Gallery chronicle (January 2011)

Andy Piedilato, The Antagonist, courtesy of the artist

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2011

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Andy Piedilato: New Paintings” at English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn; "Andrew Hurst" at Storefront, Brooklyn; “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” at Centotto, Brooklyn; “Sacred Presence/Painterly Process” at the Derfner Judaica Museum, The Bronx; and “Becoming Modern in America” at Minus Space, Brooklyn.

The artists of New York no longer bloom in a decayed downtown. Tenth Street and Greenwich Village, Soho, Tribeca, Union Square: the areas that once nurtured artists’ studios now contain the most expensive real estate in the country. It’s a development that owes as much to culture as to policy. Today’s beneficiaries of the financial services industry, the city’s enduring economic engine, harbor a fierce nostalgie de la boue. So wealth has migrated from the pre-war “classic sixes” of the Upper East Side to the lofts and brownstones downtown. And in their pursuit of the down and out, the rich have inadvertently chased the artists from their studios in the heart of town.

Perhaps we should be thankful for the shakeout. Art-world centers are often peripheries. Montmartre and Montparnasse, two modernist neighborhoods at the turn of the last century, were the bookends of Paris, north and south of the city center and connected in 1910 by the Nord-Sud metro line. Today’s New York follows the same model. Artists are again pushed to the outskirts. Rather than being disconnected extremities, the peripheral communities they establish become vital frontiers, each developing its own characteristics.

In addition to offering studio and living space, many of these neighborhoods boast new galleries. Often artist-run, these galleries are becoming as important as the blue chips of Manhattan. They are also far more welcoming. You don’t need a passport to get to them, even if the locations may sound exotic and the subway stations unknown. Since many of these galleries maintain weekend-only hours, a Sunday afternoon outer-borough gallery crawl is fast emerging as a tradition on par with the Thursday-evening openings in Chelsea.

Founded in 2007, the gallery English Kills is already the old timer of Bushwick—currently the most rewarding artist center in Brooklyn—with an A-list lineup of talent. The director Chris Harding has described the gallery as his antidote to working for a year at Mary Boone. Still the space exudes its own sense of ambition. The largest gallery in the neighborhood, English Kills often shows expansive art—fast, messy paintings and installations with jock swagger. The frat-house quality of the place (which can seem like a cave) is sometimes reinforced by the odd hipster loafing on the disposable beach chair outside. You might also spot a parade of initiates, beer in hand, regularly emerging through a curtain separating the exhibition space from the private rooms in the back. Yet fear not—this gallery still gets the Good Gallerygoing Seal of Approval; I’ve even changed my baby’s diaper in the back room.

Andy Piedilato, the artist now on view at English Kills, is one reason to pay attention to this gallery.[1] With canvases over nine-foot square, Piedilato has been refining his use of hatch marks to denote bathroom-tile surfaces undulating in space. With the grout lines first laid down in masking tape, Piedilato has been able to focus the rough expressive energy of his paint handling to create a mash-up of neo-expressionism and Op Art. In some paintings, like Hummingbird and Iceboat, the spectral iconography of sinking ships and surfacing submarines plays off the weight of the bricked-up surfaces. In others, such as the more abstract Nut Rolling Through Hills, Red Roll, The Antagonist, and Maze, Piedilato tells his stories almost exclusively through volume and pattern. In all of them, the tactile surfaces feel like the tiles of a cold shower in a strange dream. These paintings are wet and chilly in a way you can’t easily shake off.

Storefront may be a gallery just around the corner from English Kills, yet the style of the two spaces could not be more different. I have covered Storefront, which Jason Andrew and Deborah Brown opened a year ago, on a few occasions in this space. I wish I could have written about every one of their three-week shows. Andrew and Brown have an interest in jewel-like work that plays off the small scale of their gallery as well as a local taste for the intimate and ad hoc. Austin Thomas’s solo show of bits of printed words and delicate paper collages of origami folds, which ran at Storefront in September and October, was the summa of this aesthetic.

The collage and assemblage artist Andrew Hurst is an English Kills regular, yet most recently his work went on display at Storefront.[2] Hurst is an expansive Bushwick artist who often creates performance pieces and writes his own poetry and music. The change in venue to tiny Storefront allowed us to observe his energy by focusing on his smaller work.

Is collage the creepiest of art forms? There might be a reason why criminals write their ransom notes from cut-up magazines. The repurposing of found objects and printed materials has an quasi-occult quality. Andrew Hurst follows in this tradition. Yet unlike his darker influences of Kurt Schwitters or Ray Johnson, Hurst practices only white magic. For him the power of collage and assemblage (which brings collage out to the third dimension) offers a compelling way to unlock materials. Hurst then reuses his found objects to depict a personal mythology. He starts with one or two pieces—often the lowliest castoffs pulled from the streets of Bushwick (a flattened shoe; the gears of a watch). By slowly adding more material, drawn through poetic associations—with paint and the textures of other found pieces thrown in the mix—he gives these cast-aways new life. Peel Sessions starts with a shredded tire and becomes a black hole filled with plastic gears and other personal ephemera. The work reminds me of the sculptures of Lee Bontecou, here turned into a meditation on speed and the mechanics of movement. Hurst also creates icons to his heroes—a gold-speckled championship panel to Muhammad Ali in The Greatest, and a diptych memorializing Max Ernst and Hurst’s pet tarantula in Homage to Max and Becky. Unlike many collage artists who revel in the superficial jokes of pop juxtapositions, Hurst goes for more profound impact, with detailed work that rewards close viewing.

Centotto is another nearby gallery that warrants a stopover. Paul D’Agostino is a young professor of Italian literature who has carved a project space out of the living room of his shared apartment. He mounts shows that feel like graduate seminars—with assigned readings and a conversation among classmates you only half understand. His immersive approach has its place. You pick up the ideas in the room even if you don’t catch every word. “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” was a two-artist exhibition on view last month that well reflected the Centotto style.[3] Here John Avelluto created his own three-hole notebook paper, with fabricated erasures and blue and red margin lines sometimes warping in odd directions. Josh Willis built up and scraped away scumbled paint to depict the Tower of Babel. Each played off the notions of unstable surfaces, where the end point looks like the start. The dialogue was brainy. Even if you didn’t get it, you felt elevated for having overheard the discussion.

Moving on to the Bronx, I recently traveled to a bucolic corner of Riverdale for an experiment in mixing contemporary art and Judaism. The show was by Jill Nathanson, and the venue was a stunning little museum overlooking the Hudson River Palisades that happens to be tucked in a retirement home.[4]

A recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, featuring religious commissions by Robert Motherwell, Herbert Ferber, and Adolph Gottlieb, served as a good reminder that abstract art can be ideally suited for faiths that shun literal representation. Trained in American abstraction, Nathanson found new inspiration creating Jewish work several years ago by mixing Hebrew lettering into her swirling compositions. I remember once encountering a painting by Marsden Hartley that also incorporated Hebrew, and thinking that it appeared ideally American—full of that Old-Time Religion. Nathanson’s work likewise seems to be a natural extension of Abstract Expressionism, which of course never quite shook its mystical origins.

Following the lettering work, which she called “Seeing Sinai,” Nathanson took on the subject of Genesis for a series depicting the origin of the world. But just how do you depict nothing out of something? For this she did a close Torah reading with rabbis. In the “welter and waste” of her studio, Nathanson saw parallels in the act of creation. She made seven collages, each representing a day of creation, of colorful plastic sheets mixed in with the detritus of her artistic process.

Unfortunately, Nathanson sometimes overbuilds her compositions, resulting in a muddy mix. I was not a fan of the drippy plastics in the latest work, with welter and waste that looked more toxic than divine. Yet art sometimes succeeds in failure. Nathanson’s experiment in studio process and biblical scholarship is both an inspiration and a challenge for a new (old) direction in art.

Finally a word about the artist Loren Munk. Many gallery goers might know him through his pseudonym, James Kalm, and his online “James Kalm Report.” Since what must be the dawn of the internet age, Munk has been taking his interest in the contemporary art scene to the web by somewhat secretly filming and narrating gallery openings, large and small, with a digital camera strapped to his chest. A one-man Archives of American Art, Munk has created a singular cultural record by posting all of these videos free of charge on his website (lorenmunk.com) and on YouTube.

For anyone who obsesses over the history of art in New York, Munk is like that brilliant professor of anthropology who knows everything but sometimes forgets to take his meds. Under his given name, Munk paints heavily impastoed canvases of diagrams detailing the locations of artist studios and influences among the great schools and critics (Munk is a critic himself who writes for The Brooklyn Rail). Often these colorful charts riff on Alfred Barr’s old moma visuals of the history of modern art. Two of these panels are now on view in an exhibition at Minus Space, a gallery on the border of Carroll Gardens and the Gowanus Canal that I wrote about two months ago for its project show on Robert Swain.[5]

Munk’s work is meant to be absorbed as much for its swirling compositions and overall effect as for its didactic information. In their bright colors and levels of detail, the diagrams also seem to revere the artists and critics they depict. Next to them, MatthewDeleget of Minus Space has posted his collection of Life magazine’s historical coverage of modern art, including 1949’s “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

At the opening, there was a rush to see who would film the show à la James Kalm. Sharon Butler ended up making the video for her blog twocoatsofpaint.com. There could not have been a better tribute to Munk—a recognition that his work may just be art history in the making.

[1] “Andy Piedilato: New Paintings” opened at English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn, on December 4, 2010 and remains on view through January 9, 2011.

[2] “Andrew Hurst” was on view at Storefront, Brooklyn, from October 22 through November 14, 2010.

[3] “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” was on view at Centotto, Brooklyn, from November 5 through December 17, 2010.

[4]“Sacred Presence/Painterly Process” was on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum, The Bronx, from September 26 through December 31, 2010.

[5] “Becoming Modern in America” opened at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on December 11, 2010 and remains on view through January 29, 2011.

Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 26, 2010

Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?
by James Panero

Thanks to a new law against SRO hotels, the UWS is at risk

If you want to stay at the Alexander, a boutique hotel on 94th St. on the upper West Side, you better book your room soon. With plush bedding, sparkling renovated bathrooms and a welcoming staff, this hotel has received great reviews online. Problem is, the only guests who may stay here in the new year could be the homeless.

Because of a change in New York law, starting in 2011, single-resident-occupancy buildings (SROs) such as the Alexander will no longer be allowed to rent rooms for less than 30 days unless they get a new certificate of occupancy and, in most cases, a zoning exemption. So out goes this legitimate hotel, its hardworking employees, the happy tourists and a revenue engine for the city.

In comes Samaritan Village. On Dec. 10, this Queens-based substance abuse and mental-health center gave notice to the local community board that it intends to run a 200-bed homeless facility out of the Alexander, according to community sources and confirmed by a spokesman for Samaritan.

The conversion of a welcome local institution into a shelter for the city's indigent population may sound like deja vu all over again to longtime residents of the upper West Side like me. Unfortunately, it may be the beginning of a broader attack on urban sanity and gentrification throughout the city.

For decades, my neighborhood - like neighborhoods in Harlem, Chelsea and the East Village - has borne an unfair burden of New York's supportive housing industry. Despite the "fair share" law in the city Charter that requires social service facilities to be evenly distributed through all neighborhoods, W. 94th and 95th Sts. alone, next door to where I live, have seen half-a-dozen such institutions proposed in recent years, from homeless shelters to drug treatment centers to halfway houses. The residents of these two tree-lined streets - with their public schools, nursery schools and family residences - must wonder what they did to deserve such generosity.

State Sen. Liz Krueger has largely kept supportive housing out of the wealthiest portion of her district, the upper East Side, but she has championed legislation in Albany amending the multiple-dwelling law that could result in more than a dozen new supportive-house facilities opening in the old SROs on the upper West Side.

Krueger and her political allies - including Councilwoman Gail Brewer and State Assembly members Richard Gottfried and Linda Rosenthal - may believe they are protecting tenants' rights by preventing the proliferation of small hotels into SRO buildings. Instead, their beneficence has only managed to clear these buildings of useful small businesses, while protecting the special interests of the hotel workers' union, since the targeted SRO hotels generally employ nonunion labor.

The landlords will chase the dollars still available. Many vacated rooms can be expected to enter contracts with organizations operating with the Department of Homeless Services or other city agencies. The presence of these facilities and the undesirable groups they import, in turn, will push out industrious neighbors, rich and poor, or at least those who can afford to leave, along with local retail.

If Samaritan Village is allowed to open on the upper West Side, it will be the first of many such conversions here - a sad sign that the local political complex appears interested in anything but the rights of a community that has fought for decades to make its streets safer, better and more beautiful.

Other parts of the city should beware. By Krueger's own tally, once the new legislation goes into effect in 2011, it will impact 280 buildings citywide.

Only in New York would politicians complain about the blight of middle-aged European tourists asking for directions. Force out one population, and you leave a hole for another one to fill. You only hope your new neighbor isn't the next Larry Hogue.

Why Paris?

Modigliani, Picasso and André Salmon in front the Café de la Rotonde, Paris, 1916
c. Modigliani Institut Archives Légales, Paris-Rome

HUMANITIES MAGAZINE
November/December 2010

Why Paris?
by James Panero

Two neighborhoods—Montmartre and Montparnasse—helped shape Picasso and a generation of innovators.

Let’s dispense with the romance of Paris. A century ago, the City of Light was a city of lice for the artists who carved out their reputations there. The primitive conditions of their apartments and studios often meant no heat and no running water. Money for food was scarce, while disease and infestation were in abundance. A story of the painter Chaim Soutine sets the general tone. An abscess he discovered on his ear turned out to be a nest of bedbugs. “Poverty was a luxury,” said the playwright Jean Cocteau of his neighborhood of Montparnasse. The term “starving artist” was no conceit. La Vie de Bohème might be appealing on the stage of Puccini’s opera or in the pages of Henry Murger’s nineteenth-century novel of struggling artists. The real life of the Paris Bohemian was hard and unenviable.

So why did so many artists flock there from around the world? As a new PBS program called Paris: The Luminous Years asks, “Why Paris?”

Another question could be, Why does any great city, with its high rents and low standards of living, attract artists who could paint or write just about anywhere? One answer may be found in an unusual place: a theory of economics first promoted by the urbanist Jane Jacobs. Her understanding of an effect called “knowledge spillover,” which helps explain the rise of industries in certain cities, such as textile manufacturing in Birmingham, England, might also help take some of the mystery out of the magic of Paris.

First, some background on Jacobs’s theory and the history of knowledge spillover: In 1890, the economist Sir Alfred Marshall described cities as having ideas in the air. He recognized that the countless interactions that city dwellers have with each other on a daily basis could also have a unique effect on innovation. Such interactions were a direct result of urban density, where people live and work in a close proximity to one another. Greater density meant a higher chance of unplanned encounters and conversations, whether on the street, across the hallway, or often in the gossip of restaurants and cafés. These discussions resulted in the phenomenon of “spillover.”

Here is the remarkable thing about knowledge spillovers. If the crowd is right, people can pick up invaluable information through casual interactions in what is called a “dynamic externality”—in other words, free of charge. In exchange for struggling in the crowded city, the poorest worker could indeed be enriched by its “ideas in the air.” Through one’s own innovation, those ideas could be translated into new and better products.

Marshall and his intellectual descendants maintained that the concentration of a single industry in a city would best benefit from knowledge spillover. Some theorists even thought that urban monopolies might be best poised to take advantage of knowledge spillover. It was assumed that when interactions within companies were limited, workers would not risk sharing secrets with the competition. From this notion emerged the development of the office park, with its concentration of solitary businesses.

Yet, in 1969, in her book The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs offered her own theory of urban communication that updated in a significant way what is now called Marshall-Arrow-Romer externalities. Instead of concentrating single industries or even single companies, Jacobs maintained that the variety and diversity of businesses in a dense environment led to the greatest and swiftest innovations. The reasons were twofold: A cross-fertilization of ideas across different industries and a density of small firms in local competition with one another bring innovation most quickly to market. Monopolies avoid the risks of innovation and are slow to recognize new demand, but small firms can be adaptable. “Few sights are more flabbergasting than the sheer quantity and diversity of work and working places concentrated in a great city,” Jacobs wrote, and such diverse concentrations encourage the borrowing of innovations from one industry and applying them to another.

Concerning the diversity of urban influences, Jacobs was making an important point. Examples of the ideas of one industry informing another are numerous. The development of the auto industry in Detroit grew out of innovations in shipbuilding for Lake Erie, where the gasoline-powered boat was an antecedent to the automobile. New York’s financial services industry emerged from the demands and knowledge of the cotton and grain merchants trading in town. In the early 1990s, a team of researchers from Harvard, New York University, and the University of Chicago, led by Edward L. Glaeser, conducted an analysis of data sets of major industries in U.S. cities between the years 1956 and 1987. They concluded that Jacobs’s understanding of knowledge spillovers was right. A variety of activities in a dense environment stimulates the greatest innovation.

To understand how the Jacobs theory applies to the artistic life of Paris at the turn of the past century, consider the rise of Pablo Picasso. The Spanish artist was not nearly the finest painter of the Modern movement, but he was by far its most ruthless innovator.

Picasso from a young age understood the particular role that the city of Paris could play in his success. He was as calculating in determining his accommodations there and the way he moved through the city as he was in his adoption of new painting styles and techniques.

Instead of developing new textiles or faster engines, Parisian artists at the turn of the century—its Modernist innovators, anyway—worked on one thing: building a better avant-garde. Picasso determined to do this better than anyone else.

Picasso was born in the Andalusian town of Málaga in 1881. His father, José Ruiz Blasco, was a successful art teacher and painter of naturalistic scenes. He bestowed on his son a talent for applying oil on canvas, but Picasso had to go elsewhere to develop his singular sense of Modernist innovation. After spending his teen years in Barcelona and Madrid, where the prodigious painter found early success with his symbolist figures, he moved to Paris for good in 1904. He established himself in the area of Montmartre, a hill on the northern Right Bank, which had been the heart of the artistic life of the city in the 1890s. Everyone from Eugène Delacroix to Vincent Van Gogh had passed over its steep slopes. Several of the Impressionists had found a home in its circuses and cabarets. Starting in 1904, Picasso’s Paris headquarters was a hovel of a studio, without gas or electricity, known as the Bateau-Lavoir, so named for resembling the laundry washbasins used along the Seine.

“To a greater extent than any time since the Renaissance,” wrote the historian Roger Shattuck of Paris at the turn of the century, “painters, writers, and musicians lived and worked together and tried their hands at each other’s arts in an atmosphere of perpetual collaboration.” In his first decade in Paris, Picasso absorbed every drop of the city’s knowledge spillover. He especially adapted innovations from other artistic fields. From non-Western sculpture to experimental writing, music, and dance, Picasso found new ideas for his paintings.

The painter’s earliest friend in Paris was the art critic and poet Max Jacob, who exposed him to the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine during some previous visits to the city. Picasso’s Blue Period of 1901–1904, in which he painted only in somber tones, was influenced by the mood of the Symbolist poets. Picasso then synthesized the singularly strange and groundbreaking Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 by fusing African masks, which he may have seen at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, with influences from Iberian statuary and the paintings of Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, and El Greco. From a further analysis of Cézanne, whose work was surveyed in the Salon d’Autumne of 1905, a year before he died, Picasso found a new way to model pictorial space. He incorporated Cézanne’s technique with the literary innovations of friends like the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and turned painting into “a form of writing,” as his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler described the development of Analytical and Synthetic Cubism between 1908 and 1914.

The other great Cubist innovator, Georges Braque, described his relationship with Picasso as “two mountain climbers roped together.” In reality, Picasso was roped to every artistic innovator the city had on offer. Aside from Braque and his Spanish protégé Juan Gris, Picasso’s closest friends and influences in the Bateau-Lavoir were not painters. Apollinaire, Jacob, and the poet and critic André Salmon were the charter members of the Bande à Picasso. The artist even saw fit to write “au rendez-vous des poètes” in chalk on his studio door.

In 1912, Picasso made a different sort of discovery. The knowledge spillover of Montmartre was drying up just as another artist neighborhood was taking shape. Across the other side of town, connected by the new Number 12 Nord-Sud metro line but a world apart, the Left Bank neighborhood of Montparnasse was already humming with artistic activity when Picasso closed the door on Montmartre, never to return. By the time Picasso moved to Montparnasse, it had already become the new modern neighborhood, and the innovation-minded artist had no choice but to relocate. The dealer Kahnweiler found him his first space there, on the Boulevard Raspail.

Apollinaire described the emerging difference between the two neighborhoods in this way. Montmartre was “full of fake artists, eccentric industrialists, and devil-may-care opium smokers. In Montparnasse, on the other hand, you can now find the real artists, dressed in American-style clothes. You may find a few of them high on cocaine, but that doesn’t matter: the principles of most Parnassois (so called to distinguish them from the Parnassians) are opposed to the consumption of artificial paradises in any shape or form.”

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the picturesque charms of Montmartre had flooded the neighborhood with tourists, pleasure seekers, and painters working in the un-innovative style of Maurice Utrillo. For the old-fashioned plein-air painter, the brand-new neighborhood of Montparnasse was far less attractive—a work in progress, with wide streets and empty lots—but it was perfect for the Modernists in their studios. “It wasn’t picturesque like Montmartre. I think Montparnasse was the opposite—rather dull and unfinished,” said the art historian Kenneth Silver in an interview. Silver, who appears in Paris: The Luminous Years, is mounting an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum on Modernism between the wars, called “Chaos and Classicism.”

What it lacked in charms Montparnasse made up for with ample space for knowledge spillover. A ring of new, large cafés at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail became the watering hole and town square for a growing avant-garde. First made popular by a band of German intellectuals who became known as the “domiers,” including Wilhelm Uhde, Richard Goetz, and Alfred Flechtheim, these cafés—the Dome, the Coupole, the Rotonde, and the Select—served the same innovative function that the Cedar Tavern did for New York’s Abstract Expressionists. They provided especially efficient venues for spillover.

“It was extremely strategic . . . a military placing of avant-garde,” notes the art historian Romy Golan in Paris: The Luminous Years. “Those cafés become the place where artists meet. They are sitting in the cafés, drawing in the cafés on these wide sidewalks, and that is unique to Paris.”

Since the artists of Montparnasse often lacked toilet and kitchen facilities in their studios, they had little choice but to rub shoulders with one another in the cafés. “In the large cafés, small bistros, cheap restaurants, and art academies of Montparnasse,” said Apollinaire, the modern artists of Paris found “a substitute for the steeper slopes of Montmartre.”

The studio hub of Montparnasse served a similar function. Here a building known as La Ruche—literally, “the beehive”—provided eighty studios and two hundred beds arranged in the round. The main rotunda had been the wine pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, beside Eiffel’s new tower. A sculptor of funerary monuments relocated the building to Montparnasse in 1902.

Here the most striking variety of different nationalities came under one roof. Austrians, Russians, Scandinavians, and Americans all followed the Germans to Montparnasse. “There was a vast migration of Eastern European artists,” says Silver, “and it coincided precisely with the moment when things shifted from Montmartre to Montparnasse.”

Indeed, the residents of La Ruche were mostly Eastern European: Marc Chagall, Soutine, Jacques Lipchitz, Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine, or from Italy: Amedeo Modigliani and Ardengo Soffici. Soffici describes the international scene of the studio house as comprising “Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Russians, Englishmen, Americans, German sculptors and musicians, Italian modelers, engravers, fakers of Gothic sculpture, assorted adventurers from the Balkans, South America and the Middle East.”

Chagall similarly remembered his own stay at La Ruche: “While in the Russian ateliers an offended model sobbed, from the Italians’ came the sound of songs and the twanging of a guitar, and from the Jews debates and arguments. I sat alone in my studio before my kerosene lamp. . . . Down below and a little way off, they are slaughtering cattle. The cows low and I paint them.”

“I think of 1910 as the moment when Montmartre is finished,” says Silver of the rise of Montparnasse. “Modigliani arrived 1909. Picasso in 1912. The scene shifts towards the international, and Picasso was the perfect symbol of that, because he is not French.” Montparnasse hosted an avant-garde collective that was dominated by foreigners. The sport of American boxing took the place of the circus and cabaret in captivating the interest of the avant-garde. Even the collector and writer Gertrude Stein, another resident, attended the matches, while the eccentric Cocteau liked to splash in the athletes’ leftover bathwater. As foreign style replaced bohemian influences, Picasso went on to design stage sets for the Ballets Russes and the exiled impresario Serge Diaghilev.

For Picasso, the rewards of knowledge spillover were more than artistic. A Paris auction of 1914, on the eve of the First World War, demonstrated it could be profitable as well. A decade before, a group of investors called the Peau de l’Ours pooled their money and began purchasing Modernist work. As planned, they then unloaded their purchases at a high-profile sale at the Hôtel Drouot, a major Paris auction house. Of all of their investments, Picasso’s work showed the greatest returns: His Family of Saltimbanques purchased in 1909 for 1,000 francs, sold in 1914 for 12,650 francs. Spanish and American papers picked up on the sale, adding to Picasso’s growing fame. The artist made 4,000 francs from the auction for himself. From the ideas in the air of Paris, Picasso out-innovated everyone during his first decade in residence, enriching the art of the twentieth century along with himself. (As a Spanish national, unlike many of his fellow artists, Picasso continued to thrive through both world wars by pledging his loyalties to his own artistic production.)

The swift evolution of the Parisian avant-garde at the turn of the century, embodied in the innovations of Picasso, was not the linear progression of painterly style but the result of a knowledge spillover from an array of artistic, historical, and nationalistic influences.

It owed less to French style and everything to French democracy and its civic life, where personal liberties could be enjoyed in open cafés. In fact, by the start of World War I, French taste turned against the Modernists, who came to be viewed as unpatriotic and foreign—and by and large they were. Paris provided the framework for a band of innovators to develop their products by sharing their ideas in its restaurants, boulevards, and studios, but the School of Paris was underwritten by foreign enrollment. The nationalism of the First World War and the Nazi occupation of the Second finally put an end to Paris’s diverse artistic scene and the artistic innovations that spilled out of it.