The Fish Monger and the $40 million dollar Painting
What does a fish monger and a $40 million-dollar painting have in common? Where these two things intersect is with one gentleman: his name is Frédéric Gérard or Frédé.
Frédé was a real eccentric character. On any given day around 1900, you could find Frédé walking up and down the streets of Montmartre with a cart, and in that cart, you could either buy two things from him: paintings or fish.
Frédé parléd his success from his art-dealing fish cart into a bar called Le Zut. It was this sort of strange, illegal, off-the grid bar, but it attracted a lot of artists around at the time like Modigliani and Picasso. When he traded it up from that into a place called Au Lapin Agile, which translates for “The Adult Rabbit”, he commissioned a number of artists, including Picasso, to create some works for the bar.
If you look at the painting itself, Picasso is pictured as this Harlequin character, something that he would paint over and over again –not only throughout this period, the Rose Period– but later throughout cubism.
His friend Germaine Pichot is next to him in classic bohemian Parisian garments. And then Frédé is in the background with his guitar, his clogs, and a kind of wild looking hat. The painting humorously, is pretty meta. It’s Au Lapin Agile in Au Lapin Agile, or of a bar in a bar, where you could probably find Picasso, Germaine and Frédé drinking in that bar.
Picasso actually never received any money for this painting; he traded it for a bar-tab. Hopefully he got a lot of drinks for it. It was hung on Au Lapin Agile from 1905 to 1912. Then Frédé needed some money so he sold it to a German collector; the German collector sold it in the 1950’s to the Whitney family, famous of the Whitney Museum here in New York. Then in 1989 it came up in this spectacular sale, and at that time, it was really considered to be one of the great early masterpieces available on the market. It sold to the Annemberg family in 1989 for $40 million dollars. Quite a lot of fish! It was later donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is where it hangs today.
The bar Au Lapin Agile is still active in Paris, so if you find yourself either in Paris or New York, you can have a drink and cheers to one of the great unsung heroes of our history, Frédé.