Citroën’s discovery came at just the right time, coinciding with the early adoption of electric motors, which required highly efficient and quiet-running gear systems. Yet his business, although state-of-the-art, remained small-scale and customized, which meant that he was constantly in search of new clients. In addition, since his business was small, he had to serve as sales and marketing manager as well as chief engineer and production manager.
Nonetheless, Citroën had made a bold entrance into the world of manufacturing, and his double-chevron logo was already becoming a symbol for success.
The 1902 Paris–Vienna road race intentionally gave racers and their cars a new challenge by taking them through the Alps. Louis Renault and his brother Marcel were ready for the challenge, convinced that this course gave every advantage to their light automobiles.
The race began at four in the morning of June 28, just outside Paris. By the third day the racers were negotiating the steep and dangerous Arlberg Pass, where one mistake could send an unfortunate driver hurtling into the abyss. Drivers jettisoned extra weight, including doors and seats (which they had to return for, on foot), while Louis Renault’s mechanic constantly filled the radiator as its water boiled away. The descent was even more hazardous, since no one had previously put automobile brakes to such a test. Brakes caught fire, and racers hurled themselves out of their seats to keep from following their cars over the edge.
Louis Renault got through this set of adventures unscathed, but then he had the misfortune of crashing into a closed gate at a railroad crossing. After repairing the axle and replacing his wheel spokes with the crossbars from a chair, he set off again, only to be rear-ended by another contestant while stopping for a referee.
Marcel Renault, however, had better luck. After brilliantly negotiating the Arlberg, he decided to push his vehicle to the limit, passing all of his remaining competitors at speeds sometimes reaching nearly seventy miles per hour. He came in first, even ahead of the heavier vehicles, some of which had to rely on horses to pull them to the finish line. Impressively, Marcel had traveled even faster than the famed Arlberg Express, which was then considered the fastest train in Europe.
Word of Marcel’s success spread quickly, and sales for Renault autos poured in. From the Renault brothers’ point of view, there could be no better form of publicity.
Meanwhile, back in Paris, Hector Guimard was running into trouble with his employer, the Compagnie du Chemin de Fer Métropolitain de Paris, or CMP. When he and the CMP collided, he was supervising the placement of his entrances to the Métro’s new Line 2, which followed the semicircular path of the old Farmers-General wall around the northern side of Paris.
At first it was a question of money. Looking for a way to reduce its expenses, the CMP had taken steps to work directly with Guimard’s suppliers. The CMP had already antagonized Guimard by refusing to pay more than a portion of the percentage in fees that he claimed on materials—a typical practice for contractors, but which in this case amounted to a sizable expense that the CMP was unwilling to pay. Complicating matters were imprecise oral agreements and the fact that the CMP had hired Guimard without the support of Paris’s municipal council.
The CMP, acting under an earlier agreement, now claimed that Guimard’s projects belonged to it, to be directed as it pleased and by whomever it pleased. Guimard was aghast. How could his style, the “Style Guimard,” be implemented by anyone else? How could his project be summarily placed outside his control?
Now, with the question of artistic control as well as cold cash at stake, Guimard took action. Having been paid only half of the money he claimed at the end of 1901, when the final accounts for Line 1 were settled, he took action to block building sites for his entrances to Métro Line 2. This forced a by now thoroughly unhappy CMP to resort to temporary Métro entrances at additional expense. The CMP responded by suing Guimard.
Things were getting nasty.
Several years after Pelléas et Mélisande first appeared, the writer Jacques Rivière recalled his first impressions. He had been a student at the time, and he reminded the reader that for those who were sixteen to twenty when it first appeared, Pelléas offered “a miraculous world, a cherished paradise where we could escape from all our troubles.”11
The element of escapism that drew audiences to Debussy’s dreamy Pelléas et Mélisande also pulled in audiences for the magical films of pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès, a Parisian born in 1861, had been fascinated by magic acts since his youth. In 1888 he became the owner and chief creative force behind the Théâtre Robert-Houdin, specializing in dramatic and fantastical illusions. It was but a step to the new field of moving pictures, where the Lumière brothers led the way. Méliès immediately understood the importance of their invention, and after unsuccessfully trying to buy one of their machines (in which their films of less than one minute each were hand cranked through a projector), he bought a similar apparatus from another inventor, which he adapted on his own. Eighteen months later, he began to shoot films under the aegis of his own company, Star Film, located just outside of Paris—the first film company in the world. Soon, notables such as Thomas Edison and the Pathé brothers would visit this remarkable glass-walled and glass-roofed studio, where its technically adept magician wove celluloid magic.
Méliès’s films included documentaries, the primitive predecessors of the newsreels that would soon become part of the movie-viewing experience. But his specialty became inventive special effects, earning him the title of “Sorcerer” or “Magician.” He had been making and experimenting with the new medium of film for six years when in 1902 he made film history with his classic A Trip to the Moon, in which he rigged up a memorable scene of a spaceship hitting the man in the moon, square in the eye. Running at fourteen minutes and filled with state-of-the-art special effects, this was his most ambitious film to date. A Trip to the Moon drew admiring audiences in France and abroad—including Edison and others who unabashedly pirated this and other Méliès films.
While Méliès was making his mark on popular culture, Rodin was enjoying the fawning popularity that had come to him as he aged. His beautiful young friend Helene von Hindenburg was a favorite correspondent, but it was the young German poet Rainer Maria Rilke who was Rodin’s most important visitor that summer of 1902.
At first, Rodin scarcely noticed Rilke, who came to pay tribute and to interview the famous sculptor for a book he was writing. Rilke was searching for guidance in life from a man and artist such as Rodin, and he was thrilled to believe that he had found exactly the person to understand and guide him. Soon after their meeting, the young poet wrote Rodin, “It is not just to write a study that I have come to you, it is to ask you: how should I live?”12 Rodin rather perfunctorily told him to work hard and finish his book, and Rilke hastened to comply. When the book was published the following year, he sent a copy to Rodin. Because Rodin couldn’t read it (it was in German), he promptly set it aside. Rodin may have shrugged off this homage, but subsequently the two did begin an increasingly warm correspondence, and they would meet again. This time Rilke would have a much greater impact on the lauded French sculptor.
In the meantime, as Rodin was beginning what would turn out to be an important friendship with the German poet, across the Atlantic an eminent historian was about to establish Rodin’s reputation in America. Although Americans had proved an important and even lifesaving market for the Impressionist painters, especially Monet and Renoir, these artists had never challenged Americans’ uneasy relationship to sexuality as Rodin did. For years Rodin had failed to interest American buyers in his work, and as recently as 1893 no American owned a Rodin. That same year a prudish committee removed the sculptures that Rodin loaned Chicago for its Columbian exposition.
Rodin had thus entered American consciousness as a delectable but still forbidden fruit when the distinguished historian Henry Adams encountered his work, probably at the C
hicago exposition before the censors removed it. Once Adams saw more Rodin sculptures in Paris, he concluded that although they were unquestionably decadent, he had to have one. “Why can we decadents never take the comfort and satisfaction of our decadence?” he slyly wondered.13
Adams never cared for Rodin personally; he described him as “a peasant of genius; grasping, distrustful of himself socially; susceptible to flattery, especially to that of beautiful or fashionable women.” Especially distressing to one of Adams’s exacting nature, Rodin was “perfectly buzzy about his contracts; keeps no books or memoranda; forgets all he says, and has not the least idea of doing what is promised.”14 Still, Adams became one of Rodin’s most important backers. He never did buy a Rodin for himself, but he bought on behalf of friends, especially the wealthy Boston collector Henry Lee Higginson. With Adams’s encouragement, in 1902 Higginson became the first American to purchase a group of Rodin sculptures (two marbles and three bronzes).
By this time Rodin’s reputation throughout Europe was secure, and he even was gaining a toehold in America, that bastion of puritanism. Yet in his own homeland, matters remained considerably less satisfactory. The year 1902 brought an especially painful series of reminders of this state of affairs. Rodin may have successfully shown his Victor Hugo monument at the 1901 Salon, but when Paris celebrated the centennial of Hugo’s birth in 1902, it was another sculptor’s monument that went up in Place Victor-Hugo (16th), near the novelist’s last home.15 Even the monument scheduled for Hugo’s longtime residence in the Place des Vosges was by a sculptor other than Rodin (the sculptor being Georges Bareau).
When it came time to commemorate Baudelaire in Montparnasse Cemetery, José de Charmoy received the honor. Following Zola’s unexpected death, the commission for his monument went to Constantin Meunier. And, topping off the year’s round of snubs, Honoré de Balzac’s monument at long last was unveiled—not the splendid but controversial monument that Rodin had created, but a vastly inferior one by Alexandre Falguière, which after the latter’s death yet another sculptor completed.
Not surprisingly, Rodin found this series of obvious oversights disturbing. Nowhere in Paris but the Musée du Luxembourg was his work on view.
While Rodin was brooding on his inability to impress his fellow Frenchmen, Isadora Duncan was reveling in her growing success—which in her case meant leading a wild and crazy life and enjoying it thoroughly. She and her family had virtually adopted the American Mary Desti and her infant, Preston (whom Isadora’s mother nursed with spoonfuls of champagne when he became ill). Mary had escaped a bad marriage back in Chicago, and after her introduction to the Duncans, she and Isadora became inseparable. “At this moment,” she later wrote, “my heart went out to Isadora, and she still has it with her in eternity.”16
Isadora had begun to drink pretty heavily—favoring champagne, but not adverse to anything with alcoholic content. According to Desti, it was because Isadora had tipsily spilled whiskey on her sandals that she scandalously danced barefoot at a Paris recital attended by Georges Clemenceau. Clemenceau may or may not have noticed, but others did, and it made such a sensation that Isadora thenceforth made bare feet one of her trademarks.
In 1902 or thereabouts, Desti returned to Chicago with little Preston to marry an old flame, Solomon Sturges, who adopted Preston. Desti would move on to other husbands and lovers, but Preston Sturges would eventually become the famously creative writer and director of madcap films. According to his memoirs, Isadora’s and his mother’s lives were as screwball as his movies. It was a crazy life, but somehow, he survived.
Isadora did far more than simply survive. During the winter of 1902, she met Loie Fuller, the American dancer who had made a name for herself as a strikingly original dancer at the Folies Bergère. Using electrical lights, colored gels, and billowing silk to summon up visions of fire, butterflies, and huge flowers, Fuller was pushing toward new and more serious horizons, and in the process was exploring some of the same pioneering concepts of modern dance that Isadora was simultaneously making her own.
Fuller, the dancing flower, was also a shrewd businesswoman. Introduced to Isadora, who promptly danced for her and tried to explain what she was doing, Fuller was sufficiently impressed that she invited her to tour Germany with her company. Isadora, thrilled to be asked, accompanied Fuller’s troupe through Germany to Vienna, luxuriating in champagne dinners and lavish accommodations along the way. In Vienna, she danced in gauze so thin that the stunned audience at first thought she was naked. Naturally, her fame spread.
Just as naturally, Loie became jealous. As far as she was concerned, Isadora’s eccentricity was a pain in the neck, and when Isadora set off on her own for a tour of Hungary, Fuller was astounded. In Fuller’s view, she had set Isadora on her feet, and now Isadora was discarding her. It did not make for amiable relations between the two, but this was the last thing on Isadora’s mind as she set off for Budapest. It was here, in a run of sold-out performances, that she became a star. And it was here that she met Oszkár Beregi, who became her first lover.
Isadora’s evolution from “chaste nymph” to “wild and careless bacchante” was almost complete.17
Pablo Picasso returned a third time to Paris in October 1902, during which he unsuccessfully attempted to toss off a few crowd-pleasers, but overall stayed with the themes and somber palette of his Blue Period. It was a dismal winter, during which he first bunked with an impoverished Left Bank sculptor. He then moved to Boulevard Voltaire in the seedy eleventh arrondissement, where he shared a room with the thus-far unsuccessful artist and poet Max Jacob—a friend since Picasso’s 1901 Vollard exhibit.
Jacob was knowledgeable in art, literature, and philosophy, and he provided the French viewpoint on many subjects—opening new intellectual horizons for Picasso, who had previously associated almost solely with his Catalan and Spanish friends. Picasso would never speak French without an accent, but it was Jacob who taught him to converse more fluently in French, and it was Jacob who introduced him to the richness of French literature and culture.
Jacob had a wicked sense of fun and would later become the life of raucous Bateau-Lavoir parties, but during this bleak winter in the dingy area between the Place de la République and the Place de la Nation, there were no occasions for the two destitute friends to celebrate. Picasso’s later claim that he had to burn his paintings that winter to keep warm probably was an exaggeration. But his misery, and the misery of the subjects he painted, were real.
Chapter Five
Arrivals and Departures
(1903)
In the autumn of 1903, Matisse and his wife Amélie returned to Paris and to Matisse’s fifth-floor Left Bank studio at 19 Quai St-Michel, high above the Seine and Notre-Dame. Their sons remained with their grandparents, but Marguerite—now nine years old—stayed with her father and stepmother, serving as Matisse’s frequent model and learning to look after him and their small apartment while her stepmother worked (in an aunt’s hat shop) to earn the small income with which they got by.
Matisse was still desperate for work. Friends tried to help, but nothing seemed to go right for him. And then, late in autumn, his three-year-old son Pierre became deathly ill. Amélie traveled to Rouen to nurse him,1 and when he blessedly survived, brought him back to Paris where she and Marguerite could watch over him. Then, adding to their woes, Amélie’s sister Berthe in Rouen grew desperately ill. The upshot was that Berthe, along with Amélie’s parents (who had been living with her), moved to the south of France for her health.
In the midst of this unhappy turmoil, Matisse submitted two paintings to the first exhibition of the Salon d’Automne, a new and (at least as envisioned) more forward-looking organization that some of the more liberal among the older artists formed as an alternative to the official Salon and the increasingly stodgy Salon de la Société Nationale. Organized on the fly and under strenuous opposition from the other two salons, it turne
d out to please neither the traditionalists nor the avant-garde. It certainly did not please Matisse, who in any case was still trying to find himself.
Gertrude Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris. Photo Credit: Heritage / The Image Works. © Jewish Chronicle Ltd / HIP / The Image Works.
It was now, in the darkest days of Paris winter, that Henri Matisse began to dream of moving south to join his wife’s family in the Midi.
For the grand old Impressionist and neo-Impressionist Camille Pissarro, it was the same old story. “I have no luck in exhibitions,” he wrote his eldest son, Lucien. “In Berlin . . . the three figure paintings I showed were not sold; at Mâcon . . . nothing was sold; at Dieppe . . . nothing was sold; at Beauvais . . . nothing.” Soon after, he reported that he had sold two pictures to the Le Havre Museum (the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts), the first and only paintings purchased by any French museum during Pissarro’s lifetime. He sold an additional two paintings to collectors, but reported that he was “hardly besieged by demands!”2
Money had always been a pressing problem for Pissarro, who never achieved the same kind of success in his lifetime as had his colleagues Monet and Renoir. In 1903, at the age of seventy-three, he still was supporting his five adult children, including his eldest son, Lucien, who by then was a forty-year-old married father eager for parental help in buying a house.
Pissarro had always been generous with his time as well as with his limited funds, nurturing Cézanne and Gauguin and, more recently, Matisse early in their careers. He was an able and perceptive teacher, who imparted confidence as well as technique. When he encountered Matisse in the late 1890s, Pissarro had told him: “You are gifted. Work, and don’t listen to anything anyone tells you.”3 He then took Matisse to visit Caillebotte’s magnificent collection of Impressionist paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg, giving him an in-depth tutorial along the way. Subsequently, Matisse took to visiting Pissarro regularly, to talk and to learn—especially about Pissarro’s former pupil, Cézanne.
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