He was 18 years old when he first arrived in Paris, wide-eyed and hungry, come to see the World's Fair of 1900. His name was Pablo Picasso, and the city would change him forever. Not long after that first visit, his closest friend, Carlos Casagemas, took his own life in a Parisian café. The grief was devastating. It pushed Picasso into what we now call his Blue Period, those haunting, cold canvases soaked in sorrow.
He eventually settled in Montmartre, at a crumbling studio building called the Bateau-Lavoir. Twenty-five people sharing a single water tap. No electricity, no heating, a latrine out in the garden. And yet, until the very end of his life, Picasso called it the place where he had been happiest.
That contrast, raw poverty and explosive creativity, is at the very heart of who he was.
And now you're standing in front of a 17th-century mansion in the Marais, the Hôtel Salé, home to the Picasso Museum. Inside, over 5,000 works wait for you, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, photographs. The full arc of a life that never stopped reinventing itself.
Sources. Story: https://www.cntraveler.com/activities/paris/musee-picasso-paris https://parisjetaime.com/eng/culture/musee-national-picasso-paris-p3516 https://www.sothebys.com/en/museums/musee-picasso Photos: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra from Paris, France, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons | Door Jean Cocteau - Modigliani Institut Archives Légales, Paris-Romehttps://web.archive.org/web/20090225224048/http://museothyssen.org/thyssen/exposiciones/WebExposiciones/2008/modigliani/fundacion/fundacion9_ing.html, Publiek domein, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4766641
