It is not clear exactly when Ravel first met Debussy. By the late 1890s the two had many common acquaintances, and their professional and social lives may well have casually brushed them across one another. Ravel had been deeply moved by Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, recognizing it for the revolutionary work that it was. For his part, Debussy was present, or at least heard about, the premiere of Ravel’s Sites auriculaires in 1898 and found it sufficiently interesting to ask its young composer for a copy of the manuscript.
Yet no actual meeting between the two seems to have occurred until sometime in 1900, when Debussy invited Ravel and several others to his home, where he played excerpts from Pelléas et Mélisande, the opera on which he had been laboring for seven long years. It was the beginning of a complex relationship, begun in friendship, that would link the two composers more closely in the public mind than either in the end would have preferred.
As a youngster, the future fashion designer Paul Poiret was acquainted with the Renault family, who—like the Poirets—owned a country house in Billancourt, southwest of Paris. The Poiret retreat would eventually become the property of the Renault auto works, but during these early years Billancourt still remained a tranquil escape for members of the prosperous bourgeoisie such as the Renaults and the Poirets.
Paul Poiret was only two years younger than Louis Renault but did not know him well. Poiret later recalled that “the Renault boys never showed themselves to those who went to visit their parents.” Instead they preferred to stay in their workshop, among “machinery, coupling rods and pistons.” Moreover, “if by chance one caught sight of them, they were covered with oil and grease.”12
This certainly was not something that the future fashion titan could or would enjoy. Paul Poiret, son of a Paris cloth merchant, had dreamed of women’s fashion for as long as he could remember. “Women and their toilettes drew me passionately,” he later recalled, remembering that he “went through catalogues and magazines burning for everything appertaining to fashion.”13 His father was alarmed by his spendthrift and dandyish son and apprenticed him to an umbrella-maker, where young Poiret was given the most menial jobs. To keep his spirits up, he pinched bits of silk that fell when the umbrellas were cut, pinning them to a small wooden mannequin that his sympathetic sisters gave him. From there, he began to design “fantastical ensembles,” some of which he eventually took on a dare to one of the leading Paris couturières, Madame Chéruit.
Madame Chéruit, a beauty who dazzled Poiret, was one of the first women to control a major Paris fashion house. She saw his designs, liked them, and paid him twenty francs apiece for them. “It was a gold mine,” Poiret enthused, and with this encouragement he began to visit the other great dressmaking houses, including Doucet, Worth, Rouff, Paquin, and Redfern. One day Monsieur Doucet proposed that Poiret should produce for him alone. The youngster, who was still in his teens, became head of the tailoring department. “I am putting you in as one throws a dog into the water to teach him to swim,” Doucet told him. “You must manage as best you can.”14 Poiret managed.
He soon learned the fine art of cultivating the patronage of leading actresses, using them to introduce and advertise his fashions on stage and off. He had always been enamored with the theater (“It was Paradise”),15 and now he had the opportunity to dress stars such as Réjane and Sarah Bernhardt. “I had stormed the ramparts on the shoulders of Réjane,” he later recalled.
It was an era of spectacular actresses and just as spectacular courtesans, the two categories frequently overlapping. Reigning supreme among Paris’s grandes courtisanes at the turn of the century was a flawless beauty with the acquired name of Liane de Pougy. Like her somewhat lesser rivals, Emilienne d’Alençon and Caroline Otero (known as La Belle Otero), Liane had experienced adventure en route to stardom, including stints at the Folies Bergère and two bullets permanently lodged in her lovely thigh (courtesy of a jealous husband in her past). Liane regularly held court at Maxim’s, where she and her similarly bejeweled rivals specialized in entrances on the arms of their latest conquests—men of great wealth, whether aristocrats, businessmen, or even the occasional crowned head (the Prince of Wales being the prime example of this species, much to his mother’s dismay). In this spirit, Paul Poiret now took a beautiful mistress, whom he took care to dress fabulously, and in her company he began to frequent the most chic cafés and theaters along that portion of the Grands Boulevards known as The Boulevard (from the Madeleine to Rue Taitbout, and encompassing the Opéra Garnier). It was an expensive lifestyle, but Poiret was earning good money (even though he spent it as rapidly as he earned it), and it helped establish his image as a fashion designer to watch.
After a spell at the House of Doucet, Poiret went to the venerable House of Worth, once patronized by the Empress Eugénie. There, following the death of Charles Frederick Worth in 1895, Worth’s sons (Gaston and Jean) carried on their estimable and profitable trade. Jean Worth continued in his father’s footsteps, but Gaston had a different vision. Today, he told Poiret, the House of Worth’s clientele no longer dressed exclusively in robes of state: “Sometimes,” he said, “Princesses take the omnibus.” But his brother, Jean Worth, refused to make concessions to modernity. “We are,” Gaston continued, “like some great restaurant, which would refuse to serve aught but truffles. It is, therefore, necessary for us to create a department for fried potatoes.”16
Poiret immediately grasped Gaston’s vision and signed on with Worth, but Jean did not like what he saw of Poiret’s work, even though it sold well. “In his eyes,” Poiret explained, “I represented a new spirit, in which there was a force (he felt it) which was to destroy and sweep away his dreams.”17
From the outset, Poiret had the same confidence of conquering Paris as had Picasso, only in different fields. In time, Poiret would indeed become known as Le Magnifique, or the King of Fashion. Yet it would not be until 1903 that he would establish his own fashion house and at last get to do things his way.
Chapter Two
Bohemia on the Seine
(1900)
From the outset, Picasso’s parents had never envisioned his departure for Paris as a permanent move. In fact, they had dug deep into their pockets to pay for his round-trip railway fare, leaving them little to live on for the rest of the month. But how often did such an honor come to a family—especially one in such modest circumstances as Picasso’s?
Born in 1881 in Andalusia, Pablo Picasso was the oldest child and only son of José Ruiz Blasco, a charming and easygoing artist and painting instructor who spent much of his life chatting in cafés and producing endless paintings of pigeons. Don José never was able to make enough money to support the family—a large one, which for years included Picasso’s maternal grandmother and two unmarried aunts. Yet what the father lacked in talent and drive, the son soon abundantly provided. Although little Pablo may not have been a genius from the outset, he showed sufficient promise to prompt his father to enroll him in a series of art schools. Here Pablo learned the basics and, by his early teens, was creating a flow of technically impressive although entirely conventional works. One of these, Last Moments—a sentimental painting of a priest attending a woman on her deathbed (which he later painted over with a masterpiece, La Vie)—was the one that gave him his entry to the Paris exposition.
Rue Cortot, Montmartre. © J. McAuliffe
Not surprisingly, Picasso quickly became bored with this kind of painting and found his art instruction increasingly stultifying. Fortunately for him, his father’s search for jobs had brought the family to Barcelona, where Pablo became a loyal Catalan and an enthusiastic member of Barcelona’s young and vibrant artistic community. By his late teens Pablo had turned his back on the conventional and assured artistic career that his father envisioned for him. It was now that the young man began to sign his works as Picasso rather than Ruiz—from his mother’s maiden name.1
In preparing
themselves for their journey to Paris, Picasso and Casagemas outfitted themselves in identical black corduroy suits with loose jackets and narrow pants, vented and buttoned at the bottom—evidently the latest thing in fashion for young Barcelonans, although in Paris it clearly marked them as foreigners. They promptly set out for Montparnasse, an emerging hub for artists in southern Paris, where they rented a studio in a building recommended by a friend. Yet after visiting another friend on the Butte of Montmartre, located on the far northern side of Paris, they immediately regretted this decision, having decided that Montmartre was where the action was. This friend convinced them to take over his apartment in a few days, after he returned to Barcelona. They agreed and, to climax an already-long day, settled up with the Montparnasse landlord and carted their luggage across Paris and up Montmartre’s steep Rue Lepic. There they temporarily settled into a dodgy hotel while waiting for their more permanent lodging to open up.
Once into their friend’s studio, the two newcomers wrote home to describe how hard they were working. “So long as there is daylight,” wrote Casagemas (with input from Picasso), “we stay in the studio painting and drawing.” Nighttime, of course, was a different matter, and Casagemas proceeded to paint a lively picture of Montmartre night life, including café concerts and drinking bouts. In conclusion, they enthused that their letter’s recipient must “rob, kill, assassinate, do anything to come.”2
In this letter, Casagemas listed the meager furnishings of their apartment, down to “a kilo of coffee and a can of peas.”3 What he did not mention were the three young women that he and Picasso found virtually in residence there. The three were models, in the parlance of Montmartre, and while they indeed modeled for artists, they also provided ready companionship for the two newcomers plus another friend from Barcelona who soon joined them. Germaine and Antoinette were sisters and spoke some Spanish, which was a help in communicating with the trio of Spaniards, especially with Picasso, who spoke no French. The third, Odette, spoke no Spanish but must have been a live wire. Attractive and promiscuous as well as easygoing about Picasso’s own promiscuity, she and Picasso quickly paired off, as did Casagemas and Germaine—born Germaine Gargallo but now known as Germaine Florentin, having casually acquired and disposed of a husband along the way.
Picasso was only dallying with Odette, but Casagemas soon fell passionately in love with Germaine. Unfortunately, he seems to have been an inadequate lover—at least by Germaine’s standards. Whether he was impotent, as has been conjectured, or merely overwhelmed by inadequacy in such close proximity to his macho hero Picasso, the relationship between Casagemas and Germaine became increasingly strained.
In the meantime, the trio of artists managed to stay solvent, partly by drawing on Casagemas’s resources (provided by his wealthy and indulgent parents) but also by selling drawings and paintings that they had brought with them. Of the three, Picasso was the most successful. Soon after arriving in Paris he introduced himself to Pere Mañach, a Catalan who had recently established himself in Paris as a dealer in modern art. Mañach was greatly taken by Picasso’s bullfighting scenes, and he was even more impressed when another art dealer, Berthe Weill, bought three of them from him for 100 francs. She in turn quickly resold these for 150 francs, prompting her to request a meeting with Picasso, where she took a look at his stock and made several more purchases.
Weill, who would become legendary in the modern art world, was just beginning her career as a dealer in modern art (she had recently opened her first gallery at 25 Rue Victor-Massé, at the foot of Montmartre, in what amounted to a bric-a-brac shop). In time she would become a staunch supporter of artists ranging from Matisse and Modigliani to Maurice Utrillo. Picasso was one of the first of the modern painters that she spotted. Most importantly for him, this first encounter prompted Pere Mañach to offer him a contract that would provide Picasso with a monthly payment of 150 francs. This seems to have been in exchange for Picasso’s entire output; yet given Picasso’s traditionally limited financial resources, this modest stipend promised for the first time in his life to give him a degree of financial independence.
Mañach sold Picasso’s remarkable painting of the Moulin de la Galette to one of the most forward-looking collectors of the day, Arthur Huc of Toulouse, for 250 francs—a princely sum for a work by the young artist. By this time Picasso would have been well aware of Renoir’s famous painting of the same subject, which then hung in Paris’s Musée du Luxembourg. Toulouse-Lautrec had also painted this scene, with an entirely different technique and sensibility. Yet Picasso, even at the age of nineteen, had no qualms about painting this celebrated spot, challenging these giants on their own ground by bringing a dark and threatening interpretation to the scene. Picasso never had qualms about his own worth.
Early on, amid this intense round of work and play, Picasso made his way to the Paris exposition, where he spotted his own painting (which he thought was hung much too high) and took in the exposition’s huge display of French art, including its large selection of modern works.4 He soaked up French art wherever he could, whether at the Louvre or the Musée du Luxembourg, which had become the state repository for recent French painting. He also checked out the many commercial galleries, especially those of progressive dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. He even managed to take the time to decorate the walls of his shabby Montmartre studio with a frieze of the temptation of St. Anthony—a subject that would periodically occupy him.
It was a heady experience, but Picasso had promised his family that he would return in time for Christmas, and he thought it important to bring Casagemas with him. Casagemas’s state of mind was worrying his friends, especially Germaine, whom he insisted was his fiancée—even though (to her bafflement and his evident frustration) their relationship was largely platonic.
Casagemas’s behavior definitely was disturbing. And it just as definitely signaled trouble ahead.
When Picasso arrived there, Montmartre still was “a real village, almost unknown to the uninitiated,” as the poet J. P. Contamine de Latour later recalled. The poet had lived there before the turn of the century with his friend the composer Erik Satie, and several decades later he nostalgically reminisced that “this was the real bohemian life, with its uncertainties and expedients, but free and happy.”5
Montmartre had remained outside the Paris orbit until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Baron Georges Haussmann, in his capacity as prefect of the Seine, undertook to reshape and modernize the City of Light. Haussmann created wide and spacious boulevards, uniform and gracious housing, and an array of expansive parks—all at the expense of the undulating terrain, winding streets, and ancient but shabby neighborhoods of Old Paris. Hammering his vision into reality, Haussmann in 1860 removed one of the two last walls that still enveloped Paris—an act that brought down the barrier between the city and many of the villages surrounding it. Officially and physically incorporated into Paris, Montmartre now became the city’s eighteenth arrondissement.6
Until then, the Butte of Montmartre had been predominantly rural, although poverty-stricken urbanization—the detritus of industrialization—was beginning to crowd in at its foot. The anything-goes atmosphere of the brothel-filled neighborhoods of lower Montmartre also fostered an array of nightlife that drew bourgeois pleasure-seekers northward from their more sedate quarters in the heart of the city. Cabarets proliferated, the most famous being Le Chat Noir and the Mirliton, while dance halls such as the Moulin de la Galette and the Moulin Rouge featured rowdy can-can girls and other delights.
The quarries that once tunneled deep into the steep hillside of the Butte for gypsum, or plaster of Paris, had closed years before, leaving place-names such as Place Blanche (recalling the white of gypsum) along with a treacherous network of quarries that destabilized much of the Butte’s southern face. Builders of the dazzling white Basilica of Sacré-Coeur (erected during the last part of the nineteenth century on the locally reve
red site of the 1871 Commune uprising) found it necessary to sink more than eighty massive stone pillars almost one hundred feet to bedrock in order to support the basilica’s bulk and weight. They succeeded in their daunting project, but the portion of Montmartre’s southern face directly below the basilica would remain scarred and desolate until Sacré-Coeur undertook to change this desert into the steeply pitched garden one sees today.
Up to the turn of the century, much of Montmartre’s poverty and the more raucous of its nightlife proliferated at its base, along the outer boulevards (Clichy, Rochechouart) and the Pigalle quarter, leaving the upper reaches relatively untouched. The presence of Sacré-Coeur at Montmartre’s peak probably had little to do with staving off this decidedly irreligious invasion, since Sacré-Coeur relied on the fervent devotion of supporters elsewhere. The Butte’s residents, who either were impious bohemians or staunch supporters of the bloody and failed Commune uprising, had heartily opposed the basilica’s construction from the outset, and most of them continued to ignore or despise it.
Life in Montmartre was undeniably gritty for the poets and artists who increasingly congregated there, drawn by its cheap rents and a growing community of like-minded bohemians. Yet it also retained some of the bucolic aura of its past. As Contamine de Latour recalled, “Once you’d climbed its rough steps, you felt as though you were hundreds of miles away from the capital. . . . Everything about it was rustic and peaceful. Streams ran down the middle of the streets, . . . and birds twittered in the luxuriant greenery that covered the old, ruined walls.”7
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 3