Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  Marie Curie never paid much attention to food, and there were long periods when she was either too poor or too preoccupied to eat. Yet as her daughter recalled, on those few occasions when she did entertain, she tried her best, shopping in the Rue Mouffetard or the Rue d’Alésia for fruits and cheeses, and ordering ice cream from the neighborhood patisserie. On a more regular basis, since daughter Irène was a picky eater, Marie made winter trips across Paris in search of suitable apples and bananas for her child to eat.

  Yet in the autumn of 1904, Marie Curie craved caviar—just a tiny bit would do, but she longed for it. She was pregnant again, and this pregnancy was difficult, leaving her weak and depressed. The birth itself was long and painful, but on December 6, another daughter was born, whom she and Pierre named Eve.

  It would be some time before Marie recovered from this pregnancy and delivery, and her depression often sent her into black and dismal realms. Eventually, though, the new baby helped bring back her interest in life. Much as with her first daughter, Marie kept track of Eve’s developments in a notebook, and as the baby grew, Marie Curie was able to seize life—and her research—again.

  In the meantime, following the Curies’ Nobel Prize, the Sorbonne had at last found a position for Pierre in physics and (shortly before Eve was born) a position for Marie as chief-of-work in physics. No laboratory had as yet appeared for Pierre, but the two now moved their equipment from the old leaky shed to a new place in Rue Cuvier.

  Despite their rigorous lives, Pierre and Marie Curie permitted themselves occasional pleasures, including exhibitions of paintings and the occasional concert or play, where they preferred Ibsen to Rostand, and Eleonora Duse to Sarah Bernhardt. Even before their Nobel Prize made them famous, Loie Fuller—the so-called “light fairy”—had come knocking on their door, in the hope of adding a luminous radium dance to her many other stunning showpieces. The Curies were not encouraging—they had already discovered some of radium’s dangers—but the friendship remained, leading to other friendships.21

  Fuller, who was short and stout, had found fame at the Folies Bergère as a dancing flower and other exotics after discovering that long extensions of billowing silk elongated her stage presence and, with dramatic lighting effects, compensated for her otherwise unglamorous face and figure. She was a dynamo, and soon after meeting Rodin (her private theater at the 1900 Paris exposition was located near Rodin’s private exhibition), she organized an American exhibition of his work, along with pieces of her own, at the New York National Arts Club, billing it as “Miss Fuller’s Collection.” These were mostly plasters, although some marble and bronze versions also made the trans-Atlantic trip, and these Rodin sculptures, which included The Hand of God and The Thinker, gave New York its first up-close look at his work. The show lasted only a week, but Fuller managed to negotiate with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to display some of the works for a year. Much to her surprise and dismay, Rodin refused. As always, the crosscurrent of women in his life had led to backstabbing, and accusations of Fuller’s financial interest in the scheme contributed to the abrupt end of this venture.

  It was through Fuller, though, that Marie and Pierre Curie met Rodin, and subsequently visited him at his home in Meudon. Meudon had by this time become a kind of mecca for visiting dignitaries, and Count Harry Kessler had already gone to pay his respects. “Today,” Count Kessler reported, Rodin “was particularly talkative,” stating that Michelangelo had “freed him from classicism” and “opened his eyes to nature.” Kessler, who was a perceptive collector, asked how Rodin had discovered (or rediscovered) light and how to incorporate it in his sculptures. Rodin replied that he had hit on it by accident, over the course of fifteen years. “I wanted at first to follow nature as closely as possible,” he told Kessler. “But I noticed that it was necessary to exaggerate it a little. . . . Without that, the piece looks thin.”22

  Later, Kessler visited Monet at Giverny, where he found Monet’s auto waiting for him at the Vernon train station.23 Monet, Kessler noted, was somewhat similar in appearance to Rodin, being “short, wide, powerfully built with a large, almost white beard and frank, dark brown eyes.” He noted that Monet, however, “lacks entirely the sly glint of Rodin’s eyes.”24

  In the course of a marvelous Saturday, including lunch, Kessler asked Monet how it was that he came to use colors for the shadows, and Monet replied: “Ah well, it was by egging each other on, Renoir, [Frédéric] Bazille, and me.”25 And then, after pulling out a number of his London paintings, Monet remarked, “I have always said to English painters, ‘How is it possible that you who live here have never done this?’” He then answered his own question: “They make objects but not their atmosphere, that’s the problem.” When Kessler asked if Monet had ever wanted to paint the Thames at night, Monet replied that indeed he had, “but one is too tired when one has painted all day. And then it would be difficult without imitating Whistler.”26

  Somewhat later, Monet unwillingly relinquished further insights to Paul Durand-Ruel’s son, Georges, who asked which colors Monet used. “Is it really as interesting as all that?” Monet testily replied. “The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.” And then he added, “Anyway, I use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green, and that’s all.”27

  Picasso’s Catalan friend, Jaime Sabartès, recalled Picasso’s own palette from his early Paris days: “As a rule, the palette was on the floor; white, heaped in the center, constituted the basis of that type of mixture which he prepared especially with blue. The other colors brightened the contours.” Sabartès did not remember ever seeing Picasso holding the palette in his hand, as with most other artists, but instead, whenever he was composing his colors he was usually “leaning over a table, a chair or the floor.”28

  Picasso had returned to Paris in April 1904, with his friend Sebastià Junyer Vidal (who paid the rent), an assortment of works that Picasso valued, and a dog—a mongrel named Gat (Spanish for “cat”). Two more dogs, Feo and Frika, would follow, as would a mistress named Madeleine, who enigmatically slipped in and out of Picasso’s life. Vidal also slipped out, after a few weeks of roughing it in the Bateau-Lavoir, but Picasso was there to stay.

  The Bateau-Lavoir was essentially a wooden hillside tenement on Place Ravignan that had been inhabited by anarchists and impoverished bohemians since the late 1880s.29 It was seedy, but it was cheap, and Picasso gratefully took to it. His old friend Max Jacob may have been responsible for the name, as the ungainly building did faintly resemble a laundry boat; but however dismal the accommodations, its years of glory began when Picasso moved in, attracting a coterie of other artists and writers.

  Squalor and camaraderie were mixed in equal parts in the Bateau-Lavoir of the Picasso years. Max Jacob moved there, as would André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, and for a brief while, Amedeo Modigliani. Picasso used his slender new mistress, Madeleine, as a model for paintings and sketches as he moved from his Blue to his Rose period, and when Madeleine became pregnant, Picasso readily approved of an abortion. Madeleine no longer figured in his life, for he had just met another young woman, Fernande Olivier, who would become his first great love.

  It started with what looked on the surface like a simple state visit. In October 1903, the king of Italy made an official visit to France, and the French president, Emile Loubet, returned the compliment in April 1904. Yet as often happens in foreign affairs, this seemingly simple exchange of visits sent off ripples in many directions, and before long, all hell broke loose.

  The key element here was the pope—and the difficult relations between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy, which in 1870 had completed Italian unification by capturing Rome. In time, the Church would reluctantly agree to accept the results of 1870 in return for Italy’s recognition of the Vatican State, but in 1904 this loss of temporal power (Rome as well as the ear
lier loss of the Papal States) still rankled mightily in the Vatican, which refused to recognize either the Italian government or its conquest of Rome.

  By 1904, other nations had lost interest in the Roman question, especially since far larger issues loomed—most particularly in the east, after the Japanese navy sank the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, leading to the outbreak of war between these two rival empires. For France, this meant that its Russian ally would be preoccupied with Japan and no longer would be able to provide a check on Germany to its west—an arrangement that the French had held dear for more than a decade. This newly opened vulnerability made friendship with Italy of the utmost importance. Loubet went to Italy in April with the near-unanimous support of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Soon after, the papal curia sent a stiff note of protest to Paris.

  The Bateau-Lavoir, Paris. © J. McAuliffe

  Unfortunately, the Vatican decided to make this protest public, circulating it to all governments. Soon a copy appeared in the French press, and the French read there a series of insults that few could abide. It would have been difficult to have produced a more provocative communication, and the French promptly recalled their ambassador from the Vatican.

  French Catholics witnessed this display of pontifical ire with dismay. It was clear that the pope had given French anticlericals all the ammunition they needed to strike the last blow in the separation of Church and state.

  As Abbé Mugnier commented sadly in his journal, “All is going. End of a world!” And then he added, “But this world, has it been truly fruitful?”30

  April 1904 turned out to be a busy month for French diplomacy. Not only did President Loubet visit Italy, but the French and the British signed an alliance, the Entente Cordiale, which marked the formal end to almost nine centuries of intermittent conflict and the culmination of almost a full century of peace following the Napoleonic Wars.

  Various parts of the agreement settled long-standing disputes, whether in Egypt (where British hegemony was recognized), Morocco (where French hegemony was recognized), or several other portions of each nation’s respective empires. The Entente gave France a much-needed ally in addition to Russia, which now was preoccupied with Japan, while it gave previously isolated Britain some protection from the source that worried both nations—a potentially aggressive Germany.

  All-in-all, the year seemed to end satisfyingly for France: peace and prosperity, and the prospect for more in the year to come.

  Chapter Seven

  Wild Beasts

  (1905)

  Until the autumn of 1905, Henri Matisse was known among his colleagues as “Le Docteur,” an artist whose neatly bespectacled appearance was in direct contrast to the passionate artist within. It was at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, held in the eminently respectable Grand Palais, that the Fauvist (“Wild Beast”) revolution broke forth, with Matisse as its leader.

  What had happened? For years Matisse had battled his conflicting impulses, between commercially viable conservatism and something else, although he had not yet grasped what that something else was. Earlier that year he had helped organize the first official exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works, as part of the Salon des Indépendants—certainly an influence, for he later gave credit to van Gogh as well as Gauguin for his summer breakthrough. But it was the little fishing village of Collioure that dazzled him with color and light, and drove him to take more risks than ever before. Two summers in the south of France had exposed this northerner to vibrant color, and he responded ardently, even gratefully.

  Collioure radiated color and light, but it also exuded an element of savagery, for there was a fierce primitivism in this Catalan town that expressed itself in the explosive colors and contrasts of Fauvism, so unlike the gentler colors of the Impressionists. Embracing Gauguin’s insistence that art should primarily communicate emotion, Matisse forged ahead, daring all by rejecting art as representation, and producing works of shattering impact.

  Pablo Picasso at Montmartre, Place Ravignan (now Place Emile-Goudeau), Paris, circa 1904. Photo Credit: Adoc-photos / Art Resource, NY. © Art Resource, NY.

  The most important painting that he showed at that year’s Salon d’Automne was La Femme au chapeau (Woman in a Hat), a violently colored portrait of his wife that quickly became the most notorious entry in the show. Surrounded by others of similar audacity, including those by his friends Derain and Vlaminck, this explosion of color inspired one critic waspishly to compare these artists and their works to fauves, or wild beasts. And among the wild beasts, Matisse was the undisputed king.

  This coronation certainly did not make his life any easier; critics and crowds openly jeered these new works. Both his morale and his income had hit rock bottom when, shortly before the Salon closed, an unexpected offer arrived for Woman in a Hat. It was for much less than Matisse’s asking price, and although he was inclined to accept, his wife was not. They held out, and after several anxious days, the buyer at last came around to their price.

  The buyers were Leo and Gertrude Stein. Leo and Gertrude, Michael and Sarah had debated the picture—along with their Baltimore friends, Claribel and Etta Cone, wealthy sisters and close friends of the Steins who were, like the Steins, about to become major collectors of modern French art.1 Gertrude later insisted that it was she who spotted Matisse’s Woman in a Hat, but Sarah remembered that Leo first called it to her attention, and that she too was attracted to it. After the four considered buying it jointly, Leo put in a low bid, which (to the Steins’ surprise) Matisse rejected. Eventually Sarah and Michael would buy it from Gertrude, but it first went to Leo. It was “a thing brilliant and powerful,” Leo later recalled, “but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen. It was what I was unknowingly waiting for.”2

  Picasso did not participate in any of the official salons in Paris, and never would do so. Instead, he relied on his principal dealers (soon to become Ambroise Vollard, then Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler) and on the exhibitions they arranged for him in other major cities. In addition, he relied on a growing group of collectors. As he later observed, even though most of the poets and women in his life at this time were French, most of the people who kept him alive were from other places.

  This included the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin; the German collector Wilhelm Uhde; and the American Steins—Leo and Gertrude, Michael and Sarah. Leo Stein had bought Matisse’s Woman in a Hat shortly before he purchased his first Picasso, Harlequin’s Family with an Ape. Leo followed this with Picasso’s Girl with a Basket of Flowers, which Leo bought over Gertrude’s strong objections (something about the legs and feet repelled her).

  Despite their argument over this painting, Leo and Gertrude soon found their way to Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, where Leo was overwhelmed as much by Picasso’s intense gaze as by his art. As Leo later recalled, “When Picasso had looked at a drawing or print, I was surprised that anything was left on the paper, so absorbing was his gaze.”3 Gertrude later described Picasso as “thin dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not rough way.”4 Clearly fascinated, Leo added, “He seemed more real than most people while doing nothing about it.”5 Both Gertrude and Leo were sufficiently impressed with the young Spaniard that soon after their first introduction, Picasso and his latest love, Fernande Olivier, dined with the Steins at 27 Rue de Fleurus—the first of many such visits to come.

  Picasso was as fascinated with Gertrude Stein as she was with him, and soon after this first dinner he asked to paint her portrait. What followed was an enormous number of sittings (Gertrude claims some ninety of them), for which she regularly crossed Paris by horse-drawn omnibus to Place Blanche and the Moulin Rouge, where she got off and climbed up steep Rue Lepic to Place Ravignan (now Place Emile-Goudeau) and the Bateau-Lavoir. There, in what would soon become (in Max Jacob’s words) “the Acropolis of cubism,” she sat in a broken chair by a red-hot stove while Picasso perched on a kitchen chai
r and leaned close to his easel while he painted from a very small palette of “a uniform brown grey color.”6

  Picasso painted intently, ignoring comings and goings, cooking, distractions, and much disorder, while Fernande graciously offered to read La Fontaine’s stories aloud to amuse them while Gertrude posed. By this time Picasso would have seen Matisse’s extraordinary Woman in a Hat—probably at the Salon d’Automne and certainly at 27 Rue de Fleurus—and, keenly aware that his portrait of Gertrude Stein would hang in the same room as Matisse’s own glorious breakthrough, every competitive bone in his body would have compelled him to come up with a portrait that would overshadow Matisse’s. And so, at the end of the afternoon, when Leo and others came to look at what Picasso had done and exclaim at its beauty, Picasso shook his head and said, non, it would not do.7

  Afterward, Gertrude would walk home (about two miles, much of it downhill), accompanied on Saturdays by Picasso and Fernande, who stayed to dinner. And that, as Gertrude Stein later explained, was the beginning of the Steins’ celebrated Saturday evenings.

  Picasso regularly carried a gun, a Browning revolver that had once belonged to the legendary poet and playwright Alfred Jarry, the bizarre and outrageous creator of the bizarre and outrageous Ubu Roi. Picasso and Jarry seem never to have met—Jarry was dying at the time Picasso was reestablishing himself in Paris. But they shared many friends, and Picasso biographer John Richardson hypothesizes that either Max Jacob or Apollinaire nabbed the revolver or arranged for it as a gift at the end of Jarry’s life.8 However it came into his possession, Picasso regularly carried this rusty old revolver. He claimed (in Jarryesque fashion) to use it to ward off bores and morons as well as anyone who spoke ill of Cézanne, and is credited with having fired off several shots at the Lapin Agile in exasperation with several Germans intent on extracting aesthetic theories from him.