La vie d'artiste

Lucien Genin left his provincial home in autumn 1919 and followed in the footsteps of other young artists, along the route that led inevitably to the heart of Monmartre.

Providence brought the young man to a small round square, flanked by two celebrities, the Hôtel du Poirier where he first made his home, and the Bateau-Lavoir where he would spend fifteen years of his life. This vessel, abandoned by its captain, was now crewless too, no more than a carcass without a soul, uncomfortable and miserable, housing an anonymous world of cobblers, office workers, locksmiths and pensioners, not to mention a stonemason, a laundress, a seamstress, a labourer and handful of marooned artists. On the other side of the Butte, at the Lapin-Agile Inn , old Frédé was reliving his youth, entertaining a newly arrived clientele of adventurous tourists and shopgirls from the Galeries, all delighted to discover his eternal Return of the Sailor, scratched out on a guitar that would have been more at home in a junk museum. A sometime visitor was Max Jacob, still living - though not for long - at Rue Gabrielle, one of the last witnesses to the adventures of the famous prewar gang. By 1920, the geniuses had left, Monmartre was free.
The geniuses had left... Except for one, the local boy Maurice Utrillo. Having made his name in the police stations and the hospitals, this crank was now the talk of the fine districts. His paintings of alleyways, of crumbling masonry and tumbledown hovels, had travelled from the walls of local cafes to those of the Lepoutre Gallery, in rue de Boétie. His fantastic adventure story was already becoming miracle and legend, the ultimate example of the artist accursed. His emerging celebrity would sow the seed of new vocations amongst an up-and-coming generation.
Lucien Genin, as a young street artist, would paint the portrait of this inspired senior and would himself fall victim to the ubiquitous mal de La Butte. The same disease that racked Maurice Utrillo, that Georges Michel had brought to Monmartre more than a hundred years before, as he dawdled along the pebbled streets, producing endless paintings of the sky and the mills, drinking bottle after bottle, the disease that survives to this day, blending the love of place and the love of wine. Falling in love with the place in his turn, Lucien Genin yielded to the seductive aroma of freedom and gaiety that around these hills. Borne along by the new breeze with its subtle intoxication, the young artist followed his instincts and sought, in his turn, to spread his wings on the slopes of the Butte. Little did he realise that his life story was to be so intimately entwined with that of Monmartre.

The Butte de Monmartre after the Great War attracted a new crowd drawn from every corner of the globe in search of the exotic, eager to celebrate, sensitive to the rebellious and joyful spirit reawakened with the return of peace.
The creation of the Free Commune, the opening of the Vache Enragée cabaret, electrified a host of satirical cartoonists, of painters, of poets and freedom songsters, of dancers, singers and actors, who set the village alight. Monmartre became a place for dreamers of dreams, for poetry, for singing, a small new kingdom of freedom. The joyously anti-conformist spirit of such as Depquit, Hallé, Toziny took over the Butte and excluded the banalities of the day-to-day. Popular festivals followed one upon the other with the speed of imagination, Seamstress Races, Smokers' Races, Swims across La Butte, Feather and Brush Races... The excitement also reached beyond the Butte. Of all the Paris festivals, the Monmartre Festival was the happiest. On Boulevard Rochechouard, an enormous crowd jostled before the fairground stalls, around carousels gleaming with revolving lights. The rattle of turnstiles, the cries of gypsies, the firecrackers, the bellowing of wild beasts. Truly peace has returned (Le matin, 14/7/1920). The Daubers' Fair, another innovation of the Free Commune of Monmartre, gave everybody, all those who would like to but don't know how, as the slogan went, to sell their works directly to the art lovers who came to browse in Place Constantin-Pecqueur. A seventeen year-old Jean Hélion tried to sell his thumb painting, Maison de Mimi Pinson, and recalled all those hideous paintings arranged along the pavements, underneath the trees. Others spoke of the kingdom of daub, the junk sale with its hidden priceless jewels... Amidst these marvels, it is said, certain connoisseurs managed to unearth the odd naive painting.
The Butte de Monmartre had shown a certain fondness for the naive since Apollinaire and Picasso enthroned Rousseau there and Utrillo emerged from the whiteness of its alleyways. With the same kindness, its landscape established the reputation of Elisée Maclet's little cartoons, themselves naive, whose reds softening into wine shades were admired by Francis Carco. Elisée Maclet had nothing left to prove. Of the same generation as Utrillo, he was then his equal in stature, the two of them representatives of that new, soon-to-be admired lineage. Marcel Guicheteau describes the friendship between Maclet and Genin. It seems they met at the Hôtel du Poirier where they were landing neighbours, Maclet returning to the Butte after the war, Genin newly arrived from Rouen. Maclet, the mature man says Guicheteau, opens doors to the youngster from Rouen and gave him some old-timer's advice about colour. Maclet and Utrillo had by now done their time in the Butte and were about to move on, leaving the seeds of a certain naivety that Genin would share with the small band that launched itself on to the pavements of the Butte, now relinquished by the two tenors.
Here we find the energetic Camille Bombois, broad as a cartload of cobbles, displaying his first paintings on the pavements of the Daubers' Fair. Encouraged by the poet Noël Bureau, the ex-roadmender Bombois had given up his workman's jacket and corduroys to devote himself to his long-time passion, painting. With Florent Fels, Wihelm Uhde was one of the first to spot this future master of the naive and recalls that the merchant Mathot, he of the legendary intuition, was a buyer. Wihelm Uhde, this time in the company of Henri Bing, spotted the postal worker Louis Vivin, newly retired to Monmartre, and now entirely and naively devoted to his art, which he sold on Place Constantin-Pecqueur and to the pilgrims around Sacré-Coeur. In Place du Tertre, meanwhile, Emile Boyer's bric-a-brac stall displayed the landscapes of Monmartre that he too had suddenly begun to paint. Thanks to the interest of a handful of artistic visionaries, these street artists would gradually win their place in the sun.
The Butte was home to the Naives, but also to the Fauvists, the Impressionists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, the Cubists... But how many of them were there in all, these Monmartre painters in the interwar years?
In his Art Vivant, Maximilien Gauthier tries to count them. He mentions Bombois, Boyer, Creixmans, Jean Dufy, Pierre Dumont, Gen Paul, Genin, Leprin, Maclet, Frank Will. If we add those who chose to take up residence in Monmartre, he says, then there were also Jean Marchand, Maurice Asselin, Daragnés, Mainssieux, Kvapil, Lewitzka, Suzanne Valadon and Utter. He also mentions two painters of nightclub fauna, Vertes and Pascin, and awards the title of painter of Monmartre to Utrillo to the highest degree. He ends with a disillusioned And some I forget... No doubt!
This band is sometimes described as a colony of bohemians, sometimes as a hive of artists, depending whether one is impressed by the atmosphere or the number. They were, the painter Papazoff tells us, more bohemian and more sybaritic than in Montparnasse. This party reputation of the Butte de Monmartre attracted the young working class, totally determined to escape their condition by becoming artists.
A child of the sun, the vagabond Marcel Leprin scaled the Butte in 1921, his dream to meet Utrillo. He met the master, became friends with Genin and other artists of his generation. Artists like jovial Frank Will, a painter's son and therefore quite naturally a painter himself, who had just chosen his artistic name. He had grown up in the district with a certain Gégène, born in Rue Lepic, whose outspokenness and cheek had made him a Butte celebrity. Wounded in the war, Gégène was obliged to change jobs. He tried his hand at Daubing, had some success, and became the painter Gen Paul... Frank Will, Gen Paul, Leprin, Genin, a group of mates united by painting and bound together by wine. Drinking here was more than a pleasure, more than a popular tradition; it was the emblem, the initiation rite of this knighthood of the street, under the blazon of the palette and the paintbrush, inherited from Georges Michel and Maurice Utrillo.
These Buttards-Fêtards, these bold, warm-hearted carousers, cared not a fig for money or old age. They were consuming their youth, confronting day-to-day realities head on, and had no doubt that the Butte would grant them their share in the prestige of the place. Lads with heads full of hope, bodies full of youth, feet shod with courage, as Emile Goudeau more elegantly put it. They made the dusty figure of the Dauber fashionable again. This gang of New Daubers, of which Genin was a member, had the cheek to be unaware in 1920 that modernism meant cubism. The gang was neither a school, nor a movement, nor a trend. Their literary cafe was simply old Madame Paille's pub down at the Boulodrome. They were not interested in theories, or rather knew only one theory: The living world exists..., and took their legitimacy from the recognition of the handful of connoisseurs who bought their works. Their paintings are quite simply windows opening on to the Butte, because... the landscape is born of the people, it is for them the ultimate picture (Marcel Arlan).
Gen Paul, Frank Will, Leprin, Boyer, Vivin, Bombois, Genin all came from the working class and, with the exception of Lucien Genin, were all self-taught. Tèese self-made artists worked in a party atmosphere and, though some might have their hearts set more than others on fame, each of them faced the nightly need to eat... In front of the easel, each could grow wings and give free rein to his temperament. The paintings are nothing but spontaneity, generosity, authenticity, simplicity. The dauber doesn't think. He comes back from the hunt, takes off his boots, looks at the landscape he has killed. Everyone eats some and finds it good. The next morning, he gets up early and goes out hunting again (Jean Cocteau).
They lived in Monmartre and would live off Monmartre. Once again, the famous mother hen would take this new generation of artists under her protective wing. They were street painters and that is how they met the collectors who, in those years of interest in the arts, climbed the hill in the hope of unearthing an authentic masterpiece amidst the street stalls and markets, or better still - we all know the one about the genius who swaps his painting for the price of a bottle of wine - who search the alleyways - exhilarating quest - for the artist standing before his subject, who sells them - with the paint scarcely dry - the picture that will make their children's fortune. Perhaps. These works had many destinies. Some have hit the top of the auction sales; others are today in museums.

La vie d'artiste