Photo By Gail

Located near the Champs–Élysées, the city’s fame tree-lined avenue, Jardin de Paris (1901) was the summer location of the historic dance hall Le Moulin Rouge. A young Pablo Picasso pursued commercial work to sustain a living and produced this design as a speculative bid. The venue’s Catalan manager, Josep Oller, however, did not purchase it. Both the imagery and the style recall that of the iconic Montmartre artist of the 1890s, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose work Picasso emulated. While he enjoyed Paris’s many distractions, Picasso was at this time also mourning his close friend, the Catalan painter-poet Carles Casagemas, who died by suicide in Paris in February 1901. Picasso later turned this sheet over to sketch two somber compositions on the theme of death.

Photographed in The Guggenheim Museum in New York City.