Thus began a patronage that would last for more than thirty years, interspersed with frequent visits to their mutual friend, Rodin. Along the way, the two had many good conversations. Why did Maillol always sculpt female figures, Kessler wanted to know. “Eh,” Maillol replied, “because I don’t have a model. Rodin, he can pay for as many models as he wants, but us other artists, we must typically make use of our wives.” As for a proposal to illustrate Virgil’s Eclogues for Kessler, Maillol was enthusiastic: “I read Virgil all the time,” he assured Kessler.10 Maillol’s greatest treasure, Kessler noted, was his collection of woodcuts by Gauguin.
Despite a trip together to Greece in 1908, during which Maillol’s peasant manners and narrow-mindedness got on Kessler’s nerves, their friendship, and the patronage, continued.
It was autumn of 1909 when Picasso moved from the Bateau-Lavoir to a remarkably bourgeois apartment on the top floor of 11 Boulevard de Clichy, complete with a maid. Although the top floor location would not have signified what it would now (ground floor apartments then commanded the highest prices, especially in a walk-up), this clean and comfortable apartment at the foot of Montmartre was a clear sign of Picasso’s growing success. Yet despite the Bateau-Lavoir’s bohemian squalor, Picasso departed with reluctance.
It was during this same autumn that Henri Matisse made his escape from the Hôtel Biron and Paris to the southwestern suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux, where he rented a house for himself and his family. His academy had quickly burgeoned, thanks to his reputation as well as to his reluctance to charge fees. But his students had taken far too much of his time and energy, and a move to what then was the countryside (but still within reach of Paris) represented a safe haven, where he could work relatively free from interruption.
Substantial purchases and commissions from the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin had for the first time put Matisse on a somewhat easier financial footing, and now the Matisse family could afford an entire house and garden in which to live and breathe freely. This was especially important for Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, who that spring had endured yet another tracheotomy (her first, several years earlier, had left her with a damaged windpipe that she regularly covered with a ribbon). The government’s decision in the summer of 1909 to put the Hôtel Biron up for sale provided the final push. The Matisse family moved to Issy that autumn, after another summer on the Mediterranean coast.
Although Shchukin had become Matisse’s foremost patron, Sarah and Michael Stein continued to be devoted collectors, and by now Matisse was beginning to be appreciated and collected by Germans and Scandinavians as well as by Americans and Russians. The French did not share in this enthusiasm for one of their own, and when not avidly hostile to his work, they were at best complacent about the fact that the best of it was leaving France.
When Matisse published his “Notes of a Painter” in 1908,11 French critics reacted with particular vehemence to one particular statement: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be . . . a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.”12 This set up a howl from those who saw Matisse’s work as anything but serene or soothing. At the same time, it gave Matisse’s rivals within the avant-garde—especially Picasso and his adherents—considerable ammunition with which to attack him for being a lightweight, little more than an entertainer or decorator.
In fact, with this essay, Matisse was drawing a line between his artistic vision and Picasso’s, which (although he never named the artist) he viewed as overly abstract and theoretical, guided by the brain rather than by emotion, intuition, and the senses. Although Picasso would never give voice to, let alone write, an explanation of Cubism, those who viewed his work and that of his colleague, Braque, believed that their general goal “seemed to be the representation of the three-dimensional and its position in space on a two-dimensional surface.”13 A more recent specialist in Cubism has noted that “what makes Les Demoiselles a truly revolutionary work of art is that in it Picasso broke away from the two central characteristics of European painting since the Renaissance: the classical norm for the human figure, and the spatial illusionism of one-point perspective.”14 Whatever the definition, Matissse completely rejected the end product.15
Yet by now it mattered little what Matisse thought or wrote; within the avant-garde, Cubism already was in ascendance. Picasso and his band openly derided Matisse, while others, envious of Matisse’s commissions and what they wrongly presumed was his opulent country lifestyle, claimed that he was charging (and receiving) obscenely high prices and that he and his household were living in splendor. A telephone, a bathroom, and central heating may have counted as luxuries in France at the time, but the house was a relatively modest one, and the Matisses still had financial problems, alleviated somewhat by the lucrative contract that he signed that September with the prestigious Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune. This was unusual in that it allowed him to accept outside commissions, providing he gave a share of the profits to the gallery. Word of this, too, quickly made the rounds in exaggerated form, adding to the malice.
Matisse had only one response to the invective: “I rolled myself into a ball in my corner as an observer,” he wrote, “and waited to see what would happen.”16
Picasso, not surprisingly, viewed matters quite differently. “When we invented cubism,” he later remarked, “we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism. We simply wanted to express what was in us.”17
Despite Matisse’s claim to “expression” and “expressionism,” dating from his 1908 “Notes of a Painter” and his 1907 The Red Madras Headdress (also titled Tête d’expression and submitted to that year’s Salon d’Automne), Picasso was not about to give ground here. Theoretical? Absolutely not. Picasso flatly rejected formulas and theories; from his standpoint, there was nothing cerebral about him or his artistic output. Physicality and potency, that was the key, along with radical daring and a new view of realism that rejected the three-dimensional simulations of the past.
Matisses’s problem, as Picasso viewed it, was Matisse. After all, it was he who had laughed at Demoiselles and rejected Braque’s submissions to the 1908 Salon d’Automne. Or so they thought. This may not have been the case—or at least not entirely the case. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, later wrote that although Braque had gagged at his first sight of Demoiselles, he quickly found his way to his own early vision of Cubism—although with Cézanne rather than Picasso as his guide. Inspired by Cézanne’s words, that “you must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” Braque began to paint the scenery of the French Midi village of L’Estaque in a burst of cones, cylinders, spheres—and cubes.18 Triumphantly, he submitted six (some say seven) of these breakthrough paintings to the 1908 Salon d’Automne and was astounded when the jury refused every one. Following this total rejection, two jurors each voted to save one of his pictures (every juror had this right), but Braque, deeply angered, withdrew them all.
Matisse was one of the members of this jury, which Braque regarded as a betrayal and a massacre. After all, Matisse was the leading Fauvist—a group that Braque had briefly joined—and, until now, a friend. Matisse, by his own account, had voted to include one of Braque’s paintings in the exhibition, having (as Flanner put it) “an eclectic’s interest in any new formula.”19 Yet he was not one of the two who voted to save two of the Braque pictures for exhibition, and despite whatever Matisse offered in his own defense, Braque regarded Matisse as the one who had engineered his rejection.20
This was not all. In addition to Matisse’s real or imagined role in the 1908 Salon d’Automne affair, it was Matisse who famously described Braque’s pictures as having been composed “avec les petits cubes”—a phrase that the French art critic Louis Vauxcelles promptly picked up and published, with the result that the term “Cubism” caught on. B
oth Picasso and Braque detested this description (which Vauxcelles had originally intended as an epithet), although they quickly found that they had to use it. But it amounted to yet one more grievance against Matisse.
It was a touchy situation, made more so by Braque’s desertion of one camp for the other. Matisse felt abandoned, and Braque felt ill-used. Picasso resented Matisse’s teaching academy and his printed pronouncements on art, which Picasso regarded as self-serving and pretentious. And of course, underlying the whole were deep reserves of rivalry, envy, and misunderstanding, exacerbated by the artists’ dramatically different personalities and lifestyles.
Picasso—the younger by more than a decade—was Spanish to the core, with a corresponding machismo that Gertrude Stein deftly summed up in her description of him as “the little bullfighter, followed by his squadron of four” (Derain, Braque, Apollinaire, and Salmon); she also hit the mark with her description of him as “Napoleon followed by his four enormous grenadiers.”21 Picasso needed to be at the center of an exclusive coterie, as its ringleader and star, and achieved this dominant position easily. He rarely went anywhere alone, and references to the “Picasso crowd,” “Picasso court,” or “la bande à Picasso,” abound throughout the Bateau-Lavoir years. Men and women gravitated to him, although women (with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein) held a distinctly inferior position in his life. He acquired, dominated, and shed women easily, and although Fernande would stay with him for the better part of seven years, she, too, would eventually be cast aside.
Matisse, despite his renegade youth, was by this time a conservatively dressed family man who felt his family responsibilities keenly. Although he had friends and saw some of them on a fairly regular basis, the core of his life was his family and his studio, where he preferred to work alone. It was the interruptions from friends, students, potential clients, and a variety of others that drove him to Issy-les-Moulineaux. Privacy and peace were essential to him, and despite the catcalls from his detractors, he sought in his art a serenity and stillness that was completely alien to Picasso.
In seeking this stillness, Matisse was willing to endure self-sacrifice, including sexual abstinence, which he had attempted to put into practice ever since 1905, believing that this would conserve his creative energies. Picasso would have found such renunciation laughable, as would Rodin, who gloried in the female body in both his art and his life, and viewed sexual energy as the source of his inspiration and creativity. Believing Victor Hugo to have been similarly inspired, Rodin symbolized this in his first (and unaccepted) rendition of a Victor Hugo memorial by placing a crotch-revealing sculpture of the goddess Iris directly above Hugo’s head. That Hugo in old age was regarded by those who knew him as a sadly salacious old man, and that Rodin was rapidly acquiring the same reputation, did not seem to occur to the sculptor.
That spring and summer, Rodin supervised the site in the Palais Royal gardens for his monument to Victor Hugo, which was unveiled in September.22 By this time, although he may not have realized it, public interest in such monuments was declining, and trends in art had significantly shifted from his focus on drama-infused naturalism.
Simultaneously, it was this summer that Rodin’s depression—which had first appeared three years before—became significantly worse. He anguished that he was “always worn out by a senseless life,” and that he was “totally out of touch with [his] energy.”23 Evidently exacerbating the situation was the death of Claire de Choiseul’s sister and the resulting bequest to Claire’s husband, the marquis. Rodin paid for the marquis’ trip to America to sort things out, and by the year’s end, the marquis—quite on his own volition—had upgraded his title in the social register to “Duc de Choiseul.” Correspondingly, Claire de Choiseul began to refer to herself as “Duchess.” Perhaps this was what Rodin had in mind when he said he found life especially senseless.
Nonetheless, Claire de Choiseul continued to play an intimate role in Rodin’s life, and by the year’s end, he seemed happier. Perhaps his refuge in the Hôtel Biron was responsible for this change in mood. He certainly seemed content there, and it was only the prospect of its disappearance that created a new set of clouds on his horizon.
It was during this time that Isadora Duncan also found her way to the Hôtel Biron. After touring extensively throughout Europe and America, she returned to Paris early in 1909, where she rented apartments for herself and her daughter, Deirdre, and for the students she had brought from her disbanded school in Germany. She also rented a long gallery in the Hôtel Biron that she used for dance rehearsals. She and her pupils made their debut in late January at the large Gaité-Lyrique theater, accompanied by the prestigious Colonne Orchestra. Tickets sold out within hours, and they played to full houses for the entire run.
Isadora and her young dancers quickly became a great hit, and it was during the early days of her success at the Gaité-Lyrique that a new man unexpectedly entered her life: Paris Singer, brother of Winnaretta Singer (the Princesse Edmond de Polignac), and as unlike Winnaretta as possible except for his inherited wealth. Handsome, charming, and a notorious playboy, he did everything he could to sweep Isadora off her feet. They had met once before, briefly, at the funeral of Winnaretta’s elderly husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac. At that time Isadora had barely taken note of him; but now, she understood completely what his appearance meant in her life. She had already turned to telepathy, using the positive thinking system of Emile Coué to ask repeatedly for a millionaire to pay for her enormous expenses, including her school. Now, when Singer entered her dressing room, her first thought was, “Here is my millionaire!”24
They soon became lovers, although they quarreled constantly. Singer dispensed largesse without limit but (as Duncan later wrote) “had the psychology of a spoilt child.” He was domineering, and Isadora was not one to be dominated. Making matters worse, he had no particular interest in or appreciation of her dancing. Repeatedly, they left one another, only to make up and start over. Still, Isadora admitted to loving him, and undeniably, all that money made for some good times and a life of luxury, such as sailing for Italy on Singer’s yacht, and dining at the best restaurants in Paris. Singer paid for everything, including Isadora’s clothing binges at the salon of Paul Poiret, who (according to Isadora) “could dress a woman in such a way as also to create a work of art.” And although Isadora insisted that she paid for her glamorous new studio in Neuilly before she even met Singer, it probably was his money that paid for the lavish decoration, done by none other than Paul Poiret.25
It was in Venice that autumn, without Singer, that Isadora learned that once again she was pregnant. Torn, she considered an abortion, “filled with revolt that such a deformation should again come to my body, which was the instrument of my Art.” Yet she simultaneously was “tortured by the call, the hope, the vision” of the baby to come. In the end, she decided to keep the baby, and then left for a second tour of America. There, she danced continuously and with great success, managing to hide her pregnancy until one day in January, when a woman came to her and exclaimed, “But, my dear Miss Duncan, it’s plainly visible from the front row.” At which point Isadora decided that it probably was best to stop the tour and return to Europe.26
During this time Paris Singer’s sister, Winnaretta, the Princesse de Polignac, had been quietly conducting her own love affairs, including one with the young American artist Romaine Brooks. Brooks, who idolized and pursued Winnaretta, had not yet met Natalie Clifford Barney, the American writer who would become the great love of her life. Indeed, after Winnaretta, Brooks would spend several years with the celebrated Russian dancer, Ida Rubinstein. In any case, it was not Romaine Brooks but Olga, the lovely Baroness de Meyer who, from 1909 until the coming of war, became Winnaretta’s love interest.
Typically, Winnaretta was drawn to individuals who shared her love of the arts. A talented musician as well as painter in her own right, she had for many years—first with her husband, then
by herself—presided over one of the foremost salons in Paris, where avant-garde composers and musicians could perform their latest works. It was as a major patron of the arts that she first encountered Sergei Diaghilev in 1906, at the home of Grand Duke Paul of Russia (who by then lived in Paris, having dared to marry a commoner). Diaghilev needed private patrons for his productions—especially in the spring of 1909, after the czar unexpectedly withdrew his financial support. When Diaghilev and Gabriel Astruc drew up a list of possible supporters, the Princesse de Polignac, along with Misia Edwards, was at the top. By the time Diaghilev arrived in Paris to launch his 1909 season, both Winnaretta and Misia had become major patrons, and they would continue in this role throughout the twenty years until his death.
Diaghilev’s 1909 program was huge and daring. In addition to Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Ivan the Terrible (originally titled Maid of Pskov), starring Feodor Chaliapin, Diaghilev decided to bring Russian ballet to Paris—not the famed Russian imperial ballet, but a new company, the Ballets Russes. This would be the ballet of a new era, uniting the talents of Michel Fokine, Anna Pavlova, and Vaslav Nijinsky, the most progressive dancers and choreographers in the land.
For more than a decade, Diaghilev and his colleagues had grown increasingly dismayed and bored with the tradition-entrenched Russian imperial ballet, and Isadora Duncan’s 1904 performances in St. Petersburg made a deep impression on them. “We do not deny that Duncan is a kindred spirit,” Diaghilev wrote some years later. “Indeed, we carry the torch that she lit.”27
Almost undone by the czar’s abrupt withdrawal of support, as well as by the temporary desertion of Anna Pavlova, the intended star of the ballet program (fearing the collapse of the entire season, she had gone off on her own tour), Diaghilev salvaged what turned out to be a magnificent season. In addition to Ivan the Terrible, he presented five ballets by Fokine: Le Pavillon d’Armide, Les Danses Polovtsians (from Borodin’s Prince Igor), Le Festin, Les Sylphides, and Cléopâtre. As the first non-narrative ballet, Les Sylphides (originally Chopiniana, and danced to music by Chopin) paid tribute to Isadora’s innovations in dance.
Twilight of the Belle Epoque Page 23