Inkpot
J. Rappoport
Hall No 3.118 of the General Staff building
Moulin de la Galette was Picasso's first Parisian picture and one that shaped for several years to come the creative direction taken by the young artist. The “Little Goya” who had arrived to conquer Paris was barely nineteen when he painted this, his earliest masterpiece.
Picasso, who had already attained fame in his homeland, set off to Paris for the Exposition Universelle: there, in the Spanish section, his canvas Last Moments was being displayed. A friend Isidro Nonell who had made the move from Barcelona suggested he stay a while in his large studio in Montmartre where a whole Catalan colony had taken up residence. Only a very short time separated the arrival of the artist in Paris from the creation of the bravura-gloomy depiction of a Montmartre dance-hall at the Moulin de la Galette.
“Models” frequently visited Nonell's studio, but Picasso with his memory had no need to ask them to pose. In part these girls were recorded in the typal characters of Moulin de la Galette. It is believed that the woman on the left is Germaine Gargallo who would soon play a fateful role in the life of Picasso's closest friend, Casagemas with whom he had travelled to Paris. Spurned by her, he shot himself and his death was to become one of the motive causes of the appearance of Picasso's “blue style”. The Moulin de laGalette was executed before the onset of that period, but one can already detect in the painting hints of the coming transition to the emotional structure of the Blue Period.
Picasso undoubtedly knew Renoir's Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and his own work became an antithesis to that apotheosis of Impressionism. Picasso's anti-Impressionism was also encouraged by the influence of the artists of the late nineteenth century — Steinlen, Van Gogh with his La Salle de Danse à Arles (1888, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) and in particular Toulouse-Lautrec with his canvases Bal au Moulin de la Galette (1899, Art Institute of Chicago) and Au Moulin Rouge (1890, Philadelphia Museum of Art). It is hard to imagine, given the fascination with Toulouse-Lautrec at that time, that Picasso did not know of them. It is no coincidence that the first Parisian period in his career has been dubbed “Lautrecian”.
The entire scene in which the pairs are depicted dancing a fashionable South American dance unfolds like a stage performance in which arc lamps pick out of the gloom the painted faces and emphatically bright or gaudy costumes of the actors.
The painting bears the imprint of the influence of Symbolism, which expresses itself in its dark tonality among other things. The lamps burning in the semi-darkness inspire us to perceive the atmosphere of the Moulin de la Galette as something arousing, mysterious and even fraught with danger. At the same time sweeping generalization is astonishingly combined with precise detail: not only in the depiction of the crowd and the setting, but even, for example, in the fact that we can sense the time of year. It is late October and fairly chilly in the hall. And the gaiety itself seems only luke-warm.
Depicting a crowd in a large hall, Picasso managed to combine the various personages into an organic artistic whole. To achieve unity the painter resorted to a condensation of the entire structure, reducing its main part to a frieze and closing off the space with the green strip of the opposite wall. Besides that, on the left he placed a table and customers, forming a sort of bridge linking the frieze in the middle-ground to the foreground. The composition is unobtrusively reinforced by the arches breaking up the opposite wall. The majority of women in the composition share more or less the same looks. Here Picasso pre-empted Van Dongen who reproduced the same sensual type in his Moulin de la Galette (1904, Musée d'Art Moderne, Troyes). Only in his treatment of the image of the femme fatale Picasso was from the outset immeasurably more profound and penetrating.
