But on this same trip, tensions arose between Matisse and Leo Stein. With Matisse’s reputation at its height (thanks in no small part to the Steins’ support), Leo’s own frustrated artistic ambitions may have contributed to the ill feeling. But it was their enforced intimacy in the aesthetic hothouse of Florence that caused the more immediate problem. Matisse responded to what he saw in Florence with an artist’s intimate urgency, an almost larcenous drive to possess his experiences and exploit them for his own purposes. Stein’s susceptibility was different. His zeal was unmistakable, but it had a disinterested, intellectual quality that was foreign to Matisse. And so these two proud men—both so intelligent, so articulate, so eager to press their insights on others—struggled to connect, and increasingly got on each other’s nerves.
Back in Paris, these frictions proved difficult to smooth away. Gertrude and Leo were also increasingly in competition with Sarah and Michael Stein, whose rapport with Matisse was growing ever closer. The upshot at this crucial time was that Leo and Gertrude began to turn away from Matisse and put more and more weight behind Picasso. Blue Nude, as it transpired, would be the last Matisse they ever bought. And it wasn’t long before they gave almost all their Matisses to Sarah and Michael.
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MATISSE FINALLY SAW THE Demoiselles soon after his return to the city on a visit to the Bateau-Lavoir, with the critic-turned-dealer Félix Fénéon. He was surprised, to say the least, and he may once again have made the error of saying too much, or saying the wrong thing, or simply not saying the right thing. One report has Matisse and Fénéon seeing the picture and braying with laughter. Twenty-five years later, Olivier claimed that Matisse was furious when he saw it, and vowed to get his revenge, to make Picasso “beg for mercy.” None of this rings true. The most credible account has him saying, more mutedly but with evident bitterness: “A little boldness discovered in a friend’s work is shared by all.” The implication was that while he, Matisse, had dedicated years of experiment and honest inquiry to making a high-order aesthetic breakthrough, here, now, was Picasso, stealing ideas he didn’t fully grasp in order to produce a painting that was deliberately and senselessly ugly—all for the sake of looking equally bold.
In truth, Picasso had put everything he had into the Demoiselles. And yet his efforts were met by universal dismay. The people whose support he needed most went missing in action. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the dealer who would go on to mastermind Picasso’s career (after trying and failing to strike up a relationship with Matisse), deemed the Demoiselles a “failure.” “What a loss for French painting,” said the Russian collector Shchukin. Fellow painters began “giving him a wide berth,” according to his friend André Salmon. Derain, knowing how much Picasso had staked on the picture, worried for his friend’s sanity and predicted that “one fine morning” he would be found “hanged beside his large canvas.” Even Apollinaire was silent.
And now, to cap it all off, the artist who was the clear leader of Paris’s avant-garde, whose intelligence Picasso had experienced at close quarters at the Steins’ homes, and whose audacity he had witnessed in galleries and on multiple visits to Matisse’s studio—the artist who knew, moreover, what it felt like to be truly out on a limb—was dismissing the work not just as a failure, but as a bad pastiche—a parody.
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THERE WAS, OF COURSE, a lot about the Demoiselles that Matisse might have found galling. So much about the picture seemed aimed directly at him. Where his own paintings, even when roughly executed, were always concerned with wholeness, stability, and calm, the Demoiselles was splintered, aggressive, jagged. The picture’s construction was opposed, in every way, to that of the frescoes he had just been looking at in Italy. How could he fail to be provoked by the squatting figure at right, drawn directly from a figure in his own most cherished possession, Cézanne’s Three Bathers? And how could he not notice the African masks on both the squatting figure and the woman behind her? He, after all, had been the one to introduce Picasso to African art; he never expected his discovery to be adopted in such a blatantly literal way.
But there was something else about the painting, something more fundamental—something that had nothing to do with borrowings or larceny or sabotage. It was the sheer confrontational force of it. Picasso wanted to unsettle the viewer (and himself) with an image of brazen sexuality. The result was like Manet’s Olympia, but without the knowing wink; it was amplified, compressed, nakedly combative.
Whatever the reason, Matisse failed to see the Demoiselles for the masterpiece that it was. Like so many others, he could not face down those leering nudes, and the intensity of the sexual power they presented. What’s more, the message of the painting in relation to him—the thing Picasso seemed to be telling him—was too complicated, too ambivalent, for him to read cleanly. He might have read aspects of the picture as a kind of backhanded homage. But he also suspected that what the Demoiselles was really telling him was that Picasso was not his to claim, either as protégé or follower. Picasso, it announced, was his own man. A man with the same ambition—to be a great modern painter—but a very different idea about what that meant.
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AT THIS CRUCIAL POINT, Matisse’s influence on avant-garde art was actually stronger than ever, his precedence beyond dispute. At the 1907 Salon d’Automne, which opened at the beginning of October (and which featured major retrospectives of the work of Berthe Morisot and of Paul Cézanne), it seemed every other young painter was trying to paint like “the Fauve of Fauves” (as Apollinaire had dubbed Matisse). Seeing so many crass imitations of his style caused Matisse acute distress. Most of those under his spell had utterly failed to understand what he was trying to do. This wouldn’t have mattered, except that their clumsy efforts only gave more ammunition to his detractors. (Picasso’s “borrowings” in the Demoiselles, although they were of a different kind, might have struck him in the same way, and carried just the same danger.)
Even as he was worrying about bad imitators, Matisse was also beginning to face a backlash. The more talented and thoughtful of his followers, including his close confrère Derain and the more independent Braque, had started to break away. They had worked alongside him during the brief Fauvist period. But since then, Matisse had been pursuing an increasingly private path. After the Bonheur de Vivre and the Blue Nude—impressed as they may have been—they were unable or unwilling to follow him.
In the end, Matisse was too solitary by temperament to be a leader of movements. But at this point—with his work striking many as unconscionably ugly and bizarre (“Why this hateful contempt for form?” one critic had asked of his latest canvas, Le Luxe, a strange dream image of three gauchely drawn women involved in a mysterious rite on a beach)—his need for validation and reinforcement was as profound as Picasso’s.
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GERTRUDE STEIN, NOW VERY much in Picasso’s corner, soon began to divide the world into “Matisseites” and “Picassoites.” Picasso’s other supporters also exacerbated tensions. They were ready to exploit any advantage over Matisse they could find. Aware of Picasso’s disappointment over the Demoiselles, they had registered his frustration at having to play a subordinate role. Indeed, for Picasso, it was this, above all, that was intolerable. Leo Stein recalled how, standing in line at a bus stop, Picasso became furious. “This is not the way it ought to be,” he said. “The strong should go ahead and take what they want.”
And yet, despite all this, it seems the painters themselves remained on civil and even friendly terms. Friendly enough, at least, to agree to an exchange of works in the late fall.
The exchange was elaborately planned. It took place in Picasso’s studio at the Bateau-Lavoir. A special dinner was arranged. Salmon, Jacob, and Apollinaire were all there, as were Braque, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Maurice Princet. They themselves may have had a hand in planning the evening, since Picasso, according to reports, was a reluctant host.
He was clearly at a low ebb. The Demoiselles was stacked in a corner of
his studio, a sheet thrown over it. Fernande and Raymonde were gone. Among friends, Picasso’s situation elicited plenty of sympathy, but no straightforward solutions. “I wish I could convey to you the heroism of a man like Picasso,” wrote Kahnweiler half a century later. His “spiritual solitude at that time was truly terrifying, for not one of his painter friends had followed him. The picture he had painted seemed to everyone something mad or monstrous.”
It’s not clear what protocols governed the exchange, but it seems that Picasso had been given the opportunity to pick a work during an earlier visit to Matisse’s studio, and now it was Matisse’s turn to choose from his.
The painting Picasso had chosen was the portrait of Marguerite. Executed in a deliberately naïve style, it had the name MARGUERITE printed in bold capitals across the top. The painting was large enough that it must have been awkward to carry, and Matisse may have felt uneasy as he cradled it under his arm on the way to Montmartre. Eighteen months earlier Marguerite herself had accompanied him on this walk in person. This time it was his portrait of her.
For Picasso, it was a striking choice—not least because he had only recently given up his own thirteen-year-old adopted daughter. Was he sick at heart? Was he trying—motivated by some kind of envy, or by the memory, perhaps, of his own lost sister Conchita—to make some kind of claim on Marguerite? Or was it simply that he felt fond of her?
We only know that he kept the picture all his life.
Matisse, in return, chose a still life that Picasso had recently painted. It had jagged angles, satisfying rhymes, and—for a Picasso of this period—unusually vivid colors. In her classic account of the exchange, Gertrude Stein claimed that, while each artist pretended to choose a work he admired, they actually “chose each one of the other one the picture that was undoubtedly the least interesting either of them had done.
“Later,” she continued, “each one used it as an example, the picture he had chosen, of the weaknesses of the other one.” This description is more a symptom of Stein’s desire to cast the two painters as enemies than anything else. Both pictures are in fact full of confidence and conviction. If Picasso was pleased to see Matisse respond to his new interest in angular forms and ambiguous spatial relations, Matisse was similarly pleased to have it confirmed that Picasso took seriously his interest in children’s art. “I thought then that it was a key picture,” Picasso said near the end of his life, “and I still think that.”
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THE DINNER DRAGGED ON. Picasso stayed sullenly reserved. The rest of the company felt ill at ease. This odd, stilted drama bore no relation to how evenings in Montmartre usually unfolded. And Picasso’s friends blamed Matisse. To Salmon, he was pompous and detached. He had no feeling—so Salmon thought—for lightheartedness, pranks, and teasing—all those things that were at the heart of social life at the Bateau-Lavoir. Matisse’s recent ascendancy only entrenched their disdain. The claustrophobia in Picasso’s crowded studio, and the obligation to keep up a level of politesse that matched the older Matisse’s, seems to have placed an almost unendurable strain on the company. They couldn’t wait for the dinner to be over. And as soon as it was, as soon as Matisse had departed, hostilities broke out.
According to Salmon, “We went directly to the bazaar in the rue des Abbesses [a two-minute walk] where, poor but unafraid to make sacrifices in the interest of pleasure, we bought a set of toy arrows tipped with suction pads, which I have to say were wonderful fun back in the studio as we could shoot at the painting without damaging it. ‘A hit! One in the eye for Marguerite!’ ‘Another hit on the cheek!’ We enjoyed ourselves immensely.”
It was all obviously designed to cheer Picasso up. With the same motive, his friends also ran around Montmartre scrawling graffiti that mimicked government health warnings on walls and fences: MATISSE INDUCES MADNESS! MATISSE IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN ALCOHOL. MATISSE HAS DONE MORE HARM THAN WAR.
The actions betray an awareness of just how much Matisse meant to Picasso at this point—how charged and infuriating was his presence, how maddening was his assumption of superiority (no matter how benignly he presented himself), and how desperate was Picasso to reverse their positions.
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AT THE END OF 1907, with his first sighting of the Demoiselles and the exchange of paintings still fresh in his mind, Matisse was interviewed for an article that was to be written up by Apollinaire. The piece was commissioned by Matisse’s dying friend, Mécislas Golberg. Matisse’s renown, combined with the fact that he had never previously given an interview, made this a huge opportunity for Apollinaire (in fact, it ended up launching his career as an art critic). But the poet worried about being disloyal to Picasso and was reluctant to follow through with the job. He delayed and delayed, and missed the deadline. Golberg was only days from death when the article finally appeared—not where he had wanted it but in a rival publication.
The short piece contains just four quotations by Matisse (who did not trust Apollinaire and soon came to detest him). It’s the last of them that—given the charged state of his relations with Picasso—seems the most carefully considered: “I have never avoided the influence of others,” said Matisse:
I would have considered this a cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself. I believe that the personality of the artist develops and asserts itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities. If the fight is fatal and the personality succumbs, it means that this was bound to be his fate.
Matisse never did succumb. But over the next decade, the tables were certainly turned. Matisse would never again enjoy the clear-cut preeminence he had in 1906 and 1907. From now on, Picasso would always be there, performing his pyrotechnics, and drawing the louder applause.
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OVER THE COURSE OF 1908, Matisse was honored with shows in Moscow, Paris, Berlin, and New York, and a retrospective late in the year at the Salon d’Automne. And yet he began to appear, even amid all this acclaim and recognition, an isolated figure.
He tried to prevent this. In an effort to shore up his position, he fell back into the role of pedagogue. Encouraged by Sarah Stein, he established a school early in 1908—a short-lived attempt to counter what he saw as the rampant misunderstandings of his work. But he had spawned unruly children. “Matisse himself,” wrote the American poet and journalist Gelett Burgess,
denies all responsibility for the excesses of his unwelcome disciples. Poor, patient Matisse, breaking his way through this jungle of art, sees his followers go whopping off in vagrom paths to right and left. He hears his own speculative words distorted, misinterpreted…He may say, perhaps: “To my mind, the equilateral triangle is a symbol and manifestation of the absolute. If one could get that absolute quality into a painting, it would be a work of art.” Whereat, little madcap Picasso, keen as a whip, spirited as a devil, mad as a hatter, runs to his studio and contrives a huge nude woman composed entirely of triangles, and presents it as a triumph. What wonder Matisse shakes his head and does not smile!
Derain and Braque, once Matisse’s fellow Fauves, had by now defected to Picasso’s side. They spent all their time at the Bateau-Lavoir and began painting in a muted palette, completely suppressing Matisse’s chromatic splendor. This was a serious blow: They were two of the most talented painters in France.
Picasso’s friends, in the meantime, had basically declared war on Matisse: They mocked his school, his aloof and sober social manner, and his latest work, which they disparaged as lightweight, decorative, and fundamentally unserious. On one occasion, Matisse walked into a café, saw Picasso and his friends, and approached them to say hello, only to be pointedly ignored.
For Matisse, who had seen so much of Picasso over the previous two years, who had welcomed him into his studio and even presented him with his portrait of Marguerite, these new circumstances must have been dismaying.
The initial shock of the Demoiselles abated, and Matisse reconciled himself to this bold new Picasso—the Picasso who was
not just a potential protégé but an electrifying innovator, someone Matisse himself now needed to take into account, and possibly learn from. In the meantime, determined not to let their relations be defined by the absurdity of open hostility, he continued to sympathize with the younger man’s plight, to admire his talents, and to cultivate his friendship. As if to prove that he was not rattled, toward the end of 1908 he took the Russian collector Sergei Shchukin—his own most important collector—to Picasso’s studio. Impressed by what he saw, Shchukin soon became a supporter, and an avid collector of Picasso’s work.
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AROUND THIS SAME TIME, 1908, Matisse’s former protégé Braque, taking his lead from sections of the Demoiselles, and even more from his own intense study of Cézanne, was on the verge of minting an entirely new manner of painting. After a period experimenting in Cézanne’s old stomping ground of L’Estaque, near Marseilles, he submitted several new paintings to the Salon d’Automne.
Matisse (the subject of a retrospective at that same Salon) was serving on the jury that year. When he saw Braque’s L’Estaque paintings, he seems to have smelled more bad faith. Not only had Braque abandoned Matisse’s own principles (above all, his emphasis on colored light), but he had taken up Cézanne—Matisse’s beloved Cézanne, his talisman (“If Cézanne is right, then I am right,” Matisse said)—in ways that seemed to misread him completely.
The Art of Rivalry Page 23