Biography | Pablo Picasso — The Studio on Place Ravignan Where He Painted the Demoiselles

Place Émile-Goudeau is a small cobbled triangle on the north slope of Montmartre, just below Place du Tertre.

Number 13, rue Ravignan, stands on its edge.

The building that stood here in 1904 was a crooked stack of workshops over a drop in the ground.

Max Jacob nicknamed it the Bateau-Lavoir because the floors shifted in bad weather like the laundry boats on the Seine.

Picasso took a studio here in April 1904 and kept it until the autumn of 1909.

The rooms were unheated.

One tap served about twenty ateliers.

Fernande Olivier, who met him in this house, later described a rusted stove, a yellow washbasin, and canvases stacked on the floor.

That is the room in which he painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon through the winter of 1906 and the spring and summer of 1907.

The canvas is 244 by 234 centimetres.

He kept it in the studio for years.

It was not shown in public until the Salon d'Antin in July 1916, where André Salmon supplied the title Picasso never used.

Picasso's own working name pointed back to Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona, where he had bought colours as a young man.

A fire in May 1970 destroyed most of the wooden structure.

The facade survived.

The present building is a 1978 reconstruction behind that face.

You will not find the 1907 attic.

You will find the square, the Wallace fountain, and a plaque on the rebuilt door.

Braque was walked here from rue Lamarck to look at the finished canvas.

From this address the argument that became Cubism left the private studio and entered other rooms.

Photo: unknown photographer, circa 1910, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons