Its performance halls provided a rare opportunity for the mixing of social classes, particularly between bourgeois men and working-class women, whose interactions were often based on prostitution. Cabarets and café-concerts were favorite spots for avant-garde artists such as Degas, who sought to capture their celebrated performers, hazy atmospheres, and artificial stage lighting in his paintings, pastels, and prints ( 61.101.7 19.29.3).īy the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the appeal of the cabarets and café-concerts extended well beyond the borders of Montmartre. Its raucous café-concerts and cabarets featured satires and crude, often subversive, performances that mocked the Third Republic’s bourgeois morality and increasingly corrupt politics. Replacing the Latin Quarter as the locus of the city’s intellectual and artistic community, Montmartre boasted a thriving bohemian culture that was driven by its critique of decadent society. The Moulin de la Galette became a popular subject at the fin-de-siècle and was painted by, among others, Renoir and the visiting Catalan painters Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Santiago Rusinõl (1861–1931), and Ramón Casas (1866–1932). A long-established center of local amusement, the “butte” featured working-class dance halls such as the Moulin de la Galette, whose iconic double windmills became the first architectural symbol of Montmartre’s bohemian culture. It was in this area-Van Gogh’s “petits boulevards”-that young avant-garde artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Émile Bernard (1868–1941), and Louis Anquetin (1861–1932) lived and worked. Rents dropped steadily as one mounted the precarious streets to the top of the hill, called the “butte,” and the population became increasingly working class. This locale was also home to art supply vendors and several important art dealers and galleries, such as Georges Petit, Paul Durand-Ruel, and Goupil et Cie. The more affluent lower slopes, which Vincent van Gogh referred to as the “grands boulevards,” housed the apartments and studios of established painters such as Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), and Gustave Moreau (1826–1898). Known for its revolutionary politics and underground culture, its liberal reputation lured students, writers, musicians, and artists to the area in the early 1880s. Montmartre’s remote location and inexpensive lodgings contributed to its transformation into a primarily working-class neighborhood in the second half of the nineteenth century. Despite its eventual urbanization, the neighborhood retained its distinct characteristics, such as the old buildings, steep and narrow streets, and rustic windmills, some of which are still in existence today. Forty years later, Montmartre would lose its agrarian nature when it was officially annexed into Paris’ rapidly expanding city limits. The area’s picturesque appearance and its views of the metropolis below had long been popular with artists, such as the landscape painter Georges Michel (1763–1843), who captured the area’s rustic beauty around 1820 in The Mill of Montmartre ( 25.110.8). Perched atop a hill to the north of Paris’s city center, Montmartre was initially a rural village dotted with vineyards and windmills. But while Montmartre’s popularity as a brash amusement district reached dizzying heights in the 1890s, the area itself had rather humble beginnings. Artists, intellectuals, and writers flocked to this bohemian district, frequenting its vibrant performance halls and celebrating them in their paintings, literature, and poems. Montmartre was home to every kind of artist.” Penned in 1882 by the writer Félicien Champsaur, these words describe the diverse audience of the Chat Noir, a cabaret that epitomized the raucous and irreverent popular entertainment for which the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre was known. “In this bizarre land swarmed a host of colorful artists, writers, painters, musicians, sculptors, architects, a few with their own places but most in furnished lodgings, surrounded by the workers of Montmartre, the starchy ladies of the rue Bréda, the retired folk of Batignolles, sprouting up all over the place, like weeds.
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