Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  Adieu! I am about to leave France, to finish my novel.—Baron Ignace d'Ormesan.

  There was a rueful sort of chivalry and irreverent humor in these missives to the Paris-Journal, but the French police were not amused. The “baron” reveled in being the center of the biggest story in France and was leaving a trail as deliberately as Hansel and Gretel.

  For the first time since Mona Lisa vanished, Parisians had cause to be optimistic. Prefect Lépine believed that the same ring of international art thieves was behind both Louvre thefts—L'Affaire des Statuette?, and L'Affaire de la Joconde. If he could collar the baron and his colleagues, the hunt would be over and the lost Leonardo would return to the Louvre. The print had barely dried on the morning paper when Lépine's men had compiled a complete dossier on Baron Ignace d'Ormesan. Le Petit Parisien reported: “The police now have a real clue to the thief of la Joconde.”

  The notorious Mona Lisa thieves were not the usual suspects.

  ∗1 The first radio programming for the French public did not begin until December 1921. Radiola, the first private radio station in France, began to broadcast in 1922.

  ∗2 Before photography, there were occasional sketches and caricatures.

  ∗3 Artists were as besotted as poets. In the 1840s, Aimee Brune-Pages's canvas Leonardo Painting the Mona Lisa sold for two thousand francs, a high price.

  ∗4 Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa.

  NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  APOLLINAIRE IN PICASSO'S STUDIO Shortly after moving from le bateau-lavoir to a new studio-apartment on Boulevard de Clichy, Picasso photographed Apollinaire there. (Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. © ARS, New York/Museé Picasso)

  PAINTING BY MARIE LAURENCIN, GROUP OF ARTISTS, 1908 The prime suspects were as shocking as the heist—two young Turks of the modern art movement, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painter Pablo Picasso. The Paris police suspected they were ringleaders of an international gang of art thieves. Shown here with their “molls” are (left to right) Picasso; Fernande Olivier; Apollinaire, looking oddly like Gertrude Stein; and Marie Laurencin, who painted the “gang of four.” Marie sold the work to Gertrude Stein. It was her first sale. (Marie Laurencin, French, 1885-1956. Group of Artists, 1908; oil on canvas, 25½ × 31⅞ inches (64.8 × 81 cm.). The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, BMA 1950.215.

  PICASSO AND FERNANDE Picasso and Fernande Olivier, his first mistress-muse, in Montmartre in 1906. Picasso would call this youthful period the happiest years of his life. (Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Museé Picassso/Art Resource, New York)

  APOLLINAIRE IN HANDCUFFS Apollinaire, arrested and in handcuffs, is brought before Judge Drioux. Apollinaire felt publicly humiliated by his ordeal.

  I

  IN A SUMMER OR UNUSUALLY HOT DAYS, September 2 was a record-breaker. In Paris, the temperature exceeded ninety-seven degrees, and four people died. But the arts editor of the Paris-Journal, André Salmon, remained cool. He spent the morning closeted in his office with detectives from the Paris Prefecture, who were demanding information on Baron d'Ormesan. Salmon's rebuff was courteous and couched with sincere regrets. He was bound by professional ethics not to reveal his sources.

  The investigation of the Louvre thefts was turning as hot as the weather. The front page of the Paris Herald announced: POLICE MAY HAVE CLUE TO MISSING MONA LISA. Prefect Lépine hinted that a “coup de theatre” was imminent. Although Alphonse Bertillon's criminal records turned up no information on Baron Ignace d'Ormesan, he was a familiar name to the Parisian literati. D'Ormesan was a fictional character in L'Hérésiarque et cie, a collection of stories nominated for the country's most prestigious literary award, le Prix de Goncourt. The police were soon knocking on the apartment door of the baron's very real, very voluble creator, Guillaume Apollinaire.

  In the seven years from 1905 through 1911, the genesis story of modern art was being written. Pablo Picasso was its genius; Guillaume Apollinaire was its impresario. A flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur, he enunciated the modernist creed, adopting the Marquis de Sade's maxim “In art, one has to kill one's father.” What Ezra Pound was to poets, Apollinaire was to painters. He was their catalyst, theoretician, and evangelist. Urging the destruction of all museums “because they paralyze the imagination,” he championed Picasso “as a young god who wants to remake the world.”

  Never one to avoid an argument or keep an opinion to himself, Apollinaire had been uncharacteristically silent since Mona Lisa's disappearance. Although it was the most sensational story of the summer and he was a frequent and prolific contributor to many publications, he wrote only one article about the theft. In a column in the paper L'Intransigeant three days after the disappearance, Apollinaire praised the painting and damned the museum:

  The Mona Lisa was so beautiful that her perfection has come to be taken for granted. There are not many works of which this can be said. But what shall we say of “The guard that watches the gates of the Louvre”?

  The pictures, even the smallest, are not padlocked on the walls, as they are in most museums abroad. Furthermore, it is a fact that the guards have never been drilled in how to rescue pictures in case of fire. The situation is one of carelessness, negligence, indifference.

  Apollinaire's declaiming against a museum was nothing new. He had signed a manifesto that threatened to “burn down the Louvre.” But complimenting Mona Lisa was a surprise and an about-face. As the crown jewel of the Louvre collection Mona Lisa had become a symbol of the stale museum art that, the avant-garde believed was stifling new ideas and new talent. She was the archetype of the dead masterpieces they were rejecting and an obvious target for their attacks.

  Apollinaire and Picasso were in the vanguard of the impassioned battles being waged in Paris over the direction of the arts. They were friends and leaders of a group loosely known as la bande de Picasso. Familiar from Montmartre to Manhattan as “the Wild Men of Paris,”∗1 Picasso's gang of painters and poets were the outlaws of traditional art, riding into town like the cowboys of the Wild West to slay the Renaissance gods. Young, brilliant, and ruthlessly ambitious, they strutted through the cobblestone streets of Montmartre and filled the cheap cafes, defining themselves as well as anew creative idiom, breaking the rules to free art from art history. Much of their art and their antics were “shocks of discovery”†2 committed to roil the status quo. More has been written about Bloomsbury, the London-based group of artists and writers, though it was less expansive and more inbred—a hothouse where la bande de Picasso was a wild garden. Passions were rude and rowdy. Ideas had the power to shock, and epiphanies came thick and fast.

  After two frustrating weeks, Lépine believed he had cracked the case. In la bande de Picasso he had found the international ring of art thieves he had been hunting. Lépine was convinced that Apollinaire was one of the nefarious “colleagues” the baron had implicated in the Mona Lisa heist—“making this hullabaloo in the painting department.”

  To the police, the case was persuasive. Seizing the Mona Lisa was an insolent act in what Apollinaire called “the endless quarrel between Order and Adventure.” It was a declaration of independence. What more dramatic way to kill your father than to target the most famous painting by the most provocative Renaissance master?

  The Picasso “gang” had been lionized as romantic renegades. When the police identified them as a ring of “foreign thieves and swindlers who had come to France to plunder its treasure,” escapades once excused as careless exuberance assumed sinister overtones. Tales circulated of the Picasso gang's coming back from the cafés of Montmartre late at night, frequently drunk, shouting, singing, and declaiming in the squares. Picasso always carried a Browning, and he would wake up the neighbors by shooting it into the charged air.

  Stunned by the greatest art theft in history, Paris was shocked anew to learn that the prime suspects were the firebrands of the modern-a
rt movement.

  2

  THE VILLAGE OR CéRéT squats against the high Pyrenees on the French side of the border. Its spirit is Catalan, its cuisine is French, which made cérét the perfect marriage for the expatriate Spanish painter and his group of poets, artists, and amours. They had arrived in the remote village early in August bearing life's few essentials: rolls of canvas, sketchbooks, oils, inks, and a portable paraffin stove. After commandeering the entire first floor of the Hotel du Canigou, they settled in for the summer to invent cubism. Picasso arrived first in mid-July; Braque followed in August. Later, he would say that he and Picasso had worked so closely they “were roped together like mountaineers.”

  The Paris papers came late to cérét,∗3 so the vacationers were always two or three days behind the news. Over morning coffees enjoyed in midafternoon, they caught up with accounts of the heist with an air of bemused detachment. The Paris-Journal arts editor André Salmon was their friend and neighbor, and they suspected his ironic pen in the early articles on L'Affaire de la Joconde. That the Louvre was a sieve was not news to them, and they had no sympathy for it. They dismissed museums as “graveyards of history.”

  “We have infected the pictures in museums with all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit,” Picasso would say. “We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. We have been tied up to a fiction, instead of trying to sense what inner life there was in the men who painted them.”

  Among the avant-garde writers and artists, pinching Mona Lisa was viewed with irreverent humor. Inspired by the theft, Max Jacob, an entertaining mystic, misogynist, poet, and painter, composed a prose poem about an alarm clock whose inner workings were Mona Lisa's soul. By day, it stopped and started in time with her hapless adventures and the erratic progress of the investigation.

  The excitement over the Thief's confession drifted slowly south toward cérét. Since Picasso sent a rushed but carefree postcard to Apollinaire on August 31, the Paris-Journal of August 29 probably did not arrive until September 1 at the earliest. When it did, bemused detachment turned to panic. Picasso set out immediately for Paris, leaving Braque to pick up the pieces of their aborted vacation.

  3

  AS CITIES GO, Paris is compact, spiraling from the center out in concentric circles like a snail shell, with the River Seine flowing through its center. Which came first, the snail shape of the city or Parisians’ fondness for escargots, is an open question. Montmartre, one of the highest of the city's districts, is set on a butte, an isolated hill formed by the limestone outcrop-pings of the ancient town. The streets are steep and narrow, like the stairs in a turret, and at the top, rising like an enormous meringue, is the white éminence of the church of the Sacré-Coeur. Although construction was at a standstill in 1911,∗4 its dominance was already ensured.

  Before the scene shifted to the Left Bank, Montmartre was a mecca for struggling artists. Not yet a picturesque tourist attraction, it was a down-at-the-heels quarter where rents were low and nights were lively. Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, and Renoir had lived and worked there. Now a new generation crowded into the same studios—an eclectic mix of artists, writers, and the occasional anarchist.

  Picasso lived at Renoir's old address, 13 Rue Ravignan, a ramshackle wooden tenement carved out of the southwestern slope of the butte. The place was known as le bateau-lavoir because it resembled one of the floating river barges where the washerwomen of Paris laundered the linen of the well-to-do, each article acquiring the yellow hue of the Seine. It was in Picasso's single studio room in le bateau-lavoir that the “gang” congregated.

  Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of the early dealers in the new art, described the squalor: “There was dust on the drawings and rolled-up canvases on the caved-in couch. Beside the stove was a kind of mountain of piled-up lava, which was ashes…. It was there that he lived with a very beautiful woman, Fernande, and a huge dog named Frika.” Picasso used the stove for heat, an earthenware bowl for a sink, and a rusty frying pan for a chamber pot. He would call those youthful days the happiest years of his life.

  “His blue electrician's outfit, his sometimes cruel humor, the strangeness of his art were known throughout Montmartre,” Apollinaire wrote. “His studio, crammed with canvases of mystical harlequins and drawings underfoot everywhere that anyone had a right to carry off, was the rendezvous for all the young artists, all the young poets.”

  In those youthful days, Picasso exuded the intensity of a matador and the swagger of a gangster. He was “short, dark and uneasy in a way that makes you feel uneasy yourself,”∗5 with a thatch of black hair curving down over one enormous dark eye. His eyes were as black and round as eight balls and just as unrevealing.

  In the bohemian haunts of Montmartre, Picasso was a charismatic, often contentious presence—jealous and explosive about both his art and his almond-eyed mistress Fernande Olivier. While he painted, Fernande lounged languorously nude and catlike on the mattress that passed for their bed, daubing on expensive perfume, which was her passion, absorbed in the Katzenjammer Kids. They would argue over who would read the American comics firsts.†6 The Katzenjammer Kids was their favorite strip.

  Fernande was one more artifact amid the chaos of Picasso's studio—Alice B. Toklas described her as “superbly decorative,” like “an oriental odalisque.” Beside the small, dark Catalan, the statuesque Fernande was a tawny Amazon, auburn-haired and green-eyed. Heads turned when she entered a room. Born Amélie Lang, Fernande had a miserable history of abuse, a loveless childhood, and a failed early marriage. Like everyone in their group, she was inventing herself, leaving behind Amélie Lang and becoming “la belle Fernande,” Picasso's first grand’ amour. He was so wildly jealous that he locked her in his studio, never allowing her to go out without him. He would take the string bag and do the grocery shopping himself.

  When the Picassos did venture out, they were in costume. Fernande in the dramatic hats she adored, looking as if she had wandered off a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas, and Picasso in pegged trousers, brandishing a walking stick like a sword. Apollinaire in his habitual three-piece British suit, and Max Jacob in monocle and a top hat he shared with Picasso, would join them. Their dress was deliberately eccentric. In their person and personality, the friends assumed a studied singularity, a carefully chosen otherness. They were a new breed of artist, and they affected a costume to fit the role.

  Fernande's memoir, Picasso and His Friends, is the best picture of that band of artistic brothers, the sometimes ignoble few who formed the Picasso gang. They were a fluid group of artists and writers that at any time included Georges Braque, André Derain, Marcel Olin, Maurice Raynal, Ramon Pichot, André Salmon, André Breton, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, and Pierre Reverdy At the center were Picasso and Fernande; Apollinaire and his lover, the painter Marie Laurencin; and Max Jacob, their court jester performing to hold his place at the round table. He called Fernande's book “the best mirror of the cubist Acropolis.”

  The years 1905 to 1911 were a magical time of intense creation and extraordinary collaboration. Picasso emerged from his melancholic Blue Period and entered his Rose Period. He took the first steps toward cubism and painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the controversial work that, more than any other, revolutionized art and implicated him in l'Affaire des Statuettes.

  Although Fernande was protective of Picasso until the end of her life, she was an astute mistress-muse, and from the reflections in her looking glass, a modernist creation story emerges. In those happy days, Picasso would sell his art by the armful—a hundred francs (then worth about $20) for a stack of drawings; two thousand francs for thirty canvases. A few dealers—notably Ambroise Vollard, astute and fair, and Clovis Sagot, an unscrupulous ex-clown who sold art out of an old apothecary—were scooping up Picasso's harlequins and saltimbanques for the price of a meal. With youth, brilliance, and a rare bonhomie, money was a luxury, and freeloading was a way of life. “You could owe money for years for your paints and canvases and r
ent and restaurant and practically everything except coal and luxuries,” Picasso remembered.

  His fortunes began to change when the Steins discovered him. Leo and Gertrude Stein, a brother-sister act from America, were in Paris then, auditioning for immortality. (In 1911, Alice B. Toklas, small and wary, was a new addition to their ménage.) The Steins’ money came from the Omnibus Cable Company of San Francisco. Although not the fortune of a Frick or Carnegie, it was sufficient to bankroll modern art.

  Gertrude dressed in a brown corduroy tunic and sandals like a distaff Friar Tuck, and like the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, she and Leo came to the rescue of starving artists with generous patronage and platters of jambon and baguettes. In their studio at 2 7 Rue de Fleurus, a short stroll from the Luxembourg Gardens, they presided over Saturday soirees that drew an eclectic company of painters, poets, and hangers-on. Although the neighborhood was more shabby than chic, if it were Versailles in the heyday of the Sun King, it could not have attracted a more lustrous, or soon to be lustrous, crowd.

  The Steins were as eccentric as the artists they nurtured—the needle-thin and needling pedant Leo, and Gertrude, the monolithic, self-aggrandizing writer. He had pretensions to erudition, she to genius. She recognized it in Picasso and lusted for it, embracing him perhaps in the hope, conscious or subliminal, that his luster would burnish her. In the early years on the Rue de Fleurus, the main draws for the penniless painters and poets were the free food and wine. By 1911, the star attractions were the art that the Steins were collecting, which by then covered the walls floor to ceiling—and the looming talents: Henri Matisse, a courtly éminence grise at forty-two, and Picasso, the rude contender.