| "Montparnasse, Montmarte and the Latin Quarter were full of hard-up, ill-housed, hungry, angry and dissatisfied students simmering on the verge of riot in the early 1890's. These were the years of assassinations and bomb explosions when the Parisian authorities felt seriously threatened by militant anarchism, a tendency to which every self-respecting student subscribed, including Matisse. Moreau's pupils responded to their professor's relatively permissive approach by rampaging out of control at intervals. The studio became notorious for the ferocity with which new students were humiliated (their torments ranged from being forcibly stripped, held down and spat at). In December 1892 the studio had to be closed down briefly because of bad publicity after an especially vicious outbreak of bullying. Six months later the police intervened to control a Bal des Quat'z'Arts which had got out of hand at the Moulin- Rouge, perhaps the first and only of these balls Matisse attended, disguised as an Arab in a bed sheet with a red headband and burnt-cork eye makeup (the fancy- dress Quat'z'Arts revelers were made up of male art students and their female models, who could expect to lose what little they wore in the first hour.) On this occasion Moreau's students, armed with revolvers, joined in the street fighting that engulfed the Latin Quarter for three days of police baton charges against barricades built from ripped-up paving stones, producing many injuries and one death." Excerpt
from Hilary Spurling's "The unknown Matisse”, pages 74-75
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