the art of the twentieth century was turned inside out.

The poet Max Jacob is usually credited with the nickname Bateau-Lavoir, the laundry boat, because the old wooden building creaked and swayed like the washing barges moored on the Seine. It was freezing in winter and stifling in summer, and the story goes that the whole house shared a single water tap. Pablo Picasso moved in in 1904, twenty-two years old and broke, and stayed until 1909. Here the Blue Period gave way to the Rose Period, and here he met Fernande Olivier, who became his companion and his model.

In 1907, in this building, Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon: five naked women with faces like masks, broken into sharp, angular planes, staring straight out at the viewer. His friends were baffled. Matisse is said to have taken it as a mockery, and Braque reportedly compared looking at it to drinking petrol. The canvas stayed in the studio, barely seen, for years. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it is often called the starting point of Cubism.

The house was full of other talents too. The painters Juan Gris and Kees van Dongen had studios here, and the poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire were always around. In 1908 Picasso threw a famous banquet here for Henri Rousseau, the self-taught former customs clerk whom most critics laughed at. It was half homage and half prank, and nobody has ever agreed which half mattered more. Rousseau, the story goes, sat on a throne of chairs and played his violin, while wax from a lantern dripped onto his head and he never noticed.

The original building burned down in May 1970, just as it was about to be restored. What you see is a reconstruction from 1978, and behind the façade there are still studios for working artists. From here, follow the little streets east along the side of the hill, until a cluster of white domes rises above the rooftops.