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By Root 1150 0

two years earlier when he moved out of his previous apartment, where the only heat had come from a rusty iron stove and there was no gas or electricity. There, Picasso had to hold a candle next to the canvas when he worked at night, his favorite time for painting. Now, he was selling paintings regularly to admirers like Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, wealthy Americans who had settled in Paris. Picasso also had a dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who relieved the young Spanish artist of the need to struggle to find gallery space or, even worse, submit his paintings to a jury for the annual Salon des Indépendants. The Picassos (as Fernande liked to call the couple, mistaking Pablo’s affection for a permanent attachment) even had a maid now, the hallmark of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The maid liked her job, for the couple often slept late, relieving her from early morning duties.

On his first visit to Paris in 1900, just before his nineteenth birthday, Picasso and his friend the poet Carles Casagemas found rooms in Montmartre, where the atmosphere was startlingly free compared to that in Barcelona, their hometown. Pablo discovered that young, beautiful women were willing to pose nude for him (and sleep with him), and he and Carles often stayed out all night at cafés where art and literature and sex and politics were discussed far into the night. They took girlfriends dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, a gaslit dance hall next to one of the few working windmills left on Montmartre. Picasso was inspired to paint the scene, brilliantly capturing its garish, underworldly quality. He and Carles visited the Louvre, no doubt standing like any other tourists in front of the Mona Lisa, and the Museé du Luxembourg, where the works of then-modern artists like the impressionists were on display. When he left Paris, keeping a promise to his parents to be home by Christmas, Pablo told himself that he would return.

Early in 1901, Picasso started an avant-garde art magazine in Madrid while Carles returned to Paris, trying to rekindle his relationship with a woman he had fallen in love with. When she spurned him, Carles shot himself (after trying to kill her first and missing). The news shocked Picasso, and he threw himself into the creation of art. This was the beginning of his Blue Period, named not only for the predominant color in his canvases, but for the melancholy quality he gave his human subjects. Later that year he moved into the apartment Carles had occupied in Paris and found backers for a well-received exhibition of his own work. He also met a neighbor named Max Jacob, a homosexual poet and would-be painter who would become one of Picasso’s closest friends. (Picasso, seeing Jacob’s paintings, advised him to stick to poetry. 7 )

After a return to Barcelona, Picasso settled in Paris for good in April 1904, renting a run-down apartment in an oddly shaped building on the hill of Montmartre at 13, rue Ravignan. Max Jacob called it the Bateau-Lavoir because it resembled one of the laundry barges moored in the Seine. The place was a haven for artists and other bohemians, and arguments, singing, weeping, and cries of passion could be heard through the thin walls at all hours. Picasso, who loved animals, kept two dogs and, in a drawer, a small white mouse. In August, during a thunderstorm, he found a sodden kitten on the street and picked it up. After he reached the Bateau-Lavoir, he encountered a young woman who had gone inside to seek shelter from the storm. He offered her the kitten, and when she laughed, he invited her to see his studio.

Her name was Fernande Olivier (the last name was her own invention) and although she was only a few months older than Picasso, she had already been married and given birth to a son. To him, she was a woman of the world, the first he had ever known other than prostitutes. Asking her to move into his apartment, as he did a few months later, was a rite of passage for him.

As for his appeal to her, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight,” she was to recall. After all,