Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife

‘In the early pages you get a sense of the adventures to be had in Montmartre and Pigalle by a young man like Picasso in amongst gypsy troupes singing of wild nights and lost love, vagabonds, anarchists, absinthe, opium dens, dives alive with ideas. But as the book develops, the idea of “adventure” becomes much more to do with attitude, a radical mindset. The book’s title is taken from a poem by Apollinaire; he uses “adventure everywhere” in relation to risk takers pushing the boundaries of art and culture’- DAVE HASLAM Adventure Everywhere: Pablo Picasso’s Paris Nightlife, is the latest in Dave Haslam’s acclaimed Art Decades series. The book is published fifty years after Picasso’s death in 1973. Picasso in Paris in the 1900s was advancing the frontiers of art in a city vibrant with hedonism and creativity. Life after dark fascinated and inspired him. On the occasion of his first exhibition in Paris, a critic wrote that Picasso is an artist ‘who never believes the day isover, in a city that offers a different spectacle every minute’. In Adventure Everywhere, Dave Haslam portrays the world of drink, sex, music, drugs, art, and chaos that constituted Picasso’s nightlife. Picasso’s relationships – and debts – to poets and other artists are described; his misogyny is addressed; and no bar, cabaret club or dance hall is left unvisited in this vivid and intriguing account of how significant nightlife was in Picasso’s Paris, and how central in his art.