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Books

Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?

A review of In Montmatre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900 – 1910, by Sue Roe. This rollicking read is at its best when describing the bacchanalian squalor

30 August 2014

9:00 AM

30 August 2014

9:00 AM

In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900–1910 Sue Roe

Penguin/Fig Tree, pp.365, £20, ISBN: 9781905490868

What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds most appealing: the perfect recipe for a bohemian life, dreamed up by a supreme master in the art of having it both ways. To begin with at least, however, Picasso had to make do only with the half of his formula: living like a pauper with scarcely any cash at all.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £16. Tel: 08430 600033. Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House explored nine weeks in the life of Van Gogh and Gauguin sharing a house in Arles in 1888.

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