The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

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  IN 1894, THE YEAR Marguerite was born, Picasso’s younger sister, Conchita, whom he adored, also contracted diphtheria. There was an outbreak in Corunna, a town on the northwest tip of the Iberian peninsula, where Picasso’s family had reluctantly moved from Málaga three years earlier. Conchita was seven. Picasso was thirteen and in the throes of a tumultuous puberty. His family was not especially religious. But as they watched Conchita weaken, there was little they could do except pray, and pretend in front of the girl that everything would be fine.

  It was not fine—and Picasso knew it. He was distraught, tormented by feelings of helplessness. Up until now, the only agency he had managed to carve out in his life—the only power he had—was all bound up in his art. People were constantly marveling at his drawing. His gifts were so abundant, and so obvious, that even his father, a painter and art teacher himself, had begun to feel outstripped. And so there was a certain logic to what Picasso did next, which was told by his biographer, John Richardson.

  Faced with the loss of his beloved Conchita, he made a vow to God that, if her life was spared, he would never, ever paint or draw again.

  Ten days into the new year, in the late afternoon, Conchita died in her bed at home. On the following day, a new anti-diphtheria serum, ordered weeks before by her doctor, belatedly arrived from Paris.

  For the rest of his life, Picasso was haunted by Conchita’s death. At a moment when his whole adolescent self vibrated with a burgeoning consciousness of his own creative powers, her death had exposed the shame of his helplessness. But it also, perversely, confirmed him in his calling: God, he could tell himself, had chosen his art over his sister’s life.

  The deal Picasso had made, which he kept secret from almost everyone (in later years he only ever told his lovers about it), left him with a confusing burden of guilt. It was the guilt of any survivor who loses a sibling; but also, perhaps, the guilt of someone with an outsized gift, a calling, who, even as he does not yet know how to take possession of it, is haunted by the temptation to relinquish it. Picasso’s deathbed pledge was entirely natural. But it was almost certainly a bargain made in bad faith, one he was never truly prepared to keep.

  The episode is of crucial importance in Picasso’s life, since it helps to explain what Richardson described as Picasso’s “ambivalence towards everything he loved.” It may also account for the various ways in which, for the rest of his life, as Richardson wrote, “young women, young girls in a way had to be sacrificed on the altar of Picasso’s art.”

  Two years later, at the age of fifteen, as if to rehearse or exorcise his guilt, Picasso embarked on a series of sickroom and deathbed scenes. All of them showed ailing girls or young women. They were given titles like Deathbed Scene with Violinist, Woman Praying at a Child’s Bedside, and Kiss of Death. These efforts culminated in a major painting of the same subject—a sickroom scene with a young girl—called Last Moments. This was the work selected to show in the Spanish section of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, prompting Picasso’s first trip to Paris. The painting was barely noticed, and before long it was back in Picasso’s studio. But when he moved back to Paris the following year, hoping to make a name for himself, he took it with him.

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  HAVING CROSSED PARIS ON FOOT, Matisse, Marguerite, and the two Stein siblings began their trudge up the hill to the Bateau-Lavoir. The building was an old piano factory, since converted into artists’ studios. It had a single-story street front, but behind this façade, it extended down a steep hill.

  The Bateau-Lavoir—or “washing boat” (it was named for its resemblance to an old laundry barge on the Seine)—was a habitat unto itself. Gorgeously anarchic, it was a warren of antic high jinks, revelry, poetry, and petty crime. Among its other inhabitants over the five years Picasso lived there were the composer Erik Satie; the artists Amedeo Modigliani, André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Juan Gris, and Georges Braque; and the mathematician Maurice Princet.

  For Picasso, however, its most important resident was Fernande Olivier. Olivier was considerably taller than Picasso. She had a full figure, almond eyes, and an idle air of sensuous curiosity. She had been raised by a single aunt, who forced her to marry a shop worker called Paul-Emile Percheron when she was eighteen. Percheron raped her, and kept her locked in the house when he went out. Only after she had suffered a miscarriage did Olivier manage to escape. She took up with a sculptor, Laurent Debienne, who went by the pseudonym Gaston de la Baume, and found work as an artist’s model. As a young girl, she wrote in her memoirs, “I’d dreamed of knowing artists. They seemed to me to inhabit an enchanted world where life must be so wonderful that it was too much to hope that I might one day share it.”

  She and la Baume took up in the Bateau-Lavoir, “a weird, squalid” place where, as Olivier wrote in her journal, “everything echoes around the building and no-one has any inhibitions.” La Baume, too, was violent, but she didn’t leave him until the summer of 1901, when she returned one day from a modeling session to find him in bed with a naked girl of twelve or thirteen who had been posing for him. “What a hypocrite!” she wrote, “with all his fine talk of the beauty and fragility of children!”

  Three years later, she ran into Picasso, who had only recently settled in Paris for good. “For some time now I’ve been bumping into him wherever I go,” she wrote at the time, “and he looks at me with his huge deep eyes, sharp but brooding, full of suppressed fire.” She couldn’t place him on the social scale, and she couldn’t discern his age. Everything about him intrigued her. But she was understandably reluctant to give herself over to a man again (especially one who could barely speak French).

  Picasso, for his part, was smitten. There was something touchingly obsessive about his early treatment of Olivier. He was openly besotted with her—in a way he never quite would be again with anyone else. “He drops everything for me,” she wrote. “His eyes plead with me, and he treats everything I leave behind like a holy relic. If I fall asleep, he’s beside the bed when I wake up, his eyes anxiously fixed on me.” And yet despite all his attentions, Olivier remained reluctant to move in with him, as Picasso was urging. She detested the squalor he lived in, and was wary of his jealous streak. When he implored her to stop modeling, she resolved to put an end to things. She came to his studio and told him they could not be lovers—although she was willing to be friends. Picasso was “devastated,” she wrote, “but he would rather have that than nothing.”

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  FOR PICASSO, WHAT ENSUED was a period both of confusion and of avid exploration. He persisted with Fernande (he had set up a kind of mock-altar to her in his studio) even as he haunted brothels and formed intense new friendships with two poets, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. It was Jacob who introduced Picasso to the poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. The two men were like brothers. They shared Picasso’s bed and embroidered their friendship with insider jokes and improvised intimacies. Jacob called Picasso “the door to my whole life.”

  But it was Apollinaire’s influence on Picasso that was especially profound. Still at the beginning of his career as a poet, Apollinaire had also embarked on an underground career as a writer of extreme (even by today’s standards) pornography. He had not yet tried his hand at art criticism, although his impact later would prove enormous. There was an extremity in Apollinaire’s vision that seemed uncompromisingly modern. It burned away incidental concerns and tired conventions. And it deeply impressed Picasso. Under Apollinaire’s spell, after several years producing work saturated in pathos, superstition, and self-pity, Picasso now began to cast off secondhand literary tendencies and to wrestle with feelings and forms that felt genuinely new and fresh.

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  OLIVIER HAD MEANWHILE MET a good-looking Catalonian artist called Joaquim Sunyer. He was from Barcelona, where he had belonged to the same group of artists and anarchists—the Quatre Gats—as Picasso, and he painted nightlife in the manner of Degas. Olivier soon moved into Sunyer’s studio—a setback to Picass
o. But she was not entirely content. Sunyer aroused her physically, but she did not feel that he actually loved her, “and I can only stay with a man if I believe I’m loved.” So she continued to see Picasso, confiding in him and no doubt communicating some of her confusion. He was eager to kindle any kind of intimacy he could. And so one day he told her that he had recently tried opium with some friends. He would buy a lamp, a needle, and a pipe, he promised, and share some with her.

  “Here’s something new at last, and of course I’m fascinated,” she wrote in her diary. They tried it soon after. They were awake until dawn that first night, and Olivier stayed in the studio for the next three days.

  Picasso finally had what he wanted. “It’s probably thanks to opium that I’ve discovered the true meaning of the word ‘love,’ love in general,” wrote Olivier. Under the spell of opium, she felt an instinctive sympathy for Picasso. “I made up my mind almost instantly to bind my life to him,” she wrote. “I no longer think of getting up in the middle of the night and going to find Sunyer, as I was still doing only recently because of the pleasure his lovemaking gave me.”

  Picasso, who was never religious but was deeply superstitious, must have felt a force akin to magic in this turnaround. He had only had to sprinkle a kind of fairy dust in the air—this drug called opium—and his wishes had been granted.

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  OLIVIER QUICKLY BECAME PART of the tight group of eccentric, penniless, and wild-living friends that had formed by now around Picasso—the so-called bande à Picasso. There were Jacob and Apollinaire, there was the poet André Salmon, and then various other Bateau-Lavoir residents and visitors, a changing cast of artists, models, and circus performers. Opium played a major part in their fledgling society, which, inevitably, involved as many dismal lows as exhilarating highs. Picasso was still prone to fits of jealousy, and the relationship remained fragile over the next year, as he continued to shake off the sentimentality of his Blue Period and pursue a tougher, more stripped-down vision.

  Artistically, he was coming into a new kind of maturity. His emotions were being stretched beyond the bounds of his own self. He grew less maudlin; his interests seemed to range more widely. His friendships—with Jacob and Apollinaire, above all—were in many ways as ardent as his feelings for Fernande, who finally moved in with him in late 1905. Under the influence of love, of opium, and of poetry, his art was becoming simultaneously more expansive and more self-aware.

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  WHEN THE RELATIONSHIP WITH the Steins had begun, Olivier, like Picasso, had immediately sensed tremendous possibilities. “We’ve had some surprise visitors at the studio,” she noted in her journal. “They are two Americans, a brother and sister, called Leo and Gertrude Stein…They really admire avant-garde artists and seem to have an instinctive understanding, a kind of flair for it. They know exactly what they are doing and bought 800 francs worth of pictures on their first visit, far more than we ever dreamed possible.”

  By this time Gertrude had already agreed to sit for her portrait. The Steins invited Picasso and Olivier for dinner, and the couple quickly became regular guests at their Saturday-evening soirées.

  In many ways, however, these evenings at the Steins’ were a trial for Picasso. His French was poor, and when, soon enough, he began to have to contend with the Steins’ new darling, Matisse, they became especially trying. Bearded and bespectacled, Matisse would hold forth in his native French with sober charm and impressive command. He was persuasive. His self-possession was intimidating, his grown-up demeanor a far cry from the behavior indulged in by Picasso’s friends around the Bateau-Lavoir and the nightclubs of Montmartre. In Matisse’s presence, Picasso must have felt acutely conscious that he was behind him in almost every way—in achievement, in maturity, and, above all, in creative audacity.

  Matisse, for his part, could surely smell Picasso’s ambition, and he had picked up—either directly or from the whisperings of others—on his brilliance. But if he felt threatened, he wasn’t ready to admit it to himself, much less betray it to others. Instead, it seems, he was inclined to think of the Spaniard almost as a younger brother. There was something special about him, no doubt, and something attractive, too. Instead of hostility, it brought out in Matisse an impulse toward magnanimity.

  Trying as these evenings were, Picasso knew how important it was that he attend them. And he, like Matisse, was stimulated by the works the Steins had on their walls. “If you get bored with the conversation,” wrote Olivier, “there are always the works of art cluttering the studio to look at, and they also have a very good collection of Chinese and Japanese prints, so you can disappear into a corner, sit down in a comfortable armchair and lose yourself in contemplating these beautiful masterpieces.”

  Like Picasso, Olivier couldn’t help but notice the many Matisse paintings that had begun to populate the walls, both at the rue de Fleurus and at Sarah and Michael’s home at rue Madame. She watched Matisse closely: “With his regular features and thick golden beard, he had the look of a classic Great Master,” she recalled. He was warm and agreeable. But she noticed how, when the subject turned to art, “he would talk for ages, arguing, explaining, trying to convince his listeners and get them to agree with him. He possessed an astonishingly lucid mind and argued clearly and precisely.”

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  WHEN PICASSO WAS PAINTING GERTRUDE, Olivier was often there, too, reading aloud from the fables of La Fontaine. When the two women were alone—either at the Steins’ or in Montmartre—Olivier would confide in Gertrude, describing the ups and downs of her amorous life, complaining about Picasso’s jealousy, admiring his dedication to his work, relishing his adoration. She may also have gossiped with Gertrude about Matisse. Olivier was perceptive. She realized that, for all his talk and outward demeanor, Matisse was “a good deal less straightforward than he liked to appear.”

  This was something Picasso, who was almost preternaturally alert to weakness in others, must have grasped, too. He would have sensed as soon as they met that, for all his outward displays of social command, Matisse was a man under enormous pressure. He suffered panic attacks, nosebleeds, and insomnia, and was plagued by insecurities. His audacity in the studio, his willingness to go where feeling led him, came at a cost. What he was doing with color was genuinely unprecedented in the history of Western art. He was frightened by what he had unleashed, and couldn’t be sure of its validity. His “rampant self doubt,” as Spurling wrote, “made him desperate to know what sympathetic observers thought about his work.”

  A part of Matisse probably hoped that Picasso might be just such an observer, and even that he might somehow make of the young Spaniard a kind of protégé. He was on the lookout for acolytes, for anything or anyone that could shore up his position. He already had Derain, Braque, and a number of others in his corner. Why not also Picasso?

  And yet Matisse could also see, like everyone else, how magnetic Picasso was, and he will have noted from very early on that the Spaniard had the kind of fluency and skill as a draftsman that he could only envy. So another part of Matisse must have realized how unlikely it was that Picasso—young as he was—would ever be anyone’s acolyte.

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  WELCOMING MATISSE TO HIS STUDIO was a way for Picasso to wrest back some of the control he had lately relinquished, both in his relations with the Steins and in the incipient rivalry with Matisse. The Bateau-Lavoir may have been wild and ramshackle, but it was also, for Picasso, sovereign territory. It was a place he was proud to show off—to all comers. In the summers when, as Fernande wrote, his studio was “as hot as a furnace,” he would often strip down and, with regal nonchalance, receive visitors half naked, or entirely so, “with just a scarf tied around the waist.” On one occasion, Gertrude had arrived unannounced with a young woman from California, Annette Rosenshine. Gertrude “turned the doorknob and pushed,” remembered Rosenshine, and encountered a scene strangely akin to the trio in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass: “There on the bare floor of a completely unfurnis
hed room lay an attractive woman between two men—Picasso on one side…They were fully clothed…lying there to rest from a bohemian revelry the night before…[Since] Picasso and his companions…were disinclined to get up or incapable of it and did nothing to detain us, we left.”

  The Bateau-Lavoir, in other words, was a place that thrived not on drawing room disputation, on endless explaining, but on youth, ardor, and spontaneity. Picasso knew that whatever else Matisse had going for him, he no longer had access to all this. And he relished the opportunity to remind him, the way any person in his twenties—free from marriage, from children, from financial responsibility, still the master of his own life—enjoys flaunting his freedom before his elders. If, at the Steins’, Picasso couldn’t help but feel inferior, here, at the Bateau-Lavoir, his potency would be unmistakable.

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  AS SOON AS MATISSE AND MARGUERITE, with Gertrude and Leo, approached the entrance to the Bateau-Lavoir, Matisse must have felt this difference between his own life and Picasso’s. But it was also, of course, as Spurling pointed out, a life he recognized. He, too, had lived for many years in poverty with a vivacious, bohemian girlfriend, in the company of other artists. He, too, had scrounged for money, pawning his watch, doing mindless jobs, dressing carelessly, oblivious to outward appearances. He was probably not yet ready to romanticize those days—they were still too raw; they had led to too much strife; and the strife was not yet verifiably over. The girlfriend—Marguerite’s mother—was gone, and in her place he had a wife. Together, they were strong. But they were still mired in poverty, still out on a limb.

  As they all entered Picasso’s studio, Gertrude, one feels (at this point one can only speculate), would have been brusque and convivial, belching out her disarming beefsteak laugh in the suddenly crowded room. Leo surely looked around avidly, hoping to see some new image, the beginnings of some new manner to get excited about. Both were probably on the lookout for any signs of tension between the painters. (The idea of rivalry—which was well and truly alive in their own sibling relations—stimulated them.) Olivier, one imagines, would have greeted Matisse with warmth and respect; but perhaps also some trepidation on Picasso’s behalf: “Matisse shone on occasions like this,” she later noted, “and was always in complete control, whereas Picasso was shy and diffident and appeared rather sullen.” To break the tension, she may have fawned over Marguerite—the more so, perhaps, since her miscarriage during the nightmare period with Percheron had left her unable to have children of her own. (This was something Picasso had only recently become aware of, so the subject was raw. Picasso was not above taunting the people in his life through his art, and the series of images he had recently embarked on of mothers nursing children may have functioned partly as a cruel reproach.)