The Red Dancer

by Richard Skinner

  In May or June 1907, Picasso saw such wooden masks and figures for the first time at the ethnographic exhibition at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris. Although Matisse had already begun collecting African tribal art, Picasso had not, until that moment, paid any attention to it. Years later, Françoise Gilot recounted what Picasso had said about the African masks and manikins he saw that day:

  Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surround them, in order to overcome their fear by giving it a form and an image. At that moment I realised that this was what painting was all about. When I came to that realisation, I knew I had found my way.

  At the time of his visit, Picasso was completing a painting that was later named Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It was the first of his paintings to show the influence of African sculptures and masks on his work. The painting depicted five nudes but, after his visit to the museum, Picasso repainted the heads of two, now making their faces into angular, mask-like forms. The arms of two other nudes were now raised behind and around the head, a position that showed clear stylistic parallels with the reliquary figures of the Kota tribe.

  That autumn, on 1 October, a memorial retrospective was held at the Salon d’Automne for Cézanne, who had died the year before. The exhibition contained fifty-six works, mostly oils, and included a group of unfinished canvases. Picasso almost certainly attended the exhibition, since he had taken his cue from Cézanne, learning from him the value of simple form. Picasso described Cézanne as ‘my one and only master’.

  Towards the end of his life, Cézanne’s work displayed a great attention to geometry. In a letter to his friend Émile Bernard, Cézanne wrote that painting should ‘treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’. In his late paintings, Cézanne had attempted to synthesise surface and depth by collapsing foreground and background, while simultaneously trying to incorporate different viewpoints gathered together over a period of time. He called his process ‘passage’. He advocated an abandonment of perspective, realising that it chained the viewer to a single viewpoint, and thus disallowed any conceptual understanding of form.

  In November, Guillaume Apollinaire took Georges Braque to Picasso’s studio, nicknamed the ‘Bateau-Lavoir’, where Picasso showed him Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Braque was horrified by what he saw, but he also understood what Picasso had attempted. The painting was so fractured that it had lost all internal consistency. On his return to his own studio, Braque put aside a collection of Cézannesque landscapes and started anew.

  Inspired by Picasso’s painting, he imagined himself moving inside a canvas, feeling the spaces within and between objects. Braque liked to call these spaces ‘tactile’. He chopped up Cézanne’s cylinders, spheres and cones and then superimposed, overlapped and interlocked them into two-dimensional planes. In making such radical reassemblies, Braque squeezed out any tactile space and the new image was represented without a single viewpoint.

  In September 1908, Braque submitted six of these highly abstract landscapes to the Salon d’Automne. All were rejected. Sitting on the jury was Matisse, who noted that Braque was merely making ‘little cubes’. Picasso, however, was impressed and quickly adopted Braque’s work methods. During the winter of 1908–09, Picasso and Braque worked extremely closely, so much so that Braque later commented they were ‘like roped mountaineers’. They carried on from where Cézanne had left off and assimilated the continuing influence of African sculpture into the work.

  Braque had some of these new paintings exhibited. Reviewers complained that the multiplicity of detail unloaded in such a limited space crushed the viewer, making it physically impossible to grasp the whole. Picasso countered their complaints by claiming that a painting should be ‘a horde of destructions’. It was after this exhibition, in 1909, that Apollinaire coined the term ‘cubist’ to describe Braque’s paintings.

  Mata Hari’s portrait by Paris artist Franz-Namur, 1909

  16

  Paris, 1909

  She was not really pretty. Her features lacked refinement. There was something bestial about the lips, cheeks, and jaw. Her brown skin always had the appearance of having been anointed in oil or was exuding perspiration. Her bust was flat and drooping and always concealed from view. Only her eyes and arms were absolute in their beauty. Those who said she had the most beautiful arms in the world did not exaggerate. And her eyes! Eyes that were magnetic and enigmatic, ever changing, yet ever of velvety softness, commanding and pleading, melancholy and mean, those terrible eyes in whose depths so many souls were drowned, actually merited the adoration awarded them. The most striking thing about her was the astonishing fact that this spoiled darling, upon whom destiny had showered gifts, grace, talent, fame, rarely lost the expression of inmost sadness. Frequently she would recline in an armchair, dreaming of secret things for perhaps an hour. I cannot recall that I ever saw Mata Hari smile.

  Paul Frantz-Namur, Mata Hari’s portrait painter

  Picasso looked up from where he was seated to the gilded ornament in the corners of the white ceiling above him. The walls of the room were vermilion.

  ‘This reminds me of the restaurant in the Hotel Colón in Barcelona.’ He turned to his companion. ‘Not bad for an embassy.’

  Frantz-Namur chuckled. ‘How many embassies have you been to?’

  Picasso shrugged. ‘None,’ he said. He crossed his arms and looked again at the ceiling for some time. ‘But, you see, one needn’t do things in order to know about them.’

  ‘You think not?’

  Picasso thought for a moment. ‘No, maybe not,’ he said. Both of them laughed.

  ‘If you had said yes, I would have called you a liar,’ Frantz-Namur said.

  Picasso nodded, then looked at his watch.

  ‘It’ll start soon,’ Frantz-Namur said.

  ‘I have to be somewhere by ten.’

  They watched the audience trickle in through the double doors to one side of the small, raised dais. Frantz-Namur and Picasso were sitting on the end of the back row. The ten or so rows of loose chairs in front of them were slowly being filled as people took their seats. Picasso turned to Frantz-Namur.

  ‘So you think she’s bona fide?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. You’ll see.’

  ‘How is she at posing?’

  ‘Good. She hardly moves and she never smiles.’

  Picasso nodded in agreement. ‘I hate women who smile when they’re sitting for me. I feel like they’re mocking me.’

  Frantz-Namur was tempted to ask him about that, but let it pass.

  ‘How many portraits are you doing?’ Picasso asked.

  ‘Two. One in costume, the other a dance pose in the nude. The costumed pose is better. She’s wearing an Indian diadem and a collar of emeralds and topaz – very beautiful.’ Frantz-Namur leaned towards Picasso. ‘The diadem I mean.’

  Picasso smiled.

  ‘She’s as superstitious as a Hindu,’ Frantz-Namur continued. ‘Once, while she was disrobing, a jade bracelet slipped from her wrist. She turned quite pale and said, “That will bring me bad luck. You’ll see. It is a presentiment of misfortune. Keep it. That horrible bracelet, I never want to see it again.” She was so upset.’ Frantz-Namur shook his head.

  ‘No, I understand what she means. Certain objects do have magic, I believe that,’ Picasso said.

  ‘Well, you should meet her.’

  A woman was watching them. She was wearing an indigo dress, which shone like coal.

  ‘Have you been to see Bonnard’s exhibition yet?’ asked Frantz-Namur.

  Picasso waved his arms in the air. ‘Agh. Don’t talk to me about his “work” – it’s execrable.’

  ‘You really think that? I think it’s fine.’

  ‘It’s nothing but a pot-pourri of indecision. Please, let’s change the subject.’

  They remained silent for a few moments. Frantz-Namur looked around the room, at the smil
ing faces taking their seats. It wasn’t really Picasso’s favourite milieu, he thought. He wondered what Picasso would think of the performance. ‘How’s the move going?’ he asked.

  ‘Horrible. I hate the upheaval, but the new apartment faces north and overlooks the trees of avenue Frochet, which I love.’

  ‘You’re moving up in the world, Pablo.’

  ‘Kahnweiler came yesterday and took everything I’ve done in the last four months. It was depressing to see everything go at once.’

  ‘Any buyers?’

  Picasso nodded. ‘Vollard. He bought them all.’

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Picasso frowned. The row in front of them was filling up. ‘You know, even after all the paintings I’ve sold, nothing can match the day my father gave me his palette and brushes and paints and told me he would never paint again. That still is the best moment in my life.’

  ‘That he would never paint again?’

  Picasso shook his head with impatience. ‘He used to let me finish the paintings he’d started. He taught me to draw the painting first using oil, then apply colour as if it had weight. “It’s about weight and texture,” he said. Then one day, he looked at a painting I had done for my art teacher and gave me his palette and brushes and said he would never paint again. A beautiful gesture.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  Frantz-Namur watched Picasso’s large head, bowed heavily towards the floor. His dark hair was thick and glossy. Suddenly Picasso glanced up.

  ‘And you, my friend?’

  Frantz-Namur sighed. ‘Maybe I should go back to art school. I haven’t sold anything in six months.’

  ‘Everyone tells me these portraits you’re doing are good.’

  Frantz-Namur shrugged. ‘I don’t know how much to charge her.’

  ‘There’s an old trick for that. Just don’t say anything about the money at all and when she finally mentions a figure, act like you’re a bit surprised and then take her next offer.’

  Frantz-Namur smiled. ‘Good advice,’ he said.

  All the seats in the salon were now taken and people began shuffling along the walls to make room for new arrivals.

  ‘How are the floods down in Pigalle?’ asked Frantz-Namur.

  ‘Not too bad, yet. It’s the embankments that are the worst, but they say the water will keep rising.’

  ‘Guillomet told me he saw two wine barrels in the Seine which couldn’t pass under the Pont Neuf.’

  Picasso nodded. ‘I know, I know. I’ve heard the lower quays by the Pont de l’Archevêché and some métro stations are flooded. They say the river is going to burst its banks if it keeps raining. If it does, the city centre will have to be evacuated.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘I should have stayed at the Bateau-Lavoir,’ Picasso said.

  The murmur of voices suddenly died down and, when they both looked up, they saw that a small man with a tanned face and shiny black hair had stepped on to the dais. He buttoned up his jacket and looked around the room.

  ‘The Chilean Ambassador,’ Frantz-Namur whispered.

  The Ambassador raised his arms. ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I scarcely need to introduce Madame Mata Hari to you – her name and her art are well known. You are all probably aware that this Indian name hides a personality of lofty birth. Born on the banks of the Ganges, she shares her time between her country and a small villa here in Paris where, though in the midst of commerce, she isolates herself in a Brahmin communion with animals and flowers.

  ‘Four years ago, at the Musée Guimet, she showed us the “Dance of the Devadasis”, a word which refers to the sacred art of expressing, by harmonious gesture, the far-off mysteries of vanished cults. It was a dancing entertainment of which the deep spiritualistic meaning could only be understood by a chosen few.

  ‘Tonight, she is going to show us an art of the most delicate charm, and at the same time nearer to our understanding. The legend she will present is called “The Legend of the Princess and the Magic Flower”. It is one of the most popular and poetic dances of India. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Madame Mata Hari.’

  There was loud applause. People craned their necks to see the stage. The lights went down.

  Tall and slender, she carries a marvellous neck, flexible and the colour of amber, a fascinating face which is a perfect oval, and whose sibylline and tempting expression strikes all at first sight. The mouth, firmly outlined, traces a mobile line, disdainful, very alluring, under a nose, straight and fine, the nostrils of which quiver above two shadowing dimples. Her magnificent eyes, velvety and dark, are slightly slanting and set with long curling lashes – they are enigmatic, seeming to look into the beyond. Her black hair, divided in two bands makes for her face a dark wavy frame. The effect is voluptuous, tremorous, full of unexpected seduction, possessing a magic beauty and an astonishing beauty of outline.

  An anonymous spectator, Paris

  When the lights came back up, members of the audience began talking to each other. Frantz-Namur noticed that people were animated. Some of the audience began leaving via the double doors. Picasso stood up and looked for a way out.

  He spotted a small set of French windows partly hidden behind curtains. He nudged Frantz-Namur and pointed to them. Together they moved against the flow of the crowd and slipped outside into the Embassy gardens. It was still raining. The evening was refreshingly cool; Frantz-Namur hadn’t realised how warm it was in the salon.

  They trod across the wet grass, not speaking. The murmuring of voices could be heard behind them. Frantz-Namur turned his jacket collar up. Picasso had his head down; he seemed not to be bothered by the rain. A perimeter wall led them to the front gates, which were wide open for the departing guests. A guard nodded to them as they walked through. The boulevard outside was shiny with water. Frantz-Namur looked at Picasso.

  ‘Well, what did you think?’

  Picasso didn’t say anything immediately. Then he looked directly at Frantz-Namur. There was hostility in his black eyes.

  ‘My dear Paul,’ he said, ‘I was appalled. From the first moment, it was clear to me that Mata Hari does not know how to dance. She has absolutely no disponibilité. She’s an impostor. I hope I never see her dolorous face again.’

  Frantz-Namur felt a coldness creep over him. He had no idea what disponibilité meant. He didn’t know what to say. It was obvious that for Picasso there was nothing more to say. They continued in the rain down the boulevard. Picasso was walking quickly, as if he were alone. Frantz-Namur realised he’d probably forgotten about her already.

  17

  Lörrach, Baden Württemberg, Germany, 1910

  My name is Maria Ann von Heinrichsen, née Lesser. To the French, I was known as ‘Mademoiselle Doktor’. Colonel Nicholai, the head of the German espionage service in the years leading up to the First World War, called me the ‘mistress of spies’ and, for once, he and I were in complete agreement. At the Academy at Lörrach in Baden Württemberg, southern Germany, I taught Mata Hari everything she knew.

  I was born in Berlin, probably in 1889, though I can’t be sure. My father had a terrible memory. He was an art dealer and used to spend his time travelling around Europe, negotiating the sale of his clients’ pictures. He was a well-known figure at Christie’s and Hôtel Drouot auction houses. He was happy and successful at his job. I never knew my mother. She left my father when I was very young and I haven’t seen her since. My father became taciturn every time her name was mentioned. I don’t even know if she’s still alive. It doesn’t matter now anyway.

  At school, I didn’t perform well. The only subjects I enjoyed were foreign languages. I excelled at French, English and Russian. I even learned a little Spanish, which was rare in those days. When I finished school, I used to accompany my father on trips to Paris. He planned a business trip to St Petersburg and suggested I go with him in order to perfect my Russian accent. Of course I accepted. I was seventee
n at the time.

  While I was there, I met a military attaché, a Prussian cavalryman, and we became lovers. My father didn’t seem to mind. When the time came for us to return to Berlin, I told my father I wanted to remain in St Petersburg. I remember seeing him off at the railway station – he said he had known he wouldn’t keep me for much longer. He knew how headstrong I could be. One evening at his apartment, this Prussian officer told me that the Russians had a new artillery gun and that it was his job to find out about it. He was very clever – he didn’t tell me outright, but let it emerge gradually. A few weeks went by and then he introduced me one evening to a Russian officer, who paid me great compliments throughout the evening. He said he loved my Teutonic beauty – my blonde hair, red lips and fair complexion. In front of my lover, he offered to pay me a great deal of money to sleep with him. I realised by my lover’s lack of protest what was expected of me. During the night I spent with him, the Russian told me about the gun, and I in turn told my lover. He was very pleased with me, and told me that Berlin would be very pleased with me as well. He suggested I return to Berlin. He told me to go to an organisation called Abteilung III. I didn’t know then that this was the German Secret Service.

  When I returned to Berlin, I was courted by personnel from Abteilung III. They put me up at the Adlon Hôtel and took me to Adlon’s restaurant. It was there that I met Mata Hari for the first time. I was introduced to her by Traugott von Jagow, who had just secured her services. To me she seemed rather gauche, but she had promise. Soon afterwards, they sent me to Lörrach for training, with the recommendation that I be trained for intelligence work. They seemed to like me there. When I finished, I was sent to Antwerp as an intelligence agent. I had a suite of rooms, where I interviewed agents sent to me by Abteilung III and allotted missions for them to undertake, as well as undertaking many independent missions of my own.

  I flourished as a spy. I loved the adventure. It furnished me with all the mental satisfaction I could have wished for, but I found I had to be extremely scrupulous. I met a great deal of resistance from certain men who could not tolerate being given instructions from a nineteen-year-old woman. I learnt to be ruthless when necessary.