But back in his studio, he persisted—he could not turn back—and his fellow artists could smell the audacity in what he was doing, the uncompromising intelligence behind it. It was an audacity that no one interested in the future direction of art could ignore.
Six months later, a few key people in the art business were beginning to come around. Matisse was touted in one magazine, Gil Blas, as the leader of a new school of painting. His second solo show—featuring fifty-five of his paintings, plus sculptures and drawings—was due to open at the Galerie Druet that spring (shortly after Matisse’s visit to Picasso’s studio). The day after the vernissage of that show, Matisse’s bold new work, Le Bonheur de Vivre, was to go on display at the Salon des Indépendants, a public exhibition, set up in the 1880s, for artists working outside the narrow, officially sanctioned mainstream.
So as he made the march to Montmartre, Matisse could sense not only that, after years of struggle and experiment, he had hit upon something genuinely revolutionary, but also that his worldly predicament, after years of crippling poverty and humiliation, was looking increasingly hopeful.
For this last, he could thank the Steins. Recognizing something new and exciting in Matisse’s work, Gertrude and Leo had bought Woman in a Hat [see Plate 10], the most electrifying of his paintings from the Salon showing. This portrait of Matisse’s wife, Amélie, was part of a collection at the Steins’ house on the rue de Fleurus that was growing—in size and in audacity—month by month.
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JUST AS VOLLARD HAD GIVEN Picasso a show before turning his attention to Matisse, Leo Stein had acquired two Picassos before he bought anything by Matisse. Here again, though, the Spaniard’s precedence was quickly overturned.
The first Picasso that Stein bought was a large work in gouache, The Acrobat Family. It showed a circus couple tenderly bent over their child with a seated baboon looking on. The second was a bigger, more ambitious oil. It depicted a full-length adolescent girl, her body in profile, her head turning to face the painter. She wears a necklace high on her neck and a ribbon in her thick, dark hair. But she is otherwise entirely naked. In her hands, cupped self-consciously at the level of her belly, is a basket of bright crimson flowers—a pretty touch that only seems to emphasize the awkward, not-quite-formed look of the girl’s body.
The model was a teenage flower seller from the local market who was known as Linda la Bouquetière. At nights she worked outside the Moulin Rouge selling not only flowers but also sex. Picasso had initially planned to paint the girl (with whom he’d most likely slept himself) dressed for her first communion. It was a characteristically sly joke inspired by his friend Max Jacob’s attempt “to reform Linda” by enrolling her in a Catholic youth organization called the Children of Mary. But he had changed his mind and painted her nude.
When Leo showed his sister the painting, Gertrude was, he claimed later, “repelled” and “shocked”—ostensibly by the stiff, gauche rendering of the girl’s legs and feet, but perhaps also by the disturbing incongruity of her mature, knowing face and child’s body. Still, despite his sister’s objections, Leo bought it. “That day I came home late to dinner, and Gertrude was already eating,” he later recalled. “When I told her I had bought the picture she threw down her knife and fork, and said, ‘Now you’ve spoiled my appetite.’ ”
Gertrude’s amusing reaction is made more memorable by the story’s underlying irony: Picasso would soon become Gertrude’s favorite. But what mattered at the time was that Picasso now had an in. His work had been bought by a man who was rapidly turning into one of the new century’s most influential and articulate tastemakers. Even if Picasso had little to say to Leo (he didn’t have the American’s yen for intellectual argument), he was smart enough to sense Leo’s personal force, his passion, and to know how important his support could be. And so he flattered Leo and did a portrait of him—a casual sketch, in gouache on cardboard, which he presented to his new patron as a gift.
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LEO STEIN WORE GOLD-RIMMED spectacles and had a long reddish beard. Like Matisse, he was often compared to a professor. He had been twenty-eight when he and his sister Gertrude came to Paris from San Francisco to visit the World’s Fair in 1900—the same year Picasso made his own first trip to the French capital.
Leo at that time was casting about for a sense of purpose in life—he had no real commitments back in America—and so he decided to stay on in Europe. He went to Florence, where he became friends with the art historian and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (both men had studied at Harvard University under William James). Eventually, having decided to become an artist, he returned to live in Paris. He found an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, on the Left Bank, and immersed himself in the city’s vast store of art treasures.
Leo had not set out to become a collector, but he was avid for knowledge, and after buying one work—a painting by a student of Gustave Moreau (Moreau had also taught Matisse)—he found he couldn’t stop. As an American Jew in Paris, he was a kind of outsider with an affinity for the underappreciated, the untamed, the uncategorizable, and his little coup seemed to boost his craving for challenging, obscure, or surprising art. He had nothing like the funds freely available to other American collectors in Paris at the time. But he was thorough, and curious, and he soon added works by Bonnard, van Gogh, Degas, and Manet to his burgeoning collection.
His sister Gertrude (Berenson’s wife, Mary, described her as “a fat, unwieldy person, the color of mahogany…but with a grand, monumental head, plenty of brains and immense geniality—a really splendid woman”) came to live with him in 1903. After failing her medical school exams, she had been traveling in Europe and North Africa, and now was ready to take on Paris. She arrived just in time for the opening of the first-ever Salon d’Automne. The sprawling exhibit was held in the humid, stuffy basement of the Petit Palais. She and Leo returned to see it several times—Leo passionately holding forth, hungry for discoveries, Gertrude less zealous (she knew precious little about art), responding freely, instead, to whatever took her fancy.
They were an odd but impressive couple. But they were not for long the only Steins in Paris, and they would not be the only Steins who would go on to play a transforming role in the lives of Picasso and Matisse. Early in 1904, Leo and Gertrude’s brother Michael, along with his wife, Sarah, their young son, Allan, and their au pair also moved to Paris from their home in San Francisco. For a short time they lived on the same street as Gertrude and Leo. But they soon moved to a spacious third-floor apartment on nearby rue Madame.
Sarah, a penetrating, persuasive woman, was as avid for knowledge about art as Leo, and it wasn’t long before a current of competition began to run between her and her sister-in-law Gertrude.
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WHEN LEO INTRODUCED PICASSO to Gertrude, it didn’t matter that she hadn’t liked his painting of Linda la Bouquetière: They developed an immediate rapport. Picasso had more than a bit of the clown in him, and he made Gertrude laugh. She was charismatic, mercurial, powerful, perverse, and she had a laugh, according to the Steins’ friend Mabel Weeks, “like a beefsteak.” Picasso straightaway sensed a soul in sympathy with his. He knew that his job was to win her over. And he did: At their very first meeting, he suggested that she sit for a portrait by him. She agreed immediately.
Picasso was used to producing portraits in a day or two, in a single sitting, or—just as often—from memory. It was an ability he’d had since adolescence, and he would continue to work that way throughout his life. But the sessions for which Gertrude sat were—famously—an exception. She later said she had sat for Picasso ninety times. What this meant was that several times a week Gertrude had to take the omnibus across Paris and then clamber up the Butte Montmartre. As if to signal his serious intent Picasso had chosen a canvas with dimensions exactly the same as the most valuable painting the Steins owned at that time—a large portrait by Cézanne of his wife holding a fan. It’s not clear if it was Picasso who was more eager to spend time with Ge
rtrude, or the other way around. But there was undoubtedly a mutual fascination between these two magnetic individuals, and the sessions were still going on when Gertrude and Leo accompanied Matisse and Marguerite to Picasso’s studio. Matisse must have known about the portrait in progress, and been curious to see it.
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SPENDING SO MUCH TIME on the portrait of Gertrude turned out to be one of Picasso’s masterstrokes. Gertrude would become one of his staunchest supporters. Because of her later literary fame, her version of what unfolded in these early years, recounted in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and elsewhere, would win out over those told (or not told) by Leo and by Sarah Stein. And yet, at the time, when it came to decisions about buying art, it was not Gertrude who wielded influence (in matters of art, according to Georges Braque, Gertrude “never went beyond the stage of a tourist”) so much as her brother and sister-in-law. Leo and Sarah were not only more knowledgeable about art but also more engaged—and fearless—as collectors.
Had Picasso, in his devotion to Gertrude, somehow backed the wrong horse? As he plugged away at her portrait, he now had to watch as the Steins’ pooling attentions receded from around his own earnest efforts and began to lap instead at the feet of the older, but edgier, Matisse.
It happened quickly: Not long after he had introduced Picasso to Gertrude, Leo took Sarah and Michael Stein to the 1905 Salon d’Automne—the one that made Matisse notorious. This third incarnation of the annual exhibition, which had quickly established itself as the city’s most important showcase for new painting, was held in the Grand Palais. It included established artists along with the younger brigade, and featured, in two adjacent rooms, posthumous retrospectives devoted to a pair of nineteenth-century greats: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (who had died in 1867) and Édouard Manet (who died in 1883). Matisse and Picasso visited both, as did the Steins.
Leo was desperate to acquire a Manet that year and looked very intently at the show, which included one of Manet’s most beautiful portraits of Berthe Morisot. Morisot is seen in three-quarter profile, arrayed in black, and set against a brown background. Her eyes are dark, her nose is slender and pert, and she wears a thick black ribbon around her neck.
By now, of course, three decades after he painted it, Manet’s bravura style was no longer controversial. If anything, the Morisot portrait’s brown-and-black palette must have looked sedate in the context of recent developments in the Parisian avant-garde—above all the full-blown emancipation of color inaugurated by the Post-Impressionists and advanced, most recently, by Matisse. Yet people admired the confident brevity of Manet’s touch and his palpable modernity more than ever. Like everyone, Leo knew about the scandals his work had provoked at the official Salons of the 1860s. He identified, too, with the courage Manet’s few early supporters had shown in the midst of the uproar. And so it’s easy to imagine the Steins comparing Manet’s portrait of Morisot with Matisse’s portrait of his wife, Amélie, which was on show not far away in gallery seven.
That gallery had been dubbed the “Gallery of Dangerous Lunatics.” And Matisse was lunatic in chief. The main question that animated those who found themselves in it (and soon enough, word had spread and people were coming in the thousands) was whether or not to take the paintings seriously. The landscapes were wild enough. The portraits were utterly bewildering. Matisse had portrayed Amélie, like Morisot, seated, and holding what appears to be a fan in one hand. She turns to face the viewer directly—oblivious to the mad unchoreographed frenzy of colors that compose her features, to the utter lack of modeling, and to the conspicuous absence of finish. Her stare, set in a face made up of green, yellow, pink, and red daubs atop a neck of livid yellow and orange, is unapologetic, somehow reinforcing the challenge Matisse himself seemed to be laying down.
The artists showing in Salle VII were labeled Fauves when the critic Louis Vauxcelles described a Renaissance-style sculpture in the same gallery as “a Donatello among the wild beasts” (fauves). “A pot of paint thrown in the face of the public” was how another critic, Camille Mauclair, described their work. The public was similarly indignant. And initially Woman with a Hat had struck Leo, too, as “the nastiest smear of paint” he had ever seen. But the Steins—Leo, Gertrude, and especially Sarah, who was the first to see merit in it—returned many times to gallery seven. Again and again, as Spurling writes in her biography of Matisse, they found themselves drawn to Woman with a Hat. “The young painters were just laughing themselves sick about it,” remembered a young American woman who was staying with Michael and Sarah Stein at the time. “And there stood Leo, Mike and Sally [Sarah] Stein, very impressed and solemn about it.”
It was a challenge that excited the Steins. At Sarah’s impassioned urging, Leo bought Woman with a Hat for 500 francs, and displayed it prominently at the rue de Fleurus. Picasso saw it there every Saturday night. He heard Leo and Sarah and even Gertrude talking incessantly about it as they tried (not always successfully) to persuade their guests that they were not, in fact, insane—and neither was Matisse.
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FOR THE MATISSE FAMILY, the sale had come at a key moment, both financially and psychologically. But it affected both Stein households, too. From that moment on, the whole character of the two collections—the one on the rue de Fleurus and the one at rue Madame—changed utterly. In effect, the Steins said goodbye to the nineteenth century. And as they threw themselves into the twentieth, it was Matisse, more than anyone, they looked to as a guide.
They had met the artist soon after making their momentous purchase. And it’s clear they were moved by him—by the force of his intelligence, his grace under pressure, his surprising combination of personal propriety and almost reckless ambition. Matisse was charismatic: He knew, as his assistant Lydia Delectorskaya said of him much later, “how to take possession of people and make them believe they were indispensable.” And he loved taking risks. The Steins liked this about him.
They liked his family, too. When Gertrude met Amélie, she grew instantly fond of her. Amélie was tough. “I’m in my element,” she said years later, “when the house burns down.” When the Steins had made their initial offer on Woman with a Hat, they had tried to negotiate a lower price. Matisse was willing to give ground—no other buyer seemed remotely interested—but Amélie had held out, insisting on the full 500 francs.
Marguerite, too, the Steins adored. She soon became a playmate to Sarah and Michael’s son, Allan. Both Stein households acquired portraits of her that year: Sarah and Michael had pictures Matisse had painted of her in 1901 and 1906, while Leo and Gertrude acquired a tumultuous portrait of Marguerite in a hat. They displayed it immediately beneath Picasso’s suddenly tame-looking portrait of the underage prostitute, Girl with a Basket of Flowers.
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AS A YOUNG GIRL, Marguerite had contracted diphtheria, a disease of the upper respiratory tract. Her breathing became so badly impeded that she had to be given an emergency tracheotomy on the kitchen table, while Matisse held her down. The incision in Marguerite’s throat allowed her to take in air, but for some time her life had hung in the balance. As she was recovering in the hospital, she contracted typhoid fever, and this, too, very nearly killed her. She eventually got better, but her larynx and trachea were damaged, and ever since her health had been delicate. Too frail to go to school, she had been educated at home.
Unlike her two younger brothers, Marguerite was not Amélie’s daughter. Rather, she was the child of Matisse’s former lover, a shop assistant and artist’s model called Camille Joblaud. Matisse’s relationship with Joblaud had lasted five years. It prospered, too, until Matisse’s seemingly endless struggles as an artist, the trying realities of bohemian life, and the birth of Marguerite placed intolerable strains upon it. The couple separated in 1897, and after a few unhappy years living with her mother, Marguerite came to live with her father, who was by then with Amélie. Amélie welcomed Marguerite into her home, and the two formed a close bond. But it was to her father that Ma
rguerite was most tightly bound. He had seen her life almost slip away. He had seen, too, how his split from her mother had torn and demoralized her. She, meanwhile, had observed Matisse’s meandering evolution as a painter. Over the years, his studio had become for her a kind of refuge, and as she grew, Matisse came to depend on her more and more. She helped arrange his paints, brushes, and canvases. She posed for him. In subtle, unspoken ways, she vouchsafed his equanimity.
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UNLIKE PICASSO, THE ANDALUSIAN wunderkind, Matisse was a late starter. He had first experimented with paints as a twenty-year-old. He was in his hometown of Bohain-en-Vermandois at the time, convalescing from a serious illness and in a fragile, susceptible state. Somehow, the simple experience of working with brushes and colored paint prompted a kind of epiphany. So when, as a seven-year-old, Marguerite herself came terrifyingly close to death, Matisse revived some of those old emotions by painting her as she convalesced over the summer. Now, five years later, she was on the cusp of adolescence, recovering yet again from a serious illness the year before. As he had during earlier scares, Matisse asked her to pose for him. He painted her during the day, her head down, buried in a book. And at night she posed nude—standing tensely, her hair in a bun—for a sculpture, Young Girl Nude.
Marguerite was much more than a convenient model for Matisse. She and her younger brothers were also muses to their father. He had lately taken a special interest in their own efforts at picture-making with pencils, brushes, and paints, and had begun to make ambitious paintings directly inspired by them. One of these, executed in a deliberately flat and childlike manner, showed Marguerite with rosy cheeks, dark-green hair to match her top, and a thick black ribbon around her neck [see Plate 11].
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