Bistrot ! De Baudelaire à Picasso

Artists and watering holes have always gotten along. An important part of modern literature was written in cafés (during the period of Lights, the Verri brothers in Milano published a beautiful magazine called Il Caffè) but the relationship has never been as fertile as it was at the turn of the twentieth century when painters took over the front row. There was of course Picasso, who haunted the traditional cafes in Barcelona. But Forain, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Camoin found their inspiration there as well. The book accompanies an exhibition at the Cité du Vin in Bordeaux and brings back to life forgotten talents, from naturalist Léon Lhermitte to bohemian Bottini from Montmartre (the son of an Italian hairdresser and a Spanish laundress!), up to Pierre Roy, the Surrealist who died in Milano in 1950, who took great pleasure in promoting cheap wine through billboards posted on the cruisers of the French Line sailing off to America.

• Bistrot ! De Baudelaire à Picasso, directed by Stéphane Guégan, Gallimard/La Cité du Vin, 2017, 160 p., €29.