This was an exhibition on Picasso as an artist moving to Paris in 1900 when he was 19. He lived on top of a laundry shop in Montmartre, le bateau lavoir. From the paintings of that period that I saw at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam I felt like being transported to Paris. I could see he had a really broad eye for what was happening around him, from the upper class party goers of the Exposition universelle crowd type to subjects of despair. He was then so emotionally touched from the suicide death of his fellow Spaniard Casagemas, and you can see that in his blue period paintings. They guy, a writer, broke up with his French girlfriend apparently. You can just imagine the mixing of people and a stool of chancers observing life. There he saw the work of Gaugain, Toulouse-Lautrec, Swiss painters and what the critics will tell you.
The cosmopolitanism of Europe was there already as the art world always anticipates trends. If you had to choose now where to go it would be much harder. That's because artists embark on global tours, people can follow developments on twitter as revolution unfolds in whatever part of the world and the feeling of satisfaction to be in one place is often transient, as something else more interesting could be happening somewhere else, literally as we speak.
The cosmopolitanism of Europe was there already as the art world always anticipates trends. If you had to choose now where to go it would be much harder. That's because artists embark on global tours, people can follow developments on twitter as revolution unfolds in whatever part of the world and the feeling of satisfaction to be in one place is often transient, as something else more interesting could be happening somewhere else, literally as we speak.
