Brassaï’s memories and photographs of Picasso’s studio at 23, rue la Boétie:
“In the winter of 1932, when for the first time I crossed the threshold of his ‘studio’ at 23, rue La Boétie, where he lived for fourteen years, Pablo Picasso had just passed the age of fifty. If I have put ‘studio’ in quotation marks, it is because rue La Boétie was, in the guise of a studio, an apartment of four or five rooms transformed into a pigsty. The rooms, each with a marble fireplace surmounted by a mirror, were entirely emptied of furniture, but littered with stacks of paintings, cartons, wrapped packages, pails of all sizes…piles of books, reams of paper, bundles of sculpture molds, placed pell-mell across the floor and covered with a thick layer of dust….The doors between all the rooms had been removed, the apartment was transformed into a vast studio with several corners for the various activities of the painter. One walked on a floor carpeted with cigarette butts, long since deprived of any polish, coated here and there with splotches of paint. Picasso painted in the largest room, the most well-lit, with the Eiffel Tower in view…. Madame Picasso never came to this apartment. With the exception of a few friends, Picasso admitted no one to it. So the dust could fall where it would and remain there undisturbed, with no fear of the feather dusters of cleaning women.”
