Montmartre – La Nuit

Night in Montmartre

Montmartre Sacré Cœur night images

 ” The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place , from the sky,  from the earth,  from a passing shape … “

Pablo Picasso 

This gallery of images shows you night in Montmartre during the Christmas of 2012, and illustrates how some places remain unaltered over time.

It was also during Christmas in Paris on December 25, 1883 , that Maurice Utrillo, the celebrated painter of Montmartre, was born. Utrillo was part of an exceptional colony of artists who frequented each other in Paris and Montmartre in the early 20th century.

Henri Matisse, Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani….all of them had a place in Montmartre, in what was then a rural village on the hill north of Paris.                                                                          

The artists were attracted to its poor neighborhoods where the washerwomen, seamstresses, hustlers, and criminals lived, and where they found cheap accommodation and acceptance of their bohemian lifestyles.

It was in his Montmartre studio at the Bateau-Lavoir in 1907 that Picasso painted one of his most noted works, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. It was also in Montmartre that Picasso and Georges Braque co-founded Cubism, one of the most famous and influential art movements of the 20th century.

Like magic, an evening walk on a quiet cobblestone Montmartre street takes us back to that remarkable, bygone era on the “Butte”, a sensation made all the more poignant by the ghostly figure appearing in the analogue photo I made on “Rue Saint Rustique” (imitating Utrillo!). Who knows? Maybe it was the spirit of Picasso leaving the “Lapin Agile” after an evening of eating, drinking, and singing with his friend Frédé, giving him a painting in exchange, a painting which over time the world would know as a masterpiece.

Milan, August 2017 © Pablo Munini

Montmartre Sacré Cœur night images