Each person, in turn, would dip the needle into the pot, extract a small glob of the sticky paste, and hold it over the flame of the oil lamp until it started to bubble, then carefully position the bowl of the pipe above it and inhale the smoke. The room was filled with the acrid aroma that Picasso once praised as “the most intelligent of all odors.”
As Olivier wrote in a July 1905 diary entry, the hours would slip by and the miseries of their surroundings would be transformed into an atmosphere of “heightened intelligence, subtlety, and delicious contentment,” in which “everything became beautiful and noble.”
The tenants of Le Bateau-Lavoir included a virtual Who’s Who of the nascent turn of the 20th-century French avant-garde. In addition to Picasso, the building was home to the painters Amedeo Modigliani and Juan Gris, the sculptor Pablo Gargallo, the novelist André Salmon, and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob. La nuit d’opium was a routine part of the lifestyle of the building’s bohemian denizens.

What, exactly, was the substance they were so enamored with? Opium, the mother of all opioid drugs, is the dried sap of the opium poppy. By the turn of the 20th century, it had been refined into stronger and progressively more dangerous formulations—including the liquid tincture, laudanum—as well as patent medicines containing the alkaloid salts codeine and morphine. A powerful new painkiller called heroin had just been introduced by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in 1898. All of these provided faster, more potent highs. But it was the elaborate rite of smoking opium that captivated Picasso and his circle, as did all things supposedly exotic, from Far Eastern art to African masks.
The drug was readily available at a number of fumeries in Montmartre. A brothel run by Georges Braque
’s mistress Paulette Philippi doubled as a private opium den on the Rue de Douai, behind the Moulin Rouge. Modigliani’s patron, Dr. Paul Alexandre, a firm believer in the power of opium and hashish to stimulate the imagination, ran another on the Rue du Delta. The most popular was the studio of George Pigeard, who’d given himself the fake title of “Baron,” and who is said to have turned Picasso on to the drug.
The young artist, then in his Blue Period, quickly became an aficionado. According to the first volume of John Richardson’s authoritative 1991 biography A Life of Picasso, he smoked opium several times a week between 1904 and 1908. Opium was more of a means of escape—and a love-potion for him and Olivier—than a creative tool for Picasso. He was no peintre maudit, like Modigliani, a cursed artist whose genius could only be liberated by drugs. Nor was he drawn to the drug out of a desire to follow his idol Rimbaud’s dictate to “derange all senses,” in order to achieve visionary flights of artistic fantasy.

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