You Must Change Your Life

  Choiseul saw an ingenious opportunity, however, to tap into America’s capitalistic national psychology. She knew that collectors there were more likely to buy art as a means of displaying their wealth than their taste. So Choiseul raised Rodin’s prices solely for American collectors, then sat back and watched the demand grow. In particular, she marketed Rodin’s busts to them, predicting that portraiture would appeal to their vanity. It worked: When Rodin met Choiseul, she claimed he was making less than $12,000 a year. Once she started personally handling all of his Paris sales, she boasted of raising it to $80,000.

  When the American railroad and tobacco tycoon Thomas Fortune Ryan came for his bust sitting, Choiseul pushed her strategy further. First she stoked his pride with a bit of patriotic camaraderie, bragging about how their country was the greatest in the world. The United States harbored more talent and potential than anywhere else, but she lamented the way its elite failed to support the arts the way they did in France. Ryan, however, was in a unique position to change all that, she said. Wouldn’t it be a shame to waste his fortune on this life? she asked. Why didn’t he start thinking about his legacy? Wouldn’t he consider buying more of Rodin’s work to donate to the Metropolitan Museum? Didn’t he want to go down in history as the philanthropist who enlightened the American people to great art?

  Her provocation worked. The industrialist soon purchased several works by the artist to give to the Metropolitan Museum and donated $25,000 for the institution to make further acquisitions. Choiseul hoped this would give the Met an incentive to one day establish a permanent gallery dedicated to Rodin.

  In 1910, she and Rodin hosted the chairman of the museum’s sculpture committee, Daniel Chester French, and his family at the Hôtel Biron. French’s wife adored the “wonderful palace” and said of Rodin that “my daughter and I were flattered because he seemed quite as pleased at our liking his work as if our criticism had been really valuable.” Shortly thereafter, French and his colleagues voted to devote a gallery in the north corridor of the museum to Rodin, which would open two years later with a collection of forty sculptures.

  Americans would ultimately become some of Rodin’s biggest supporters. Shortly after the artist’s death, the American movie-theater mogul Jules Mastbaum bought up well over one hundred Rodin works and opened the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia in 1929. It remains today the largest collection of the artist’s work outside of Paris.

  The American embrace of Rodin did little to endear him to his European compatriots, however. Of a bust Rodin had recently made of a young financier, the critic Georg Brandes described it as “a young American, like so many one meets, not stupid and not intelligent, not dull and not interesting—a commission.” When the count and patron Harry Kessler met Choiseul for the first time, he found it “astonishing how the old man has the stamina for all these Americans.”

  To keep up with the demand, some believed that Rodin and Choiseul started exploiting the ignorance of Americans and selling them inferior works. One assistant claimed that the marble Pygmalion and Galatea that went to the Metropolitan “was not among his best things,” and that Rodin himself had kept it stored away from the studio to avoid looking at it.

  It is also possible that he simply lost track of his inventory. His output had grown so large by then that it was impossible for him to oversee everything that was made and sold in his name. He outsourced nearly all of his stone carving and authorized an inordinately large number of foundries to produce works on his behalf. He made three hundred bronze versions of The Kiss alone in his lifetime. Although it made him enormously wealthy, Rodin recognized that his prolific production came at a price, once telling a writer, “All the world sees in these days are copies, and a copy always loses something of the first freshness of inspiration.”

  EIGHT YEARS AFTER HIS bitter meeting with Rodin, Matisse became the de facto general of the avant-garde. He led the artistic revolution alongside, and sometimes in opposition to, Picasso, who had his own ideas about what modern art should look like. The Spaniard once complained that there were “no vertical lines in Matisse’s paintings,” while Matisse declared Cubism too rigid and dogmatic. Their rivalry remained cordial, however, until Matisse learned that Picasso had been throwing toy darts at one of his paintings.

  Twelve years older and far too dignified for such puerile pranks, Matisse was profoundly hurt by this. When he was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, his classmates nicknamed him “the Professor.” The tweed-clad painter fulfilled that prophecy in January 1908, when he opened a small art academy in Paris. He was one of the few modern masters of his generation to teach as well as make his own work, so when he announced that he would hold classes free of charge, hundreds of students enrolled immediately.

  But those expecting untamed, paint-splattered lessons with the fauvist, or “wild beast,” himself were sorely disappointed. Matisse taught traditional modeling and still-life skills. Even though he had broken all the rules of his own training, he promoted the mastery of classical techniques to his students, often quoting Courbet to explain: “I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition.” But those who stuck with his classes, including Gertrude Stein’s brother and sister-in-law, and the American painter Max Weber, found an exceedingly thoughtful mentor. In the end, Matisse required them to copy nature only so that they could identify an image’s basic parts, strip it down, and ultimately give expression to their individual artistic styles.

  In May 1908, Matisse expanded his school into a larger space at 77 Rue de Varenne, at the corner of the Boulevard des Invalides. It was a former hôtel particulier in a quiet neighborhood of stately private mansions built by noble families in the eighteenth century, many of which were later turned into government buildings.

  By the time Matisse arrived, the once-glorious mansion had fallen into a state of disrepair. It was constructed in the early 1700s, with an entrance gate to the property wide enough for carriages to pass through and a doorbell stationed at horseman’s height. The building later became known as the Hôtel Biron, when it was briefly, but lovingly, inhabited by the Duc de Biron, who renovated the interiors and doubled the size of the gardens.

  The Hôtel Biron.

  After the duke died, the Emperor of Russia occupied the mansion briefly, followed by three nuns who bought it in 1820 to open the Sacré-Cœur school for girls. The nuns stripped down the rocaille interiors, sold the mirrors and paneling and let the gardens overgrow. They tore the wrought-iron banisters off the curved staircase. Moss grew up the front steps and nearly onto the checkered parlor floor.

  After a century of ravaging and remodeling, the building looked like it might collapse when the government made its first move toward evicting the nuns in 1904. That year, France passed the Law of Separation to strengthen the divide between church and state and the school was shuttered. When the last nun moved out in 1907, a liquidator took over and offered cheap rent to anyone who dared inhabit the derelict building before its eventual demolition.

  But the landlord wildly underestimated the decadent allure of the Hôtel Biron, as it came to be known, and artists flocked to it like flies to rotting fruit. “An uproarious horde rushed in, and soon every chink and corner was crawling with their lice,” wrote the art critic Gustave Coquiot.

  The low rent was all the incentive Matisse needed to move into one of the apartments and rent a studio, which he divided with a curtain to share with students. Although he had received top billing at the Salon d’Automne that year, his reputation in France lagged woefully behind the regard he received in America and Russia. The Hôtel Biron was the best he could afford.

  At least the gardens gave his sons space to play, and there was a pavilion in the courtyard where he could hold classes. Since most of Matisse’s early admirers lived abroad, so, too, did many of his students. Coming from Norway, Russia, Romania and the United States—just about anywhere except France—some of these yo
ung expats started sleeping in the attic.

  When Jean Cocteau, the future author of Les Enfants Terribles, was still something of an enfant terrible himself, he stumbled upon the mysterious property while playing hooky from school one afternoon. He crept around the gardens, imagining how there must be years of secrets concealed in the tangled trees and rosebushes. The grounds seemed “to mark the end of the discoveries that Paris held in store for those who searched through it, like a local flea-market.” Already envisioning the moonlit garden parties and masquerade balls he would throw there, he pushed open the heavy door and asked the concierge if he could look around.

  The yellowing walls reminded him of the hotel where Baudelaire met with his Club des Haschischins to hold opium- and hash-fueled séances, which the writer believed broke down the barriers to creativity. When Cocteau learned that an entire year’s rent at the Hôtel Biron cost the same as one month in a cheap hotel, he handed over his allowance from his mother on the spot and rented a room. That night he hauled up a piano, couch and stove to his new second-floor pied-à-terre.

  Before long, the aging, proudly plump cabaret singer Jeanne Bloch had moved into a room next door to Matisse, while the swashbuckling Romanian actor Édouard de Max, then starring onstage opposite Sarah Bernhardt, moved into the chapel. Isadora Duncan rented a long gallery on the garden wall for her dance rehearsals. Like so many artists in those days, Duncan wanted her work to commingle with other art forms, and the Hôtel Biron was the perfect place to surround oneself with an inventive mix of sculptors, poets, playwrights or, at the very least, interesting characters.

  Joining this motley crew shortly after Matisse was the sculptor Clara Westhoff. She had left Ruth behind in Germany to once again work near Rodin in the hopes of receiving his feedback. Accustomed to securing her own lodgings without Rilke, she now asked a few artist acquaintances if they knew of any affordable housing in the city. A friend told her about a bargain-priced corner studio in a former convent; the building’s future was uncertain, but artists were taking advantage of it while the city decided what to do with it.

  Westhoff pushed the iron gate open onto the courtyard, where the faded gray mansion stood in a field of weeds, as if out of a ghost story. But any hesitation dissipated the moment she went inside and saw the light flooding in through the enormous windows, and all the space she’d have to spread out. Westhoff went to the office and rented a room at once.

  CHAPTER

  12

  EXACTLY ONE YEAR AFTER RILKE’S RUPTURE WITH RODIN, in May 1907, the poet returned to Paris. In Italy he had prayed for even an hour of solitude; now it would follow him everywhere. Since Rodin had cast him out, and he had pushed Becker and Westhoff away, he had little choice but to embrace his seclusion.

  At first Rilke celebrated his homecoming by checking into the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, one of his favorite inns, with a view directly overlooking the Seine. Wagner and Wilde had stayed there, and it was where Baudelaire finished writing Les Fleurs du Mal exactly fifty years earlier. Rilke wasted no time taking in the sights. He indulged in a day trip to the Turkish baths, visited Notre Dame and went to the Bagatelle Palace to see Édouard Manet’s painting of a nude woman lounging in the park alongside her suited male companions, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and thought, That is a painter. At the Bernheim-Jeune gallery he saw a painting by Van Gogh of “a night café, late, dreary . . .” To Rilke, the artist’s style of painting lamplight as concentric circles “overpowers: one becomes positively old, wilted, and drowsily disconsolate before it.”

  He returned, too, to his beloved museum of animals, the Jardin des Plantes. Whereas once he had been captivated by the panther, now it was three gazelles that seized his imagination. They rested and stretched in the grass like women lying on chaise lounges, he thought. Their muscular hind legs reminded him of rifles. “I couldn’t go away at all, they were so beautiful,” he wrote.

  But after a few days at the Quai Voltaire, he had to downgrade to cheaper lodging. He went back to the hotel on Rue Cassette, where he and Paula Becker had last stayed. The place looked exactly the same, but there was one indelible difference: Becker was gone. She had told Westhoff a few months earlier that she had changed her mind about Paris and gone back to her husband in Worpswede. She was “no longer so full of illusions,” she said. She had been wrong to believe that she was “the sort of woman to stand alone in life.”

  She had doggedly tried to make her own way in Paris. But one by one her clients started canceling sales, backing out of appointments and generally becoming too busy to associate with the single woman. Her friends either took Otto Modersohn’s side outright or, like Rilke, withdrew in trepidation. In a desperate moment she asked Rilke if she might join him and Westhoff on a trip they had planned to the Belgian coast. But he, too, had turned her down.

  After a few months of this, Becker’s resolve had worn thin. She wrote Modersohn an apology, confessing that perhaps she had been confused. “Poor little creature that I am, I can’t tell which path is the right one for me,” she said, and invited him to join her in Paris for a few months. They would work and sleep side by side until, at some point, she got pregnant. By winter’s end, he had convinced her to return with him to Worpswede.

  Becker’s letter informing Rilke of her decision filled the poet with guilt. She did not tell him much, only that she was going home, that she hoped it was the right decision, and that she was happy to hear how rewarding Westhoff’s trip to Egypt had been—“If only we can all get to heaven,” she said.

  Rilke admitted in his reply that perhaps he had treated her too harshly and been too “inattentive in a moment of our friendship in which I ought not to have been so.” He assured her that she was acting bravely now, and that her freedom lived inside her, so it would be with her in Worpswede, too.

  While Becker learned the bitter lesson that freedom does not always feel free—especially for a woman—Rilke was starting to see that it was not all he had imagined it would be either. It had been five years since he’d knocked on Rodin’s door for the first time, and yet he felt more lost in Paris than ever. The city then had felt “strange and frightening right at the first moment and yet full of expectation and promise and necessity to the smallest detail,” he told Westhoff. But the promise that he felt back then had a source—Rodin. Now that that promise was gone, he saw only its loss.

  Rilke was consistently reminded of his estrangement from Rodin, whose ubiquitous presence within the city’s art scene alienated Rilke from many events. In June he received an unexpected invitation to a Legion of Honor award banquet for the Norwegian painter Edvard Diriks. Rilke hardly had time to savor the surprise before he remembered that Rodin would surely be going. He did not dare face him in public. What in the past “would have been an urgent reason for being there” had become “through the circumstances just as decisive a one for staying away. Strange,” he wrote.

  Lonely and purposeless, Rilke fell into a familiar depression as summer wore on. He could not concentrate in his hotel because the next-door neighbor was a student with a medical condition that caused one eyelid to shut while he studied. This sent the young man into such fits of rage that he would stomp around and fling books at the walls. In a way, Rilke sympathized with him, writing, “I at once grasped the rhythm in that madness, the weariness in that anger, the task, the despair you can imagine.” Nonetheless, it also made him want to move out.

  Unfortunately, Rilke could not afford any other hotel. He could not even spare the francs to buy books or tea, or take carriage rides. This reality became embarrassingly clear when he offered his money to a carriage driver for a ride one day and the man glanced at the change in Rilke’s palm, then chased him out of the front seat and into second class. Rilke rode the rest of the way home underneath the baggage, “with sharply bent legs, as is proper. That was clear. And I have taken it to heart.”

  In the Mediterranean he had longed for Paris. Now in Paris he could think only of German meadows. When Westhoff mai
led him a few sprigs of heather from Worpswede, their earthy scent filled Rilke with nostalgia. The aroma was like “tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and shabby like the smell of a begging friar and yet again resinous and hearty like costly frankincense.” His longing to leave worsened as the air chilled into autumn and reminded Rilke why the only thing worse than Paris in the summer was Paris in the winter. “Already the misty mornings and evenings are beginning, when the sun is only like the place where the sun used to be,” he wrote. The geraniums “scream the contradiction of their red into the fog. That makes me sad.” Rilke was just about ready to ride this gloomy cloud back out of town when he was abruptly reminded why the city, despite its difficulties, continued to lure him there time and again.

  When the Salon d’Automne opened its doors in October, a mob of people had already assembled on the steps of the Grand Palais, waiting to get in. Entering its fourth year, the show had come a long way since it first launched in 1903 as a scrappy, artist-led alternative to the official salon. Cézanne had derisively dubbed the mainstream show the “Salon de Bouguereau,” after the omnipresent painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, whose slick, schmaltzy nudes the Impressionists despised. (The feeling was mutual at the Salon de Bouguereau.)

  The Salon d’Automne promptly incited outrage, particularly at the 1905 edition, when artists including Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain displayed canvases blazing with pink trees, turquoise beards, green faces, and other flagrant inaccuracies. Dubbed the fauves, these artists saw color as a tool for expression, rather than illustration. But many visitors simply saw them as “color-drunk.”