Le Bateau-Lavoir

The building at thirteen Rue Ravignan sits crooked against the hillside, a ramshackle wooden structure often mistaken for a common tenement. Its facade holds a series of small, dimly lit studios where the floorboards groan under the weight of crates and unwashed canvases. In nineteen oh four, Pablo Picasso moved into one of these cramped rooms. He painted the walls gray, lived with a stray dog and a monkey, and worked through the nights, sometimes burning his own furniture to keep the chill away.