StageView: Picasso at the Lapin Agile

Le Lapin Agile

When Pablo Picasso returned to Paris in 1904, the avant-garde movement headquartered in two locales, Montparnasse on the Left Bank and Montmartre on the Right.  At the time, Montmartre was still in transition from a largely rural to an urban area.  Cheap rents attracted laborers mixed with a smattering of bourgeoisie and a good number of writers and artists.  Picasso settled into an atelier in a ramshackle old piano factory on the Place Ravignon.  His flat was fairly typical: four walls and little else, no electricity, no gas, no toilet, no running water and very poor cooking facilities. 

In search of air, cheap meals, wine, beer, absinthe, company and conversation, Picasso and his fellow artists frequented the many cafés and restaurants that sprang up on the Butte de Montmartre.  On week nights, they could sit for long hours on terraces and converse.  The weekends brought crowds as Parisians from all walks of life came in search of a little romance and adventure.  Avant-garde ideas were not the only danger; violent gangs of so-called apaches often preyed on well-to-do visitors to the quarter.

Between 1905 and 1910, the favorite hang out of the avant-garde and preferred meeting place for serious writers and artists was Le Lapin Agile. French for “Nimble Rabbit,” the name derives from an episode in 1875 when the painter-caricaturist André Gill painted a sign of a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan.  Le Lapin à Gill, as the painting was called, became Le Lapin Agile.  Located at the corner of the rue Saint Vincent and the rue des Saules, the café was presided over by Frédé Gérard who often strummed his guitar on weekend evenings to try to keep the noise down.  (Frédé can be seen in the background of Picasso’s famous painting Au Lapin Agile in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.)  In addition to Picasso, the writers and artists who frequented Le Lapin Agile included Guillaume Apollinaire, André Salmon, Max Jacobs, André Derain, Maurice Utrillo and Georges Braque.  The mad avant-garde writer and provocateur Alfred Jarry also dropped by regularly, armed as usual with a carbine and two revolvers loaded with blanks. One night he fired his revolvers at three Germans who infuriated him by asking about aesthetic theories.  As Miller points out, in those days in Paris, life itself was a performance. Today, visitors can still catch a performance and a meal at Le Lapin Agile.

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director at Syracuse Stage