The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  But in Gósol, where the couple decamped after the city, something even more enviable happened. In this rustic and isolated village the two lovers experienced a kind of honeymoon that was also, for Picasso, a creative transformation. For Picasso, the two phenomena—love life and creative stimulus—were inseparable and always would be; but the link was never more forceful, and never more affecting, than during this summer sojourn in Gósol.

  They stayed with the local innkeeper, a ninety-year-old former smuggler called Josep Fontdevila, who sat for Picasso several times. They were drawn into the villagers’ daily life. They observed and participated in several festivals, including the Feast of Santa Margarida, Gósol’s patron saint. Without money or the venal bustle of the city to think about; away from the poets, the pornographers, the drugs, and the melodramas of the Bateau-Lavoir; away from the pressure of dealers and collectors and fellow artists, they at last began to thrive. Picasso was able to see Fernande not as an object of veneration or a cause for frustration but as simply his lover. “The Picasso I saw in Spain,” she later recalled, “was completely different from the Paris Picasso; he was gay, less wild, more brilliant and lively and able to interest himself in things in a calmer, more balanced fashion; at ease, in fact. He radiated happiness and his normal character and attitude were transformed.”

  Olivier, too, was as content as she had ever been: “Up there in air of incredible purity,” she wrote, “above the clouds, surrounded by people who were incredibly amiable, hospitable and without guile…we found out what happiness could be like.”

  All this fueled Picasso’s sense of artistic potential. Gósol acted on his imagination much as the fishing village of Collioure had on Matisse. He was prolific. He recorded the locals dancing, just as Matisse had been engrossed by the peasant dances in Collioure. Under the magnetic pull of his lover’s body, his lines became harder, more adamant, carving out volume and mass with increased economy but also more emphasis. The emaciated circus performers and flimsy ephebes he had specialized in over the past several years gave way to wide-waisted, full-breasted figures with pouchy stomachs and muscular arms. Looking at the images that emerged, it is as if Picasso’s eyes had been flushed, rinsed of confusions and false feeling. He was suddenly able to see again, cleanly, without the distorting prism of Matisse always before him.

  Shorn of the pathos and self-pity of the Blue and early Rose periods, the new work had a timeless, inviolate quality, an almost imperious detachment. With ancient models in mind—Greek kouroi, ancient Iberian sculpture, the classical dreaming of Ingres—Picasso was searching for a quintessential line, an emphatic nudity (his pictures contain no hint of body hair), and the distant perfume of an archaic, untutored youth. There is a sense in the results of a concerted harking back, an attempt to arrive at a kind of simplified vision that predates civilization and stands poignantly aloof from social life.

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  UNFORTUNATELY, SOCIAL LIFE CAME crashing back in, bringing this lovers’ idyll to an abrupt end. The ten-year-old granddaughter of Fontdevila, to whom Picasso had become deeply attached, became ill with typhoid fever (the same highly contagious, frequently fatal bacterial disease Marguerite Matisse had contracted). As soon as Picasso, who hated illness and was haunted by the death of his sister Conchita, found out, he and Olivier fled. The journey back to Paris was long and arduous. They traveled north over the Pyrenees, first by mule (an encounter with a herd of wild horses on this first leg almost ended in disaster when some of the mules bolted and lost their loads, causing Picasso’s rolled-up canvases, drawings, and sculptures to be scattered in the dust), then by coach, then by train.

  When they arrived in the city, it was the end of July, high summer, and the Bateau-Lavoir studio was a furnace. Mice had eaten away at everything in sight, and both their bed and the sofa were infested with bedbugs.

  Picasso called on Gertrude and asked her to resume the portrait sittings. Having earlier erased her facial features, he now painted them back in, this time greatly simplified, and marked by a blockish faceting of the face. He endowed Gertrude’s eyes with a hypnotic asymmetry, evoking an inner intensity of vision, a seer’s blindness. Looking at the finished portrait, you feel the memory of the earlier drama—“I don’t see you anymore when I look at you!”—brilliantly resolved with this suggestion of a whole new way of seeing—more internal than external.

  Gertrude had wanted Matisse, too, to paint her portrait, but he had declined. His demurral had caused tensions between them that were exacerbated by Matisse’s increasing intimacy with Sarah Stein. But Gertrude was happy now. She had a full-fledged Picasso: an original, masterly portrait, noteworthy for many things, including its conspicuous refusal of Matissean color (the picture instead is a symphony in brown). And there were other ways, too, in which Picasso seemed to be trying to position himself as a kind of anti-Matisse. Where the breakthrough paintings of Matisse and his fellow Fauves were marked not just by vivid color but by an unfinished look and a lack of underpinning drawing—qualities that had provoked accusations that their pictures were anarchic and diseased—Picasso’s new work was soberly colored, classically symmetrical, and anatomically accurate.

  It was not enough, however, for Picasso to carve out his own, opposing ground, because Matisse himself would not stop moving. As the Bonheur de Vivre had shown, he was already shifting away from Fauvism. With an urgency that Picasso may partly have prompted, he was trying to regain control over the anarchic side of his sensuous response to color—not by dimming it (on the contrary, he was constantly intensifying color) but by finding alternative ways to impose balance and lucidity. Drawing, henceforth, played a key role. Carving out large areas of flat, unmodulated color, Matisse’s lines, swelling and receding, helped him achieve the composure he sought.

  In this search for lucidity, Matisse did not pursue Picasso’s more conventional, academic line, but instead sought answers in a more primitive or untutored approach. He had been repeatedly accused by his critics of celebrating deformity. As if to goad them, he now actively embraced the idea of deformation.

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  WHEN PICASSO WAS EFFECTING his solution to the portrait of Gertrude, Matisse was still in Collioure, working on two portraits of a local fisherman. Collioure was Matisse’s haven, his sanctuary. It was a busy fishing village on a small, curving bay, surrounded by the arid foothills of the same range, the Pyrenees, that Picasso had recently crossed with Olivier. Pockmarked by palm trees, radiant clumps of spiky agave, fig trees, date and banana palms, and pomegranate and peach trees, the village was close to the border with Spain. The town specialized in anchovies and sardines preserved in brine, and as a result a pungent smell permeated the port where the fish were gutted and salted and their heads left to rot. Geographically, it was the part of France that was closest to Africa, and centuries of trade and exchange had given the town a strong Moorish flavor. Collioure was where Matisse had painted in the company of Derain in 1905 and, under the spell of the port’s intense light, had produced the first Fauvist paintings. So it was a place he returned to, just one year later, with a tremendous sense of potential.

  The model for his fisherman portraits was a teenager called Camille Calmon. Matisse had the boy, who lived in the house next door, sit on a chair in a casually hunched, off-kilter pose not entirely unlike Gertrude Stein in Picasso’s portrait. The first version Matisse painted was roughly but conventionally drawn, the brushwork still essentially Fauvist—which is to say loose and unfinished-looking. The second version, painted on a canvas exactly the same size, began as a free copy of the first. But Matisse, who was thinking about how to anchor and intensify his pictures’ expressiveness, soon began altering the contours, flattening and simplifying the boy’s face, exaggerating rhymes and rhythms in the figure’s silhouette and in the folds of his clothes. He transformed the parti-colored background of the first version into a uniform bubblegum pink, and filled in the colors of his pants and shirt so that they, too, were uniform, flat, and saturated, rath
er than porous and incomplete.

  By conventional standards, the first picture was bizarre enough. But the second ran the risk of appearing as a flat-out parody. Not for the first time, Matisse was thrown off balance by what he had done. Anticipating outside responses, he was more anxious than usual. When he returned to Paris and showed the painting to Leo Stein (an audience as sympathetic as any he could hope for), he initially pretended it had been painted by the local postman in Collioure.

  Disowning the picture may have been a jest—he admitted soon enough “that it was an experiment of his own”—but it was a revealing one. Matisse’s own audacity and inner conviction were again racing ahead of what seemed permissible.

  With the insults and accusations of depravity still ringing in his ears, Matisse was growing more and more convinced that deformation—distorting the outlines and proportions of subjects in order to arrive at something more concentrated and powerful—might point the way forward. It was an idea he had been heading toward himself. But it also chimed with notions articulated by a friend of his—a poet and art critic called Mécislas Golberg. Despite being on his deathbed, Golberg was at that time helping Matisse formulate a short essay he hoped to publish. “In art,” Golberg had written, “deformation is the basis of all expression. The more the personality becomes intense, the clearer also deformation becomes.”

  The statement appealed to Matisse, above all because the idea of expression was at the very heart of his beliefs about art. He loved, too, the satisfying paradox of deformation leading to greater “clarity.”

  Leo later described this second version of the Young Sailor as the “first thing [Matisse] did with forced deformations.” He didn’t buy it. Nor did Sarah and Michael Stein—although they did acquire the first version. The second, it seems, was harder to swallow than anything Matisse had yet done. And that, of course, only made it more intriguing—and more deranging—to Picasso.

  For Picasso, intensification of personality was not just an ideal but a compulsion, so he, too, must have loved Golberg’s idea. But if he was to pursue deformation in his own work, he needed to do it on his own terms. Intensity of color—and the flatness Matisse had begun emphasizing in order to achieve it—were not his concerns. The deformations he was interested in were sculptural; they had to do with three-dimensional awareness. The sculptural distortions he now began to produce, with Matisse at the back of his mind, were fired in part by the sensual immediacy of Fernande’s body, but also by the ancient Iberian sculpture he had recently discovered. Atavistic and full of blockish, unrefined potential, these were stone carvings made during the long interval between the Bronze Age and the Roman conquest of the Iberian peninsula; they bore traces of Assyrian, Phoenician, and Egyptian influences. Picasso had seen a newly excavated group of them, made in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., at the Louvre. Their impassive, simplified features seemed magnetic to him. Best of all, they were Spanish—and Andalusian; he could almost claim a patent on them.

  They soon led to a breakthrough: a picture of two naked, pneumatically inflated women standing side-on to the viewer and facing each other. Their legs are stumpy, their breasts blockish, and their faces, as in the recently completed portrait of Gertrude, faceted and simplified. The result was stranger—and strangely more compelling—than anything Picasso had yet produced.

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  WHEN IT CAME TO INFLUENCES, Picasso was a magpie. There was nothing his avid eye would not consume, digest, and then transmute into something new. But it seemed that he was becoming aware around this time that nothing he had so far invented was adequately his own. Nor was it as unambiguously modern as the work of Matisse. Picasso had gone through his Toulouse-Lautrec phase, his El Greco phase, his van Gogh and Gauguin phases. He had been swayed by Puvis de Chavannes and Ingres and the Greeks and lately the Catalonian Romanesque and the Iberians. It was all quite dazzling. But (unsurprisingly, perhaps: He was only twenty-five years old) his efforts were not yet real. They were not yet sufficient unto themselves. Picasso was obviously on his way somewhere, but what was just as obvious was that he had not yet arrived. Two Nudes, with its odd deformations, suggested that he was close. One could point to influences, one could trace the steps that led up to it. And yet there was something about it—something fresh and audacious, something no one but he could have made.

  It was around this time—toward the end of 1906—that Picasso began plotting a picture that he hoped would establish his immediate ascendancy over Matisse.

  Originally conceived as a sexual allegory about venereal disease and the wages of sin, it became a picture of five prostitutes, clustered together in a brothel, flaunting their bodies as they stare out at the viewer with aggressive intent. In its finished form it shows the five women haunting a compressed, fragmented space described in a palette of airy pinks, icy blues, and neutral brown. But it took a long time for the picture, later titled Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [see Plate 12], to reach that finished form.

  Its conception was partly inspired by Apollinaire’s pornographic novel Les Onze Milles Verges, which the poet had given Picasso in manuscript form. It was an extreme Sadean romp involving necrophilia, pederasty, and an orgy in a brothel. Picasso read it and treasured it. But of course there were many other sources of inspiration—including Picasso’s own experience in brothels, and his abiding sense, since the suicide of Casagemas and his subsequent affair with Germaine, that sex, death, and creative fecundity were ineluctably connected.

  He was determined that the painting be something no one else could have made. He seems to have intuited that the only way to guarantee this was to make it explicitly about his own psychosexual preoccupations—the deep-down drama of his desire both to see and not to see. Since it was a picture about voyeurism that was set in a brothel, that desire related most obviously to his feelings about girls and women. But it also related to his competitive fascination with his most potent contemporary, Matisse. That fascination had itself taken on a voyeuristic quality: Picasso needed to see what Matisse was doing, and at the same time to conceal this need from Matisse by converting it into something quite unrecognizable.

  The creation of the picture would enact this buried drama. It tormented Picasso for nine months and called on all his reserves of energy. He worked on it in seclusion. Money from the Steins enabled him to rent a second, smaller studio on the floor below his main one. There, he could shut himself away and work in solitude, mostly at night. He became, wrote his friend Salmon, “uneasy. He turned his canvases to the wall and threw down his paintbrushes. For many long days and nights, he drew…Never was labor less rewarded with joy…”

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  IN THE COLD, DECREPIT, rat-riddled Bateau-Lavoir, after the idyll in Gósol the summer before, Picasso’s relationship with Olivier began to deteriorate. For a time, the intimacy they had forged in Spain lingered on. But Picasso’s obsession with besting Matisse gradually began to squeeze Olivier out of the picture. He seems not to have discussed his big picture with her—except to compare her with the prostitutes he was painting. Sexual jealousy, too, reared its head again. Picasso had caught her flirting with another man; his response was to keep her in the studio under lock and key—to forbid her to go out unless in his company. This meant Picasso had to do all the errands himself. Olivier was initially philosophical: “What does it matter if Picasso is jealous or forbids me to go out?” she wrote. “Where would I be better off than at his side?” But inevitably, the relationship festered. Even as she continued to inspire his work, her constant presence became an irritant. “In the mountain paradise of Gósol,” wrote Richardson, “Fernande had been treated—and painted—like a goddess. Back in the Bateau-Lavoir, she was treated as a chattel and depicted as a whore.”

  In retaliation, or out of desperation, Olivier somehow contrived to have a brief liaison—probably early in 1907—with the poet Jean Pellerin. The result was that Picasso redoubled his efforts to punish her on his canvas.

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  FOR MOST OF THE
PERIOD that Picasso worked on the Demoiselles, Matisse was in Collioure. But in March, he returned to Paris with a painting that once again threatened to derail his young rival.

  Just as the Bonheur de Vivre had made the last major composition Picasso had planned, The Watering Place, seem insipid, Matisse’s latest painting—his only entry into that year’s Salon des Indépendants—forced Picasso to radically rethink what he was doing. Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra was inspired by Matisse’s recent trip to North Africa. It showed a female nude, awkwardly twisted, with one arm jackknifed over her head, against a roughly painted but decorative background of spreading palms. Matisse, whose most valued possession was a small painting of three bathers by Cézanne, had adopted Cézanne’s blue-green palette, as well as his obsession with rhythms that disperse sensation across the picture like rustling leaves or rippling waves. But compared with Cézanne, Matisse’s picture was shockingly raw. It was a nude, yes; but it refused to offer the seductions of soft flesh or familiar curves. There was something brutal and disruptive about it. Matisse had taken the deformations of the Young Sailor II a step further. Strewn with evidence of the artist’s revisions, the painting didn’t try to hide the process of its own clumsy and strenuous making. For all its coloristic intensity and formal boldness, it had a look of having been abruptly abandoned.

  Its origins, too, were violent. The painting had been triggered by an accident in Matisse’s studio. A clay sculpture of the same subject—a reclining nude with expressive distortions—on which Matisse had been working obsessively (most of his early breakthroughs in painting came via discoveries in sculpture) had been accidentally knocked to the floor and smashed into pieces. Matisse erupted. He was so beside himself that Amélie had to take him out for a walk to calm him down. The frustration and anguish fed directly into the creation of Blue Nude.