1.

Málaga

Pablo Picasso’s hometown. Pablo was ten years old when his family moved to A Coruña, and then to Barcelona four years later.

2.

Mougins, Studio-villa

Picasso first spent a summer in Mougins in 1936 with Dora Maar. The hotel where they stayed reverently preserved the paint marks Picasso had left on the door and proudly displayed them as a tourist attraction. In his final years, the painter bought a house here so that he could live and create hidden from the public eye with his second wife, Jacqueline. However, there was no shortage of visitors here either; his friends and admirers often came to see him.

3.

Bar Le Lapin Agile

It was here that Picasso met Fernande Olivier, who was his lover and partner for seven years at the beginning of his Parisian life, and appears in many of his circus-themed and later Cubist paintings (including Les Demoiselles d’Avignon). The bar is still in business today.

4.

Café de l’Hippodrome

In 1901, Carles Casagemas, Picasso’s Spanish painter friend, travelling companion, and roommate, committed suicide here. Casagemas could not bear the rejection of Germaine Pichot, a laundress and model favoured by many; after attempting (and failing) to kill her, he turned the gun on himself. At the time, Germaine was a beloved model and lover of several artists, including Picasso. The artist remained in contact with Germaine until her death in 1948 and financially supported her during the final years of her life, when she was ill and living in modest circumstances.

5.

Studio on La Boétie Street

Picasso moved into the upper-class apartment on La Boétie Street with his first wife, the ballet dancer Olga Kokhlova, and later purchased the apartment above their home to set up his studio there. Brassaï first met Picasso here when the painter invited him over to photograph his sculptures for a catalogue. According to Brassaï’s description, the contrast between the apartment’s immaculate cleanliness and elegant atmosphere and the dust-covered piles of objects in the studio’s creative chaos was striking.

6.

Berthe Weill’s gallery

(25 Rue Victor-Massé, 1917: 50 Rue Taitbout, 1919: 46 Rue Laffitte)

Berthe Weill opened her art gallery in 1901. Weill was the first female gallery owner to make it her mission to support contemporary, pioneering artists; as such, she exhibited and purchased works by Cubist artists and the Fauvists as well. In Paris, Picasso, Matisse, and Czóbel all sold their works to Berthe Weill for the first time.

7.

Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro

(Palais du Trocadéro – Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, 75016)

Picasso completed his most famous Cubist work, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in 1907. That same year, he visited the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro in Paris, where he was captivated by the African and Oceanic sculptures and masks. The resemblance between these sculptures and the facial features of the artist’s Cubist figures is striking; this period is also referred to as his “black people” or “African” period. Picasso was categorical that he saw the exhibition only after he had completed Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and that the similarity came as a shock even to him. The Spanish master enjoyed teasing those who questioned him, so the truth remains hidden. It is certain, however, that by this time he had already drawn inspiration from the Iberian primitive sculptures, and thereafter, when he could, he also purchased African sculptures for his collection.

8.

Café de Flore

If the cups at Café de Flore could talk, they would tell stories of friendships and romances among artists, of masterpieces in the making, and of countless incredible tales. The Flore was a gathering place and creative hub for artists arriving in Paris; Picasso, for instance, often spent time here, sometimes accompanied by the photographer Brassaï. Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir considered the Flore almost like their second home, and among others, Ernest Hemingway, György Faludy, Yves Montand, Roman Polanski, Brigitte Bardot, and Yves Saint-Laurent also enjoyed reflecting and engaging in discourse over a cup of coffee at the Café de Flore.

I have been drawn to this place from the start.

And here I dwelt, beside a glass of brandy,

back in my self-important student days

when I could always buy another fine, but

just now and then could not afford a meal.

And I thought I was made of fireworks.

Picasso sat here with his Spanish woman,

his back against the back wall of the room;

we nodded and I tried to write a poem

though it refused to gel. A homely place,

this modest, red Parisian one-room café,

its tiny glass-cage winter garden set

upon the boulevard.

György Faludy: Café Flore (excerpt)

9.

UNESCO Headquarters

The headquarters, which opened in 1968, was built based on designs by Marcel Breuer, Bernhard Zehrfuss, and Luigi Nervi, under the supervision of superstars of architecture Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, among others. Contemporary artists, including Picasso and Brassaï, were commissioned to decorate the building’s interior. Although Picasso was reluctant to work on commission, he accepted the assignment and painted The Fall of Icarus. The large-scale mural failed to make an impact in the space intended for it and thus did not win unanimous attention. The artist also left with bitter feelings, but at a dinner held in honour of the participating artists, Le Corbusier came to the painter’s defence, saying: “What people think of it today doesn’t matter. In ten years, in twenty years’ time, everyone will see its beauty…”

10.

L’académie Julian, a private art academy

As a private school, the Académie Julian offered an alternative to art education at the official academy, the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts. The academy served as a melting pot for art students from France and abroad. Henri Matisse trained there, and it was also regularly attended by several Hungarian painters who had come to Paris, including Béla Czóbel, Dezső Orbán, and Károly Kernstok.

11.

Gertrude and Leo Stein’s salon

The salon hosted by the American writer and art collector siblings served as a gathering place for the city’s literary and artistic elite every Saturday. Matisse and Picasso were regular attendees at these gatherings with their works, and Hungarian artists residing in Paris also frequently visited these events.

12.

Cité Falguière, Grande-Chaumière, studio apartments

Béla Czóbel lived close to Modigliani, and Rezső Bálint lived here as his flatmate for some time.

13.

Café Le Dôme

Picasso spent many evenings at the art café Le Dôme before his first marriage. The owner, Victor Libion, accepted drawings as payment from the artists, who were always short on money.

Café de La Rotonde

(105 Bd du Montparnasse, 75006)

Along with the Dôme café, the Rotonde was a gathering place for artists and a venue for intellectual exchanges.

“We used to pile in here day after day: Archipenko, Léger, Cardozo, Apollinaire, Brancusi, Pascin, József Csáky, Alfréd Rét, Le Fauconnier, Delaunay… We went to the Café Dôme and the Rotonde… It was a close-knit group.”

– Dezső Orbán

“As early as ’24, he [Picasso] would come over to the table next to ours for a cup of coffee. He listened to our deaf and dumb friend, Tihanyi’s aesthetic musings.”

– Gyula Illyés

14.

Matisse’s apartment

Matisse was a legend of modern painting and one of the innovators of twentieth-century artistic expression, as well as a leading figure of the Fauvism (Les Fauves) movement. Among his contemporaries, Picasso saw Matisse as his only worthy rival, and a friendly competition based on mutual respect developed between the two artists. Several Hungarian artists who arrived in the French capital attended Matisse’s drawing and painting classes, and Géza Bornemisza and Vilmos Perlrott-Csaba became the master’s students. Brassaï also took photographs of Matisse in the painter’s studio.

“When I paint green, it doesn’t mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn’t mean sky.”

– Henri Matisse

15.

Les Deux Magots

One of Paris’s most famous literary and art cafés. A frequent gathering place of the surrealists, and Dora Maar often joined this elite. On one such occasion, the poet Paul Éluard introduced Dora to Picasso; she became the painter’s lover and muse, and her features appear in numerous works by Picasso.

16.

Café Le Danton

Brassaï was a regular customer at the Café Le Danton; he would usually set out from there for Picasso’s studio, where he photographed the artist’s sculptures, his studio, and sometimes the painter himself over the course of several years.

17.

Le Catalan

Picasso would often stop by this Catalan restaurant on his way from his studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins. Le Catalan was also a favourite haunt of actors and other artists, and it was on such an occasion that the painter first met Françoise Gilot, a young painter who would later become his partner and muse and the mother of his two children.

18.

Dora Maar’s Apartment

Although photographer and painter Dora Maar’s romantic and creative relationship with Pablo Picasso lasted for a decade, they never lived together.

19.

Studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins

In 1937, Picasso found his new studio in the building where Balzac’s novel The Unknown Masterpiece (1831) was set. It was here that he painted Guernica that same year. He moved here in 1940 and spent the years of the Nazi occupation here. After the liberation of Paris, the studio was flooded with visitors from Europe and overseas who came to admire the master, who by then had become world-famous. Picasso spent his mornings with visitors, but he did not receive guests in the afternoons; he devoted this time, stretching into the early hours of the morning, to his work.

20.

Musée du Louvre

The City of Light attract so many artists not only because of its outstanding art schools and networking opportunities, but its museum collections of unparalleled richness lured artists as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.

At the dawn of his Cubist period, Picasso – who was searching for a new approach in form-creation – was captivated by the primitivism and clean lines of the Iberian sculptures displayed at the Louvre. The following year, the artist purchased two Iberian stone heads, of which it would later come to light that they had been stolen from the Louvre. At that time, no one had the slightest idea that a few decades later, the Musée du Louvre would honour the painter with a major Picasso exhibition to mark his 90^th birthday.

21.

Cirque Médrano

Even before the turn of the century, the Cirque Médrano was frequented by many of Montmartre’s artists. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Georges Seurat all drew inspiration from the unique world of the Médrano’s clowns and acrobats. Picasso was no exception: according to accounts, he visited the circus several times a week. Before the painter began his search for Cubist forms, harlequins and acrobats were the most frequent subjects of his works.

22.

Bateau-Lavoir, Montmartre (Émile Goudeau square) studio

The Bateau-Lavoir was a hub for young artists arriving in Paris who found cheap accommodation and a studio here, in Montmartre. It was in his studio at the Bateau-Lavoir that Picasso, together with Georges Braque, developed the foundations of Cubist painting, and it was there that he painted his masterpiece of Cubism, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The painting’s original title, later changed due to censorship, The Brothel of Avignon, reflects the carnal atmosphere of the Bateau-Lavoir, which Picasso remembered for the rest of his life as the freest and happiest times.

L’Atelier Rozsda

In 1979, painter Endre Rozsda – one of the founders of the European School, whom painter Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s partner and muse, regarded as both her mentor and friend – found a new studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, which had been destroyed by fire and subsequently renovated. Atelier Rozsda is still open to visitors today.