Marie Curie’s first reaction to the news was stunned shock and disbelief: “Pierre is dead,” she desolately wrote in her journal, “he who I expected to press in my arms this evening. . . . He is gone forever, leaving me nothing but desolation and despair.”56
Marie had once written her sister Bronya, “I have the best husband one could dream of; I could never have imagined finding one like him. He is a true gift of heaven, and the more we live together the more we love each other.”57 Years later, looking back on that terrible day, she wrote, “I lost my beloved Pierre, and with him all hope and all support for the rest of my life.”58 Yet despite her devastation, she would somehow go on, raising her two daughters and throwing herself into her teaching and research, carrying the flame for them both.
Chapter Nine
Winds of Change
(1907)
The winds of change that swirled through Paris in 1907 first came from the east. Although since the time of Peter the Great, imperial Russia had looked to Western Europe, especially France, for inspiration and guidance in matters of culture and taste, a young man by the name of Sergei Diaghilev was about to bring a new artistic sensibility from Russia to Paris’s avant-garde.
Diaghilev had been raised in wealth (from a family-owned distillery) and was nurtured in the arts by an artistic stepmother. Unfortunately his free-spending family spent its way into a hole, with the result that his father declared bankruptcy while Diaghilev was in his teens. To repair family fortunes, Sergei was groomed to enter the civil service by first studying law, but he had little interest in either law or the civil service. Instead, he dreamed of a career in music, and he entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he acquired a network of friends and acquaintances in musical and artistic circles. His dreams fizzled when the venerable Rimsky-Korsakov took one look at Diaghilev’s compositions and derisively declared that the young man had no musical talent whatever.
Portrait of Serge Dyaghilev [Sergei Diaghilev] with Jean Cocteau. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library, New York, NY, U.S.A. Photo Credit: The New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY. © The New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY.
Recovering from this major setback and looking for ways to remain in the artistic world, Diaghilev founded a progressive art journal. From that springboard, he used connections and charm (reputedly sufficient to “revive a corpse”)1 to snag the position of special assistant to the director of Russia’s imperial theaters, where he became responsible for a handful of venturesome musical and theatrical productions. Here, despite his charm, many found Diaghilev’s forceful personality irritating. Along with his ever more open homosexuality and avant-garde artistic tastes, he soon managed to antagonize even his erstwhile supporters and was fired.
Overwhelmed by his dismissal, Diaghilev wrote his stepmother that he was “frightened of everything: frightened of life, frightened of death, frightened of fame, frightened of scorn, frightened of faith, frightened of the lack of faith.”2 Still, beneath this terror Diaghilev ultimately believed in himself. As he had written several years earlier, “I’ll be successful as the promoter of great ideas, followers will gather round me, and success will be my lot.”3 It was now that he began to build on his talent as an impresario. He had already organized and mounted exhibits of contemporary Russian and Scandinavian artists, and in 1905 he pulled together an extraordinary exhibition of Russian historical portraits, which he showed to great acclaim (and national pride) in St. Petersburg, even as Japan was battering the Russian fleet in the Far East and revolution was spreading throughout the land. “I closed the exhibition almost without any scenes,” he wrote his friend and future collaborator Alexandre Benois, who had fled to Paris, “but I am not sure that the pictures will get back to their rightful owners!”4
Diaghilev celebrated with his friends when the czar authorized the creation of a legislative body, the Duma. Yet it soon became clear that the Duma would be toothless, and that any hope for meaningful political and social reform in czarist Russia was doomed. Even the arts were affected: when Rimsky-Korsakov publicly went to the defense of students from the St. Petersburg Conservatory who demanded a greater say in decision making and an end to corporal punishment, he was fired and the czarist government forbade future performances of his works.
It was in the midst of this explosive situation that Diaghilev looked westward, as many of his compatriots had already done and would continue to do in the years to come. In 1906 he brought a large exhibition of Russian art, ranging from historic icons to the most progressive contemporary works, to Paris’s Salon d’Automne, piquing the interest of sophisticated Parisians, who had been largely ignorant of what was going on artistically in the land of the Cossacks.
While in Paris, Diaghilev made allies of the wealthy arts patroness Countess Greffulhe and her cousin Count Robert de Montesquiou, who provided him with financial backing and contacts for yet another endeavor, this time in music. After joining forces with the French impresario Gabriel Astruc, Diaghilev presented a series of five major Russian concerts in May 1907 at the Paris Opera, featuring the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin; Sergei Rachmaninoff, who played his own Second Piano Concerto; Josef Hofmann, who played Alexander Scriabin’s piano concerto; and Rimsky-Korsakov, who conducted his own Scheherazade. Rimsky-Korsakov was the most reluctant participant, but after being exposed to Diaghilev’s relentless insistence, he left the impresario his visiting card, on which he had written: “‘If one has to go, one has to go!’ cried the sparrow as the cat dragged him downstairs.”5 Despite his reluctance, Rimsky-Korsakov went.
The concerts were an artistic triumph, if not a complete financial success, but Diaghilev was already on the move to organize another season for the following year. He also was about to meet a seventeen-year-old dancer by the name of Vaslav Nijinsky.
The first foreign production of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande took place in Brussels in January 1907. From there Debussy would go to Frankfurt, followed by 1908 productions of Pelléas in New York and Milan, the latter at La Scala, under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. As always, Debussy took an active part in rehearsals, which he typically denigrated in private even while he profusely thanked the conductors and musicians in public. Shortly before he expressed his deep appreciation to the Belgian conductor Sylvain Dupuis, he irritably wrote his publisher, Jacques Durand, that there was a bell that “ought to give a G and which, out of a spirit of Belgian contradiction, gives a C! . . . It sounds rather as if it’s dinner time in the castle.” In exasperation, he wrote Louis Laloy: “I had to spend a fortnight re-educating an orchestra whose Flemishness is about as flexible as a 100 kg. weight.” To his surprise (as he wrote Durand), “it seems I’m the most demanding composer they’ve ever come across.”6
In October, Debussy negotiated a hefty fee to conduct some of his orchestral works in London, and thus entered a demanding six-year period during which he would conduct and play extensively throughout a number of countries. He may have enjoyed the fame, but he distinctly did not enjoy the time it took from his composing. Nor did he like the travel, especially as his health deteriorated. Yet the concerts, and the travel, were necessary. He had always spent more than he earned, but by early 1907 his financial difficulties had become critical, following the death of Emma’s uncle, a wealthy financier from whom she expected a substantial legacy. Unfortunately for Emma and her husband, the uncle did not approve of Emma’s relationship with Debussy, nor of Debussy’s failure to generate sufficient income for a family of three, and he unexpectedly left the bulk of his fortune to assorted charities.
Debussy now began the peripatetic life of the professional musician, even while some at home were questioning whether he was past his prime or even had met his match in a younger rival, Ravel. Debussy privately commented on Ravel’s gifts—and what he saw as his limitations.7 Yet perhaps Debussy’s strongest response to this kind of criticism and engineered rivalry w
as his second book of piano Images, which appeared in October 1907. Without question, this particular master was not about to step aside.
In late 1906, Marcel Proust moved into an apartment at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. It was a necessary move, given the size and expense of the old apartment, but the new one was a bizarre choice, given Proust’s extreme sensitivity to dust and noise. Boulevard Haussmann, although a fashionable location, was a main thoroughfare plagued by dirt and incessant racket, especially from the streetcars and horse-drawn vehicles that clattered over its cobblestones. In addition, the building itself was, as Proust readily admitted, an ugly one. In the end, he was drawn to it because of associations with his mother, whose recently deceased brother had owned it.
Proust never did anything without bouts of indecision and a multitude of complications, and this was no exception. Still, the furnishings for his bedroom, where he would spend the bulk of his time, were quickly decided. To avoid dust, there would be no wall tapestries, and the carpets and rugs would be removable so they could be frequently taken up and beaten. Proust also decided against portraits in the room, but he agreed to place portraits of his mother and father in the nearby drawing room, where he could see them often—but not so much as to cause pain. As for his bedroom furnishings, he would use those from his beloved mother’s blue room.
It would not be until 1910 that Proust would famously line his bedroom with cork, to deaden the outside din. By this time, despite invalidism, he would be launched on his masterwork. Already, he was pondering some of its central ideas, as when he told Lucien Daudet, “You are wrong to think of yourself always inside time. The part of ourselves that matters, when it matters, is outside time.”8 And in an article on Anna de Noailles’ latest book of poetry, he wrote: “She knows that a profound idea which has time and space enclosed within it is no longer subject to their tyranny, and becomes infinite.”9
In early February, Claude Monet sent a message to his longtime friend Georges Clemenceau to remind him of an outstanding obligation. Back in 1889, Monet had realized that Edouard Manet’s seminal painting Olympia did not yet reside in any museum or collection. In fact, Manet’s widow still owned it, and Monet decided that in order to prevent it from eventually leaving France in the hands of American collectors, the best course would be to pool enough money from Manet’s friends and admirers to purchase the painting and donate it to the state—with the important caveat that it hang in the Louvre.
Monet collected the money, but the Louvre strenuously resisted the bequest. In the end, he had to settle for the Musée du Luxembourg, which several years later would also receive the controversial Caillebotte bequest of Impressionist art. Monet was not satisfied with this solution, and shortly after Clemenceau became prime minister in late 1906, Monet decided to give him a nudge. As Monet told their mutual friend, art critic Gustave Geffroy: “When in Paris the other day it occurred to me that I should track Clemenceau down and tell him that it was incumbent upon him to arrange it [the transfer to the Louvre]. He got the message and within three days . . . it was done, and how glad I am.”10
By the early years of the twentieth century, Claude Monet was riding high among collectors, and his income showed it. In 1900, he recorded an income of 213,000 francs, making him one of the wealthiest individuals in France.11 Yet within the roiling world of early twentieth-century painters, he already was passé. In 1905 a number of French artists, including Kees van Dongen, Raoul Dufy, Jean Puy, and Paul Signac, responded to a questionnaire sent them by the influential critic Charles Morice, who concluded from their answers that Impressionism’s day was over and that art was transitioning into something quite different from what it had been in the past. Artists, Morice noted, were now taking the revolutionary step of drawing upon their feelings and ideas rather than striving for literal representation of objects from nature.12
Within this radically new artistic viewpoint, Cézanne and Gauguin ranked high, and indeed, the Cézanne retrospective at the 1905 Salon d’Automne had an enormous influence on many of the newly emerging French painters, especially the Fauvists. Pissarro once told Matisse of the difference between Cézanne and an Impressionist: “A Cézanne is a moment of the artist,” he told Matisse, “while a Sisley is a moment of nature.”13 Even during his difficult early years, Matisse had stretched himself to the limit to acquire Cézanne’s Three Bathers, as well as a Gauguin painting and two drawings by van Gogh.
Yet if Monet was out-of-date, Manet was not. The Manet retrospective at the 1905 Salon d’Automne had enthralled Picasso, who throughout his own career would refer to Manet’s paintings, especially Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Picasso would return to this in a series of works over many years—an exploration via variations on Manet’s theme. For Picasso, Manet was the first modern artist, and an enticingly subversive one.
Still, it was Gauguin, rather than Cézanne or even Manet, who inspired Picasso to take the next dramatic step in his artistic development. Picasso had seen the Gauguin retrospective at the 1903 Salon d’Automne, but it was the exhibit of Gauguin’s Tahitian-inspired sculptures in the 1906 Salon d’Automne that truly gripped his imagination. By 1907, this, along with African tribal art and early Iberian sculpture, was pulling Picasso toward an entirely new artistic vision.
He began work on Les Demoiselles d’Aviginon (originally Le Bordel d’Avignon)14 in late 1906, driven by the need to create this particular painting, which he fervently believed would challenge the centuries-long traditions of European art and place him at the forefront of the modern art movement. He and Matisse had continued to joust for supremacy, making regular visits to each other’s studios, meeting most Saturday evenings at the Steins, and even exchanging paintings, but always with the care of rivals circling around one another. Not only had Matisse startled the art world in 1906 with his Joy of Life, but early in 1907 he showed yet another shattering masterpiece, Blue Nude, at the Salon des Indépendants. And in the meantime, Picasso worked on.
He increasingly worked in seclusion. The Steins had provided money for a second studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, where he could paint without interference—especially from Fernande or the thirteen-year-old girl, Ramonde, whom Fernande and Picasso adopted for a brief time in the spring of 1907, in a futile attempt by Fernande to establish a kind of family unit with Picasso.
Picasso insulated himself as well from the reactions of his closest friends—the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and André Salmon, along with the poet and painter Max Jacob—who seemed nonplussed by Demoiselles and resorted to strained praise or virtual silence. As for Fernande, she made no mention of the painting in either of her memoirs. It was during these months, when Picasso was wrestling with Demoiselles, that his relationship with Fernande deteriorated. His total preoccupation with Demoiselles, if not the only cause for their increasingly troubled love affair, seems to have been sufficiently painful that Fernande did not want to speak of it.
By late spring, Picasso had progressed sufficiently far with Demoiselles that he invited Leo and Gertrude Stein to see it. They were shocked by his five confrontational and distorted prostitutes, two with what looked like tribal masks instead of faces, and the whole depicted on a radically flat, two-dimensional plane. Picasso had expected shock, but he did not expect Leo’s response. Leo burst into laughter and called it “a horrible mess.”15 Other painters who visited Picasso’s studio to see what all the rumpus was about had similar reactions. Braque was reported to have said that it made him feel as if Picasso was “trying to make us drink petrol to spit fire,”16 while Derain predicted an unhappy end for the painting’s unfortunate creator. The novice twenty-three-year-old art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, was alone in being dazzled by Demoiselles, feeling that something “admirable, extraordinary, inconceivable had occurred.”17 Not surprisingly, he and Picasso began a firm friendship, and the appreciative Kahnweiler would become Picasso’s art dealer.
Matisse was especially repelled by Demoiselles; its brutality an
d insolence struck him as a blatant perversion of everything he had tried to accomplish. Still, the following year, Matisse would bring the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin to see the painting, and after an initial negative reaction, Shchukin would become a regular collector of Picasso’s works.18 Yet Shchukin, who continued to collect Matisses, was unusual in supporting both artists. Sarah and Michael Stein would collect Matisse to the exclusion of Picasso, while Leo and Gertrude Stein’s purchase of Blue Nude would be their last Matisse. From then on, Gertrude, at least, would be a strong Picasso supporter. Derain would also transfer his allegiance from Matisse to Picasso, and soon Braque, a newcomer to Fauvism (whose work strongly appealed to Kahnweiler), would abandon the Fauvist movement and gravitate into Picasso’s orbit, beginning a competitive partnership as the two developed Cubism together.
Picasso would not show Les Demoiselles until 1916, and it would remain in his studio until 1924, when he sold it to the fashion designer Jacques Doucet. Yet its influence had already begun.
In the meantime, Michael and Sarah Stein returned from San Francisco, where they had gone following the 1906 earthquake to see what remained of the family’s rental properties. They returned with the good news that their financial base was safe—which meant that all four Paris-residing members of the Stein family could continue buying pictures. At last Gertrude and Leo were able to pay Matisse for Le Bonheur de vivre, which Leo had bought shortly before he learned of the San Francisco disaster. “The Steins may well find themselves almost ruined,” Matisse had written a friend soon after hearing about the earthquake, but agreed that the painting should go to the Rue de Fleurus, even if the Steins could not pay for it.19 Now they could pay, and did, and continued their purchases from other artists, while Sarah and Michael bought increasingly from Matisse.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 18