Paris in the Belle Époque arrived in Montmartre at the turn of the century. Drawn by the reputation of Paris as the world capital of art, Pablo Picasso came from Barcelona in 1900 to share an apartment with the poet Max Ernst and began by painting the cabarets and prostitutes of the neighborhood. Amedeo Modigliani and other artists lived and worked in a building called Le Bateau-Lavoir during the years 1904–1909. In 1909, Picasso painted one of his most important masterpieces, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", in Le Bateau-Lavoir. Led by Picasso and Georges Braque, the artistic movement cubism was born in Paris. Henri Matisse came to
Crystal Cubism towards the end of 1916, with an art world still under the pressures of war, to show the parallels between the poetic theories of Guillaume Apollinaire of Max Jacob and himself in marking the burgeoning of a new era for poetry and artistic reflection. In "Nord-Sud" Reverdy, with the help of Dermée and Georges Braque, exposed his literary theories, and outlined a coherent theoretical stance on the latest developments in Cubism. His treatise "On Cubism", published in the first issue of "Nord-Sud", did so perhaps most influentially. With his characteristic preference for offense rather than defense, Reverdy launched an attack