Twilight of the Belle Epoque

by Mary McAuliffe

  By 1910, when Gertrude and Alice officially became a couple, Leo and Nina had become lovers—his first romance, as he told her. Gertrude did not approve of Nina, whom she considered an opportunist and a woman of the streets. Still, Gertrude was somewhat sympathetic to Leo’s romance—at least at the beginning. It was when it became apparent that this was no passing fancy that Gertrude’s disapproval grew. By 1911, Leo was quite thoroughly enamored of Nina, who kept up a virtual stable of men friends but seemed to love Leo quite honestly in return. On the other hand, Leo was finding Alice’s constant presence at 27 Rue de Fleurus unpleasant. Alice, as Ernest Hemingway would later note, could be frightening.40

  By 1912, the return of Sarah and Michael Stein to Paris added more friction to the mix. Gertrude feared that Sarah and Leo would make common cause, especially about Gertrude’s work, and she was right. Sarah did not manage the proper enthusiasm about Gertrude’s writing or Picasso’s painting, and she did not seem to take to Alice. At the same time, Sarah and Leo easily renewed their friendship with one another. Gertrude began to study the two and their relationship, which turned into a new book, at first titled “Two,” or “Leo and Sally,” to help explain what had happened to these two family members who had once been close to her.41

  Gertrude and Leo disagreed strongly over Picasso and Cubism, but it was Leo’s criticism of her writing that stung Gertrude the most. “No artist needs criticism,” she later said; “he only needs appreciation.” Yet Gertrude’s word portrait of her new friend, the American heiress Mabel Dodge, aroused so much derision in Leo that he could no longer retain a veneer of politeness. “Damned nonsense,” he called it, and told their friend Mabel Weeks that “Gertrude . . . hungers and thirsts for gloire and it was of course a serious thing for her that I can’t abide her stuff and think it abominable.” According to Leo, Gertrude once had had something to say, but in order to give her writing more edginess, had twisted and abused syntax and words. Gertrude later commented that Leo’s response to her writing “destroyed him for me and it destroyed me for him.”42

  Their friends thought that far more was at stake here than a quarrel about writing, or even about Cubism. Some thought that Leo’s liaison with Nina had provided the final blow. Most, though, blamed Alice. “Alice didn’t really want them to be as close as they had been,” Virgil Thomson later noted,43 and many others agreed.

  “Things were not in those days going any too well between them,” Gertrude Stein later wrote of Picasso and Fernande, when they were leaving the Bateau-Lavoir to live on the Boulevard de Clichy.44 Once there, things rapidly went downhill. Fernande, by her own account, was not happy, and Picasso was bored and irritated by what he called her “little ways.”

  By this time Cubism had begun to evolve under Picasso and Braque into what later was called synthetic Cubism, as differentiated from their earlier analytic style. They worked together in a remarkable dialogue as their paintings evolved to include printed words, lettering, and a variety of small café trivia such as playing cards, scraps of music scores, and cigarette packaging. Braque, who loved music, introduced musical instruments to the mix, most notably in his 1910 masterpiece, Violin and Pitcher. Picasso, who was quite taken with guitars, soon followed.

  By summer of 1912, the two friends (who had escaped to the Provençal village of Sorgues) began to paint imitations of objects, whether stenciled letters or simulations of wood and marble. Committed as both were to representation in painting, neither artist stepped over the line into total abstraction—although Braque would come closer to this than would Picasso.

  In the meantime, the two pathfinders had more followers than they would have preferred, who flooded that year’s Salon d’Automne with Cubist imitations. Some of these new Cubists, such as Piet Mondrian and Diego Rivera (who both then lived in Paris) were proceeding on their own paths, but others were merely imitators. “Neither Picasso nor I had anything to do with [Albert] Gleizes and [Jean] Metzinger and the others,” Braque later said of those later known as the Salon Cubists. “Their idea was to systematize Cubism. . . . It was all intellectualism. They merely cubified what they painted.”45

  Increasingly, Picasso was gravitating to Montparnasse, joining friends at a favorite old haunt, the Closerie des Lilas, or at either of the two cafés at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Raspail (then called Carrefour Vavin, now Place Pablo-Picasso). These were the Café du Dôme and the Café de la Rotonde. All three were located within minutes of each other on Boulevard du Montparnasse, but the Closerie had been there the longest, having benefited from its location at the intersection of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Saint-Michel, connecting Montparnasse with the Latin Quarter and the Right Bank. A longtime favorite with artists and students, it became a focus of weekly poetry readings that by 1905 attracted Picasso and his crowd, including André Salmon and Apollinaire. Fernande Olivier recalled walking with Picasso and Salmon clear across Paris from Montmartre to join in these drunken evenings at the Closerie, which ended only when the owner closed up and threw them out.

  It was the completion of the Nord-Sud line of the Métro (finished by 1910 for most of the distance from Gare Montparnasse to Montmartre), together with the long-awaited cut-through of Boulevard Raspail to Boulevard du Montparnasse, that suddenly made the Carrefour Vavin a hot spot. Different nationalities congregated at one or another of the favored cafés, the Dôme or the newly expanded and refurbished Rotonde. Germans, Scandinavians, and Americans favored the Dôme, while everyone else gravitated to the Rotonde, “where painters, poets, and writers mixed with no regard for nationality, styles of painting, or schools of poetry.”46 In general, impoverished artists and writers could enjoy warmth and good company for hours at any of the three cafés, while nursing a mere café crème. “Innocent beverage!” rhapsodized André Salmon of the café crème, in his memoirs of Montparnasse, “ordered as a way of paying for the right to remain, for permission to reside a certain time, the most time possible, seated in front of a small table of this Bourse of the new artistic values, this temple of living Art!”47

  Yet while Picasso was spending more time in Montparnasse, he kept a firm footing in Montmartre: in addition to his apartment, he rented another studio back at the Bateau-Lavoir, where he was free to paint and to conduct affairs as he pleased. When Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas visited his Bateau-Lavoir studio in early 1912, they left their card for the absent painter and discovered upon their return that he had painted it into a recent still life, The Architect’s Table, as well as adding the words Ma Jolie (the refrain from a then-popular song) to the painting. As Alice and Gertrude departed, Gertrude commented, “Fernande is certainly not ma jolie, I wonder who it is.”48 Soon they would find out.

  The previous autumn, Fernande—always the flirt—had begun an affair with a handsome Italian painter, Ubaldo Oppi. For her go-between, Fernande chose her close friend, Eve Gouel, the mistress of Picasso’s friend Louis Marcoussis. As it turned out, Fernande trusted where she should not have, and Eve made use of the opportunity to insinuate herself into Picasso’s good graces, as well as his bed. Before long, Picasso had left Fernande for Eve (whom he called Eva) and began to include the words Ma Jolie in his paintings in tribute to her. Now that Fernande had compromised herself with Ubaldo Oppi, it was easy for Picasso to dump her, which he did, moving with Eva first to French Catalonia, then to Avignon, before settling back in Paris—this time in Montparnasse, on the other side of Paris from Montmartre.49

  When Fernande tried to follow, Picasso left the terse message that “she can expect nothing from me, and I should be quite happy never to see her again.”50 By year’s end, Picasso had proposed to Eva and been accepted. They would have married in Barcelona, had it not been for the death of Picasso’s father, followed by signs of Eva’s own impending illness. In the meantime, Fernande was left without any means of support (Picasso had left her with nothing, and she soon broke with Oppi, who had no money). />
  Eventually Fernande found a job as a salesperson with Paul Poiret. When Poiret retrenched during the war, she found work in an antiques shop, then as a nanny, a cashier in a butcher shop, and as manager of a cabaret. She found walk-on parts in plays and films, and even read horoscopes (thanks to Max Jacob’s instruction). But she would always fall back on her ability to teach drawing and French, and although in her later years she often was penniless, she continued to find lovers to help finance her lifestyle.51

  Unlike Montmartre, Montparnasse was not a distinctly defined quarter, with its own picturesque charm. Instead, when Picasso moved there it was a hodge-podge of shacks housing down-at-the-heels artists and poets interspersed with new buildings of more comfort but no distinct character for those who—like Picasso—could afford something better. Students from the Latin Quarter had long before named the area Mont-Parnasse, or Mount Parnassus, after the hilly slag-heap left by the quarries below. They and others came to drink and to dance there, at guinguettes and cafés such as the Grande Chaumière and the Closerie des Lilas. Yet one did not find painters painting street scenes in Montparnasse, such as Utrillo in Montmartre. Even by 1912, the quarter had not yet become fashionable, as it would between the wars, and by itself it did not offer inspiration—even if the people who inhabited it did.

  During Chagall’s early years in Paris—years at La Ruche, in the farthest corner of Montparnasse—his closest friend and unfailing supporter was the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars (originally Frédéric Sauser). Cendrars “didn’t just look at my paintings,” Chagall recalled. “He used to swallow them.”52 Cendrars convinced Chagall that he need not be intimidated by the “proud cubists.” Bolstered by Cendrars, Chagall was able to look at the Cubists and think: “Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables!” Somewhat later, he declared that his art “is perhaps a wild art, a blazing quicksilver, a blue soul flashing on my canvases.”53

  Chagall’s art vibrated with poetry, color, and musicality. Picasso, despite his sculptures and papiers collés of guitars, was not musically inclined. John Richardson writes that people who urged Picasso “to look more favorably on abstract art because it was the pictorial equivalent of music would be told, ‘That’s why I don’t like music.’” Why then did “the unmusical Picasso paint so many musical instruments and instrumentalists?” Richardson speculates that Picasso may have “wanted his amazing eye to compensate for his insensitive ear.”54

  Picasso knew Chagall but was not impressed with his work, possibly because Chagall at this period had allied himself with some of those whom Picasso dismissively viewed as mere copyists of what he had already done, such as Robert Delaunay and Jean Metzinger. Delaunay, though, was in turn dismissive of Picasso’s and Braque’s monochrome paintings, remarking that “they paint with cobwebs, these fellows.”55 By 1912 Delaunay was breaking out of these cobwebs into the sort of vibrant color to which Chagall could relate. Apollinaire named Delaunay’s movement into pure color and abstraction “orphism”—the incarnation of the mythical bard Orpheus.56

  Late in his life and his career, Picasso told Françoise Gilot: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” Picasso was “not crazy about [Chagall’s] roosters and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together.” Some of Chagall’s latest works, in fact, had convinced Picasso “that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”57

  That autumn, Bernhardt returned to America for yet another “farewell tour,” bringing her now twenty-nine-year-old lover, Lou Tellegen, with her. It was a sad tour, marked by old age and pain. Bernhardt could not bear to stand on her damaged knee, and she reduced the length of her performances accordingly, avoiding standing unaided. Some newspapers lauded her eternal genius, but others commented on her sad decline: “Time has taken its toll,” the New York World wrote.58

  That same autumn, Paris Singer began to lay plans for the theater he had promised Isadora. Curiously, he decided that the man to do the kind of job he wanted was Gordon Craig, who by this time was beginning to make his mark in the theater world as a man of vision, a man of the future. Singer offered Craig a princely sum to work on stage construction and lighting, and Craig at first accepted before suddenly withdrawing, ostensibly because of press reports that the theater was being built for Isadora Duncan—which of course he had known from the outset. “I have made it one of my rules lately to work for no performer however highly gifted or eminent,” he informed Singer. Craig’s prima donnish stance may have been prompted by the unresponsiveness of his and Isadora’s daughter (who quite reasonably treated him as a stranger), as well as by the irritating presence of “Isadora and her millionaire.”59

  Still, Craig’s departure left Isadora sad and dejected, and things soon became worse. During an opulent party at her Neuilly studio, Isadora and an admirer retreated to her apartment, where Singer found them “on the golden divan reflected in the endless mirrors.” Singer stormed out and began to harangue the guests about her, saying “that he was going away, never to return.”60

  After all the flirtations and all the betrayals, Isadora had at last gone too far. She pleaded, but Singer’s “curses fell upon my ears with the empty clanging of demon bells.”61 He finally agreed to meet with Isadora only in an automobile, and after berating her, he abruptly opened the door and pushed her out into the night.

  This time, Singer meant what he said, and he reinforced his position by immediately leaving for Egypt. Isadora tried to make the best of it, but she was haunted by premonitions of disaster. Soon after, on a tour of Russia, she suddenly saw along the road “two rows of coffins, . . . the coffins of children.” She clutched her companion’s arm. “Look,” she said, “all the children—all the children are dead!”62 Her companion assured her that there was nothing but snow heaped up alongside the road, but Isadora could not shake the vision.

  At the end of that night’s performance, she unexpectedly told her accompanist to play Chopin’s Funeral March. He protested that she had never danced it. Why now? But she insisted, and after she finished dancing, there was complete silence. Her accompanist took her hands in his, which were icy.

  “Never ask me to play that again,” he pleaded. “I experienced death itself.”63

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fireworks

  (1913)

  On May 29, 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) opened to an uproar at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Gabriel Astruc’s new theater on fashionable Avenue Montaigne. This new venue itself represented a breakthrough; it was a startlingly clean-lined structure made of reinforced concrete that provided plenty of controversy among the traditionalists. Still, Astruc’s provocative new theater offered comfortable seating, clear acoustics, and generally excellent sightlines for the incendiary events to come.

  The sculptor Antoine Bourdelle created the decorative friezes for the theater’s exterior, including one celebrating a dance between Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky that had occurred only in the sculptor’s imagination. Bourdelle had seen Duncan dance at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 1909 and never forgot the experience: “Each movement, each pose of this great artiste remained like flashes of lightning in my memory,” he wrote. In his frieze, she leans her head and closes her eyes, to dance “in her pure emotion.” As for Nijinsky, whom Bourdelle pictured as the faun, he “wrenches himself free of the marble with a savage movement, . . . but the marble block restrains this man who carries within himself the winged genius of birds!”1

  The Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. © J. McAuliffe

  Debussy also figured prominently at the new theater, which opened its Ballets Russes season with his ballet Jeux (Games), exactly a fortnight before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Unfortunately, Jeux was not a success. Stravinsky had been impressed with the mus
ic, which he called “Debussy’s freshest, most youthful work of recent years,”2 but audience response was tepid, possibly because of the modernist tilt of the production. The dancers appeared in realistic tennis togs rather than exotic costumes, and Debussy’s score contained little in the way of traditional tunes and orchestral development (it did not do well even in concert version the following year). Yet to Debussy’s way of thinking, it was Nijinsky’s choreography that caused the trouble, and there were many who agreed.

  Since the beginning of his association with Diaghilev, Debussy—much like Stravinsky—feared that Nijinsky’s virtuosity as well as his primacy in Diaghilev’s affections would lead to ballets in which the choreography would take a clear precedence over the music. On opening night of Jeux, Debussy was so repelled by Nijinsky’s choreography that he left his box during the performance to smoke a cigarette at the night porter’s lodge. Afterward, Debussy wrote a friend that, in his estimation, the production had been a meaningless event, “in which Nijinsky’s perverse genius applied itself to a special branch of mathematics! The man adds up demisemiquavers with his feet, checks the result with his arms and then, suddenly struck with paralysis all down one side, glares at the music as it goes past. . . . It’s awful!”3

  Not surprisingly, Jeux marked the end of Debussy’s association with Diaghilev.

  Diaghilev may have been worried about the rest of his season, but he need not have feared. Two weeks after Jeux, a seismic event ripped through the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, creating a succès de scandale for Diaghilev and simultaneously making its mark on history.

  The Rite of Spring had its origins in a dream Stravinsky had while composing The Firebird. He later recalled that he had visualized “a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.”4 In 1911, after the first performances of Petrushka, he planned the scenario for this new ballet with Nicolay Roerich, who also designed the sets. They worked at the country estate of Princess Tenisheva near Smolensk, and then Stravinsky returned to Clarens, Switzerland, where he wrote almost the entire score in a closet-sized room barely big enough to hold a table, two chairs, and a small upright piano. He pushed himself to complete the score, hoping that Diaghilev would produce The Rite of Spring during the 1912 season; but, much to his disappointment, Diaghilev moved production off to 1913.