Matisse had presumably spoken with Picasso about Marguerite in the context of explaining his (highly unusual at the time) interest in the art of his own children. Picasso was intrigued: Matisse’s interest dovetailed with a feeling for innocence and purity that had lately found its way into his own pictures. But Picasso never adopted an interest or influence without complicating it. And almost always the complications related to sex. (If Matisse hadn’t grasped this yet, he would soon enough.) Sex, and a related drive toward visual possession, were part and parcel of Picasso’s whole way of seeing. When he looked at a drawing or print, claimed Leo Stein, it was surprising “that anything was left on the paper, so absorbing was his gaze.” A long list of women and girls—beginning with Olivier—attested that his gaze had a similar effect on them. So it’s possible that Matisse may have noticed, with some unease, how Picasso now looked at Marguerite.
—
WE DON’T KNOW WHAT pictures were hanging or stacked up against the walls that day—although Matisse, peering ferociously through his spectacles, would probably have seen the unfinished portrait of Gertrude. There may also have been several of Picasso’s stripped-back, early Rose Period works with young boys, mothers with infants, and circus scenes. To Matisse, it must have seemed admirable stuff, and in some ways even quite exciting. But there was nothing that could have struck him as extraordinary. Nothing remotely as audacious as what Matisse himself was then in the grip of. So for Matisse there was nothing to lose by dropping a few supportive comments, perhaps even asking a few pertinent questions. Matisse, according to Leo Stein, “liked giving his opinion,” but just as much, he “liked hearing the opinion of others.” He had “great maturity and the temper of the eternal pupil: he is always willing to learn anyhow, anywhere, and from anyone.”
But of course, it’s always a very delicate business, talking to someone about their creative endeavors. So easy to get it wrong. So easy for something patronizing to slip out, or something accidentally barbed—some thinly veiled rebuke, perhaps, whether real or imagined…Whatever Matisse said, whatever the general manner or particular comment, it’s fair to guess that this very tendency toward prolixity got up Picasso’s nose. “Matisse talks and talks,” he complained to Leo Stein. “I can’t talk, so I just said, Oui oui oui. But it’s damned nonsense all the same.”
When the visit was over, after Picasso and Olivier saw Matisse and Marguerite and the Steins off, dispensing thanks and jokes and best wishes as the four of them set out on the return journey, it’s easy to imagine Picasso’s temples throbbing. After a brief interlude, we might speculate, he will have reentered his studio, demanding to be left alone. His eyes, staring again at the pictures on his walls, will have blinked, looked away, looked back, and blinked again, as he struggled to compare what was here with what he had seen by Matisse at the Steins’. And with each passing minute, he will have grown more determined to prove that Matisse did, in fact, have something to lose.
—
WITHIN DAYS OF MATISSE’S first visit to the Bateau-Lavoir, he exhibited his latest picture, Le Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), at the Salon des Indépendants. When he saw it, Leo Stein balked. Matisse’s latest concoction was a radiant Arcadian vision—languorous nudes, embracing couples, a boy playing pan flutes, a ring of dancers linked by hand, all cavorting in an outdoor setting framed by sinuous tree branches and a rainbow canopy. The picture conjured a paradise, but everything about it was jarringly odd. The figures were out of scale and had weird proportions. Some were outlined with thick, colored shadows. It wasn’t clear how they related to one another, or if they did at all. The color was ecstatically vivid—so rich it was almost blinding. But the vision seemed barely related to reality, or anything even approaching it. As an exercise in bright, saturated color, it was unprecedented, certainly. But in most people, it triggered total bewilderment.
But, just as he had with Woman in a Hat, Stein soon recovered from his initial shock, and before long he was calling it “the most important work of our time.” He bought it for the walls of the rue de Fleurus, where, on account of its astonishing coloration, it quickly became the most talked-about picture on display.
Picasso was blindsided. The idea of Arcadia—of an imaginative return to a delicate, primitive, dreamlike state marked by tranquility and bliss—was in the air at the time. A rash of new translations of Virgil’s Eclogues—the Roman source of the vision—had appeared in France over the past half century, and as the country was convulsed by political upheavals, the dream appealed increasingly to artists and the public alike. Puvis de Chavannes, the muralist, addressed it repeatedly, giving the dream a stately, classical tint. Paul Gauguin, meanwhile, took the idea—and specifically, Baudelaire’s Arcadian poem, “L’Invitation au Voyage”—quite literally and went off in search of such a society in the South Seas. His Arcadian masterpiece, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? was sent back to Paris from Tahiti, and was on display in Vollard’s gallery in 1898 and 1899, where Matisse must have seen it.
Infected by the same dream of a classical, Arcadian past, Picasso had spent months planning a painting of a similar subject, The Watering Place. It was to be a large canvas showing young naked boys and horses by a watering hole. It was to be a return to essentials, to a mood of archaic simplicity, to something unaffected, inviolate, aloof from the hubbub of the modern metropolis. He wanted to use this painting to broadcast a new level of ambition.
But when he saw the Matisse, he realized at once that he’d been outflanked. He abandoned The Watering Place. There was simply no point exhibiting a work that would look so unadventurous beside the Bonheur de Vivre. Matisse wasn’t producing pale, watery imitations of Greece, or Gauguin, or Puvis de Chavannes. Whatever you thought of them, his paintings were new, and they were resolutely themselves.
—
WHAT HAPPENED OVER THE following eighteen months was a drama unlike any in the story of modern art. It was a fight between two geniuses of invention—in many ways equally endowed but in sensibility and temperament utterly different—for a true and radical originality. Ultimately, what was at stake was election to greatness. More immediately, however, it was a struggle over how much each man was prepared to see—to truly see and recognize—the other, and how much each would instead elect to defend himself against the other—to not see, or to see with deliberate perversity.
Remarkably, it was a fight that Matisse, for a surprisingly long time, doesn’t seem to have quite registered he was even in. Taking Picasso’s later ascendancy as a given, accounts of the period have tended to assume that Matisse recognized Picasso as a rival from the outset. But his behavior suggests otherwise. It suggests not only that he admired the younger man and was happy to befriend him, but that he did not see much in his work that posed a serious challenge to him.
The two men saw a lot of each other. Picasso was not just a reliable presence at the Steins’ but a regular visitor to Matisse’s studio, too. They wandered together through the Luxembourg Gardens. Both, in their different ways, were charismatic and full of charm, and despite Picasso’s poor command of French and Matisse’s seniority in age, it’s easy to imagine them enjoying each other’s company, feeding off each other’s responses to various contemporaries or predecessors (perhaps those archetypal rivals of the previous century, Delacroix and Ingres, or the more intimately connected Manet and Degas; certainly Gauguin and Cézanne), and joking about mutual acquaintances—the Steins, perhaps, or Vollard.
Matisse, at this delicate stage of his career, was acutely conscious of outside opinion. With others looking on, he was eager to be seen extending the hand of friendship to the young Spaniard. Encouraging him, complimenting him, asking considerate, thoughtful questions, welcoming him into his studio, introducing him to his family, to Amélie, and to Marguerite, who was always around the studio, posing for her father, helping him put things in order…These were the right things to do, and they came easily to Matisse.
Partly, of course, he wa
s taking the long view: He and Picasso and the other artists around them were involved in a bigger fight. They were modern artists in search of a public. It was a search fraught with risk and uncertain reward, as they knew from the stories of their immediate predecessors: the Impressionists, who struggled for so long in poverty; Manet, who was so relentlessly abused; van Gogh, who took his own life; and Cézanne, who labored his entire life in obscurity. Very few of these role models had met with fates that were encouraging. Nothing came easily to them, and there was no reason to think it would come any easier to Matisse and his avant-garde peers. And so it made sense to support one another. They were all in it together, and each among them would surely benefit from the success of the others.
This was Matisse’s basic impulse. But of course, since he was already the established frontrunner, his attitude—a sort of noblesse oblige disguised as camaraderie—was one that he could afford to take. For Picasso, the calculation was different. He had always been surrounded by people who recognized his preeminence. He could not abide the idea of being a follower.
—
MANY YEARS LATER, Matisse told Picasso that Picasso knew, “like a cat, that whatever somersault you attempt, you will always land on your feet.” To which Picasso replied, “Yes, that’s only too true, because I was imbued early with a damned sense of balance and composition. Whatever I venture, I don’t seem to be able to break my neck as a painter.”
In 1906, Matisse, as a painter, was very much breaking his own neck. Watching, Picasso—really for the first time in his life—was thrown off balance. It wasn’t a single, destabilizing blow, from which he could quickly recover by falling back on his own best instincts. It was an experience repeated each week, as bizarre, eye-catching new work—bolder, brighter, rougher, more dazzling than anything yet seen—kept appearing in Matisse’s studio and on the walls of the Steins. All through 1906 and well into 1907, Picasso was continually being made to recalibrate his judgment to match what he was seeing. And in such pressurized circumstances (Matisse always articulating his various theories, always impressive; the Steins promoting him heavily as they poured persuasion into the minds of their multiplying guests; Picasso sullenly looking on, testily answering questions about his own work—questions for which he had no real answers), the effort was immense.
It was a relief to go back to Montmartre. On Sundays, after their regular evenings at the Steins’, Picasso and Olivier would sleep in. Around eleven o’clock they would head down to the local open-air market on Place Saint-Pierre beneath the still-unfinished basilica of Sacré-Coeur. Picasso would be wearing his workman’s overalls. Olivier draped herself in a Spanish mantilla. The markets were full of life—just what Picasso needed to revive him after the ordeal of the Steins and a week spent fretting in his studio. Picasso, wrote Olivier, “loves all this working class hubbub and it takes him out of himself, away from his preoccupations with his creative life.”
—
MOMENTUM CONTINUED TO BUILD for Matisse. His Bonheur de Vivre caught the attention not just of the Steins but also of a fifty-six-year-old textile magnate from Russia called Sergei Shchukin. Shchukin’s wife and youngest son had died the previous year, and when he saw Matisse’s visionary painting, this wealthy but emotionally shattered man was overwhelmed. He asked Vollard to introduce him to the artist, and over the next decade he became Matisse’s bravest, most important, and—after Sarah Stein (who was now so bewitched by Matisse that she and Michael were soon collecting nothing else)—most trusted patron.
With its large passages of flat, saturated color, its atmosphere of riotous abandon and extravagant sensuality, the Bonheur de Vivre triggered a flood of visitors to 27 rue de Fleurus, and thence to 58 rue Madame. In Paris, the two Stein households had become the most important place to go for anyone interested in modern art. And evidently, many people were. It was six years into the new century. A sense of being on the cusp of unprecedented things prevailed. Paris had been the capital of the nineteenth century. Would it—with its sky-piercing tower, its busy, sweeping boulevards, its world’s fairs, its underground network of pneumatic tubes, and its constellation of grand railway stations—also reign over the twentieth? People came to the city to find out. At that time, aside from the cacophony of the annual Salons, the only place to go to see an official selection of recent art was the Musée du Luxembourg. But the latest developments—the ones that so enthused the Steins—had made even that museum, filled as it was with conventional-looking landscapes and portraits and history paintings, look beholden to an earlier era. Things were far more exciting at the nearby rue de Fleurus. There you could see the latest works by Matisse and Picasso alongside paintings by Manet, Cézanne, Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Eugène Delacroix, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Renoir. Both Stein families had bought heavily from Matisse’s second retrospective in the spring. By the end of the year, Sarah and Michael’s rue Madame apartment boasted a whole ensemble of his latest paintings.
At first, visits to the Steins’ were ad hoc. But the constant disruption caused by so many requests to see the collections became too much, especially for Gertrude. She had started using the atelier at the rue de Fleurus as her writing studio. To solve the problem, visiting hours were established, and both apartments were opened on Saturday evenings to anyone who carried a reference. Seeing the paintings properly was often a problem, since neither Stein home was wired for electricity. For the strong colors of the Matisses, candlelight was not ideal (Picasso, by contrast, enjoyed all his life the magical effects of candlelight on his work). As a result, many guests requested return visits during the day, and the Steins were loath to deny them. They were, as Vollard wrote, the “most hospitable people in the world.” And so the crowds only grew.
For many passing through, going to the Steins’ was almost like going to a show: It was a kind of theater—deadly serious for the cast of artists and collectors, but less so for the skeptical majority, who often came away bemused and baffled both by the pictures on the walls and the atmosphere of earnest sobriety around them. Picasso, always slightly on the edge, may have felt an urge to side with the baffled skeptics—especially since it was the work of Matisse above all they struggled to see. He, Picasso, struggled too.
—
VOLLARD WAS AMONG THE MANY who came to the Steins’. At the end of April, he swooped, buying up 2,200 francs’ worth of pictures from Matisse’s studio. For Matisse, the money (equivalent to about $10,000 today) was a godsend. He would have liked to have been in a position to decline it—he didn’t trust Vollard—but the reality was that it came at a good moment. Despite the attention his work was getting, he was still close to broke. The Steins had asked Matisse to let them delay payment for the Bonheur de Vivre, because the earthquake that devastated San Francisco on April 18, 1906, had plunged their own finances into uncertainty.
Only a week or two later, Matisse received surprising news in a letter from Leo Stein: “I am sure that you will be pleased to know,” he wrote, “that Picasso has done business with Vollard. He has not sold everything but he has sold enough to give him peace of mind during the summer and perhaps longer. Vollard has taken 27 pictures, mostly old ones, a few of the more recent ones, but nothing major. Picasso was very happy with the price.”
—
PICASSO’S SALE TO VOLLARD was indeed a major boon. He had been experiencing intense frustration in his studio. After ninety sittings, his portrait of Gertrude was stuck. He had set out to portray her in the same bulky and casually authoritative pose as Ingres’s portrait of the press baron Louis-François Bertin. But this simple idea had turned into an excruciating ordeal. He could not get the painting to where he wanted it. He kept on seeing new problems, new inadequacies. The difficulties were only compounded each time he came back from Matisse’s studio or the Steins’. The portrait—his whole conception of it—was insufficiently bold.
The sittings themselves had become a trial. It was no longer just he and Gertrude and occasionally Fernande in the studio, for Leo would
often stop by, too. And since all the Steins, but especially Leo, had Matisse on the brain and would not stop talking about him, this meant that, in effect, Matisse was there, too, always looking over his shoulder.
Finally, Picasso’s frustration boiled over. He scraped away Gertrude’s face, telling her he had to stop. “I don’t see you anymore when I look at you,” he said.
—
THERE FOLLOWED A GREAT HIATUS. Summer was coming, and with the windfalls they had received from Vollard, both Matisse and Picasso left Paris. Picasso, in particular, needed to be away from the Bateau-Lavoir; away from Gertrude; away from Saturdays at the Steins’; away, above all, from Matisse.
Matisse went to North Africa. He spent two weeks in Algeria before returning across the Mediterranean to Collioure, where he stayed through October. Picasso, meanwhile, went home to Spain. Taking Fernande with him, he went first to Barcelona and then to a remote mountaintop village in the Pyrenees called Gósol.
Barcelona was a homecoming. There, among old friends, Picasso was once again the celebrated wunderkind, the brilliant young artist who had so impressed on his home turf that going to Paris, the center of the art world, was his only real option. The intervening five years had not been easy. But now, thanks to the Steins’ early interest and Vollard’s renewed vote of confidence, he finally had something to show for himself. He was happy to see family and old acquaintances again, and proud to show off his new love, Olivier. The visit was reassuring: It bolstered his faltering sense of himself.
The Art of Rivalry Page 20