by Sue Roe
Cézanne had suffered major emotional upheavals in the years preceding. His friendship since childhood with writer Émile Zola had famously ended with the publication in 1886 of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre, which many assumed was based on Cézanne’s struggles as an artist. (Cézanne’s letter acknowledging receipt of his copy was graciously formal, as he may have thought befitted the occasion; Zola never replied.) The following year, Cézanne’s mother died, and her instructions regarding the division of her estate meant that the Jas de Bouffan, the family home in Aix-en-Provence, had to be sold. In 1899, Cézanne moved to a small apartment at the centre of Aix, where he lived for the rest of his life, journeying deep into the countryside to work. In Paris (since Vollard’s second exhibition of 1889), his work was at last beginning to attract the attention of ambitious young art students – including Matisse.
In 1901, in Cézanne’s studio in the Cité des Arts, Vollard posed, as ‘still as an apple’ on 115 occasions while the artist worked on a portrait that would depict the dealer as ‘a man of learning and introspection’. When Cézanne finally announced he could do no more, there remained two unpainted areas on Vollard’s right hand. In Cézanne’s late work, areas left unpainted invariably contribute to the sense that the painting appears before the viewer still in the process of coming into being (or into focus, perhaps, as the spectator enters into the final stage of the process of the artist’s dialogue with the viewer). No such explanation, however, would have served to satisfy Vollard; to him, the painting merely looked unfinished. While he painted the portrait, Cézanne continued his habit of studying every morning in the Louvre. If his work there went well, the following day, he told Vollard, he might discover the right tone to complete the hand. However, it was not simply a question of adding a couple of details, since, if he introduced a tone that jarred at this stage, the whole portrait would be destroyed and he would have to start again. Vollard was forced to concede that this would indeed be a daunting prospect.
The portrait, despite Vollard’s disappointment, not only depicted the sitter’s commanding presence but also expressed his interior life. Somehow, by the position of the knees and the set of the head, Cézanne had conveyed the dealer’s shyness and reserve. The artist had for a long time been thinking about the heads of his figures, developing a way of remodelling them which was partly the result of his study of Egyptian statues in the Louvre. If he asked his sitter to pose like an apple, he once explained, it was so that he could paint ‘a head like a door’. Though Vollard had little time for talk of this sort, he remained heartened by the knowledge that, since he had shown Cézanne’s work for the second time, it was finally ‘beginning to catch on with the public’. At the start of 1901, he again moved to larger premises, again in the rue Laffitte, this time to number 6. To celebrate the opening of his new gallery he was planning a second show of van Gogh’s work – for which he had acquired more than sixty paintings from the artist’s studio in Amsterdam, together with a large number of watercolours and drawings – to be held in February.
If his ultimate goal was to make sales, Vollard’s primary passion was collecting; on his own admission, he was always reluctant to sell his precious acquisitions, hence his reputation for hiding things away in cupboards and bringing out works reluctantly one by one (though that was partly, too, a strategic sales technique). As a sensitive child brought up on the island of La Réunion, he had gazed at the family parrot on its perch in the garden and longed to possess one of its feathers. He loved flowers, noting that white ones were all different shades of white. His first collection had been a heap of pebbles, which he had been forced to part with when the grown-ups retrieved them to repair a wall; then his precious hoard of bits of old blue china disappeared (confiscated for being too sharp for him to play with). He had thus learned early in life that treasured collections could easily disappear. Initially, his parents had wanted him to be a doctor, an ambition they soon relinquished when they took him to the local hospital to witness an operation and saw his horrified reaction. Their second choice was a career in the law, and Vollard had originally arrived in Paris to study it. He had hated law, but he loved Paris.
On his arrival in Paris, he had found lodgings in the rue Apennins and discovered the Chat Noir. He was seduced by the beauty of the light, the vibrant streets, the bouquinistes (second-hand-book dealers) by the Seine, the whole sensuous atmosphere of Paris. When he happened upon some books of fine etchings in the booksellers’ green boxes at the side of the river, he soon became, and remained, a serious bibliophile. He knew he had arrived at the right moment to collect works of art, since, in those days in Paris, there were ‘masterpieces everywhere, and going, so to speak, for a song’. And he kept an open mind. You never knew: perhaps one of these young Spaniards might turn out to be worth backing.
By 1900, despite his reputation as a grumpy old man who glared at prospective customers from the depths of his fusty gallery, he lived surrounded by artists. In the basement of his gallery he had a dining room, familiarly known as ‘la cave’ (the cellar), where he entertained the artistic and literary elite of his day, and others, including collectors, politicians and a nun who joined them regularly, until it emerged that the ‘sister’, despite her convincing attire, was not actually of the faith. In the early days, Renoir was a regular guest, as were Bonnard, Vuillard and Misia Natanson, the sparkling socialite and wife of the editor of La Revue blanche (she would later marry Spanish painter José-Maria Sert and become Sergei Diaghilev’s most loyal friend). Vollard cooked for his guests himself, preparing dishes from La Réunion, spiced in the Caribbean style. He was an enthusiastic, if not very talkative, host. First and foremost, however, he was a shrewd and talented businessman. Van Gogh, he still believed in. Cézanne, despite his increasing years, might turn out to be a major winner yet; and he was always on the lookout for younger newcomers.
5.
Blue Notes
Back in Spain, Picasso and Casagemas had spent a week or so in Barcelona celebrating Christmas with their families before going on to Malaga for New Year. At the end of January, Picasso left for Madrid, where, with a friend from Els Quatre Gats, he founded an arts magazine, Arte Joven. (The first issue appeared in March 1901; there were just four subsequent issues.) He signed a year-long lease on a studio, evidently intending to stay in Madrid for at least twelve months, while Casagemas returned to Barcelona, but not for long. Soon, Casagemas was back in Paris, this time without Picasso.
In February 1901, still in Madrid, Picasso received tragic news. Casagemas, driven to despair by his unrequited love for the resistant Gabrielle, had shot himself dead in front of her in a restaurant in Montmartre – just like a melodrama in the Théâtre Montmartre. For Picasso, who had already suffered the anguish of his little sister’s untimely death, it was a second horrifying tragedy and a terrible shock. He decided he must return to Paris. He arrived in late May, huddled in an oversized overcoat against the unseasonably cold weather, in time for the show Mañach had succeeded in persuading Vollard to hold for him in June. In Montmartre, Picasso took over the care of not only Casagemas’s small studio in an apartment at the foot of the Butte (at 130 ter, boulevard de Clichy) but also, if only for a while, the heroine of the drama, Gabrielle.
At Vollard’s gallery in June 1901, Picasso exhibited some sixty-four paintings and drawings, many of them executed in the three weeks since his return to Paris. The works were shown more or less pell-mell, hung haphazardly right up to the ceiling, many of them unframed. Some were not even hung, presented instead in large folders for viewers to riffle through. On 15 July, La Revue blanche ran a review of the exhibition. The reviewer, anarchist critic Georges Faillet, announced Picasso as ‘the painter, utterly and beautifully the painter; he has the power of divining the essence of things … Like all pure painters he adores colour for its own sake.’ His personality as a painter was embodied in his ‘youthful impetuous spontaneity’, but Faillet warned that such impetuosity ‘could easily lead to facile virtuosity an
d easy success …’
The show included works such as Overdressed Woman and French Cancan, in which a flurry of white – the dancers’ petticoats – dominates the foreground, accented with mere flashes of red garter and black stocking. In La Nana (sometimes called Dwarf-Dancer), the influence of Klimt shows strongly in Picasso’s depiction of the circus girl’s dress, as well as the background, painted in strong, primary colours in poignant contrast with her slender, delicate arms and legs and pearly-pink ballet shoes; her large head is accentuated by her top-heavy, coal-black hair. There is exaggeration in the detail, as there is, too, in his portrait of Bibi la Purée, a local poet and ragamuffin and a familiar, tattered figure in the lanes of Montmartre; in the portrait, Picasso gives him showy clothes, a clown’s white face and smile, and a clown’s rose in his buttonhole. In Spanish Dancer, a woman sits on the ground, one knee raised, head in hand, her red skirt a cacophony of scarlet billowing around her, white petticoats showing at the hem, against a background of teeming, abstract colour. Yellow Irises, a brilliant, visceral, approximate scribble of yellow and green which, viewed from a distance, seems to take on the exact form of irises, reveals that Picasso had probably somewhere already seen at least one or two works by van Gogh (at Vollard’s, perhaps).
If this was, as some called it, Picasso’s Toulouse-Lautrec period, the Spanish artist’s work introduced a psychological dimension entirely his own: he was looking at the people of Montmartre with the fresh eye and empathy of an outsider. Picasso was also compared with Steinlen, but while Steinlen’s art emphasized abjection and soulless lust, Picasso’s celebrated raw sensuality, warmth and passion. And there were one or two surprises – Spanish Woman, a more conventionally Spanish portrait, showed Picasso hinting at Goya or Velázquez and highlighting not so much the small, defiant face and pose (chin resting on one hand) of the woman as her ornately decorated skirt, black with silver embellishments, and the luxurious, gold-framed chair she sits in, which together establish the picture’s heart-shaped form.
Two contrasting self-portraits reveal two different states of mind and treatments of self-portraiture. Self-Portrait (Yo Picasso) startlingly contrasts the stark white of the artist’s smock with his orange-red kerchief, and the twisting pose accentuates his sparkling, currant-black eyes. The second painting, Self-Portrait (Yo), is painted on wood in simple vertical, horizontal and diagonal brushstrokes in dark, subdued browns and greens. A subtle halo of light illuminates the face, and the figure emerges like an apparition or a painting of a martyred saint, locking the viewer’s gaze into the figure’s own. Critic Gustave Coquiot, one of Rodin’s secretaries, reviewed the show, which also included portraits of both Mañach and an unknown figure (Portrait of a Man) thought to be Coquiot (or possibly Vollard). Even in his early years, Picasso was nothing if not strategic. Le Journal ran Coquiot’s review on 17 June. He detected the influence of Steinlen and hailed Picasso as a new painter of modern life and of ‘every kind of courtesan’.
The skills of an original colourist and interpreter of street life in Montmartre were not, of course, consistent with the priorities of the average purchaser of works of art. Most consumers of art in 1901 were still concerned with polish, finish, narrative subject matter – soothing landscapes tastefully executed, in pastel or grey tones – or with the snob value attaching to the work of known academicians. Nevertheless, here was a young newcomer of astonishing talent and, by the standards of the time, the show was a success – more than half the works were sold – even if, from Vollard’s perspective, Picasso had achieved nothing out of the ordinary. If, for Vollard, the exhibition amounted to little more than a succès d’estime, to the artist, Picasso’s earnings seemed a small fortune. He felt rich … and soon got through the money. He evidently enjoyed the annual Bastille Day celebrations; his painting Fourteenth of July (1901) captures the feverish excitement of the crowds on the boulevard de Clichy. However, he was soon feeling dejected and disillusioned. If he had expected success to follow from the exhibition, he was disappointed. He received commissions for posters and illustrations for magazines such as Frou-Frou, but he regarded these as hack work. And no further invitations to exhibit seemed to be forthcoming from Vollard.
The expensive boîtes at the foot of the Butte were forgone once more, still for reasons of economy but also because, by now, the rural summit of Montmartre better suited Picasso’s mood. Despite the proximity of more promising painters and more challenging companions (Matisse, van Dongen), for the time being Picasso’s bande still consisted of his old Catalan friends and their acquaintances, together with the odd bohemian inhabitant of Montmartre, including Max Jacob, one of the area’s more waspish characters, theatrically turned out in frock coat and top hat, who painted after his own fashion (mixing cigarette ash with his colours), wrote decadent esoteric poetry that harked back to Symbolism, studied the occult and read palms; he knew the Cabbala and specialized in the language of astrology. He had seen and admired Picasso’s show at Vollard’s and had introduced himself; he became one of the artist’s first true friends in Paris, helping him to learn French. Picasso drew him into his circle of Catalan friends. Jacob was also a great mimic, and entertained them in the evenings with his impressions of Sarah Bernhardt and other grandes dames of the stage.
In the evenings, they all went to the Zut, a hovel of a place at 28, rue Ravignan. A far cry from the café-concerts at the bottom of the hillside, even from the Moulin de la Galette, the Zut was a filthy dive which had recently been taken over by Frédé (the fish-seller who also sold paintings from his cart and would later become the proprietor of the Lapin Agile). Born Frédéric Gérard, Frédé had trained as an artist himself, at the École d’Arts et Métiers in his native Gagny, in the eastern suburbs of Paris (only eight or so miles from the centre of Paris but, for a man with young children and only a donkey for transport, a world away from Montmartre). He drew well and made pottery and ceramics; he also sang and played the cello, flute and guitar. In Gagny, he had started work as an illustrator, making sketches in cafés and at open-air fairs, where he heard tell of Montmartre, the artistic centre of the world, where everyone played music, sang and set up their easels to paint in the streets. He decided to see for himself, arriving in the 1890s with his wife, children and donkey, Lolo. Frédé’s dream was to run a cabaret like the Moulin Rouge.
His first venue hardly compared. He had initially taken over Le Tonneau, a fleapit in the rue Bréda where there were not even enough chairs and where he began his tradition of holding evenings of music, poetry and song that ran on into the early hours, even though the place had no licence as a nightclub. In 1900, he had progressed to the Zut, which was bigger but hardly more salubrious. In fact, it was in such a state of dilapidation, with strips of plaster hanging from the ceiling, that one of the two rooms was nicknamed ‘the stalactite room’. One of the Catalan crowd persuaded him to clean and disinfect both rooms (one for the Catalans, the other for local artists, models and poets), and the artists painted the walls with frescoes. Here he continued his musical evenings and, though it was hardly the Moulin Rouge, he succeeded in making the Zut into a popular gathering place. All those who could not afford the boîtes at the foot of the Butte quickly began to congregate in the run-down pit managed by Frédé. Once it was spruced up, Picasso and his friends met there most evenings, talking into the small hours, when outside, after the shutters were closed, the lanes at the top of the hillside became completely dark. They talked on until long after the tables in the cafés had emptied and only the hardened alcoholics were left, slumped for the night against walls, huddled in doorways or stretched out beneath the benches. In the lanes, hunched forms could be seen in the shadows, making their way back from midnight Mass. In the distance, down at the bottom of the hillside, Paris still teemed with the light of thousands of gas jets casting their sputtering shadows across the streets. At dawn, Picasso and his friends made their way home to the sounds of the early-morning trains, their wild calls rising up from the Gare du Nor
d and the Gare de l’Est, the Moulin de la Galette coming into view like a pale ghost against the sky.
6.
The Impact of van Gogh
Six-year-old Marguerite Matisse lay in the Hôpital Bretonneau in Montmartre. She was suffering from typhoid fever, contracted in the hospital. In July 1901, while most of Paris was out on the streets celebrating the anniversary of Bastille, she had fallen ill with diphtheria and almost died of asphyxiation. A doctor visited her at home, where she underwent an emergency tracheotomy, her father holding her down as the operation was performed without anaesthetic on the family dining table. For the rest of her life she wore a black ribbon or choker to hide the three-inch scar. In the portrait Matisse painted of her that autumn she is ghastly white, her enormous dark eyes staring out from her small, swollen and distorted face.