In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art

by Sue Roe

  The trauma of his daughter’s illness was compounded for Matisse by his worry that, as an artist, he was going nowhere. During the previous five years, his prospects seemed only to have diminished since he had abandoned the shades of grey that had appealed to the public in his search for a new style and more expressive ways of using colour. His allowance from his father was about to be curtailed, as his brother was due to marry, making it his turn to receive their father’s support. Matisse applied for work at the Opéra Comique, but without success. In the course of 1901, he sold five or six drawings to Vollard: the sum total of his sales that year.

  In the same year, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers mounted a small exhibition of paintings by van Gogh. Matisse visited both Vollard’s exhibition of the Dutch painter’s work, and the brothers’. In the Bernheim-Jeunes’ gallery, at 8, rue Laffitte, he ran into André Derain, the tall, loping student with the ‘primitive’ style of painting he had met at the Académie Camillo. Derain was talking to a hugely built young man with pale-blue eyes and flame-red hair who was extolling with great animation the virtues of painting with strong, pure colours – cobalts, vermilions, veronese. Despite Derain’s height, his friend towered above him, his voice so powerful he seemed to be shouting rather than talking, throwing back his head when he laughed. The colossal stranger was Maurice Vlaminck, Derain’s neighbour in Chatou, whom he now introduced to Matisse.

  All three were bowled over by van Gogh’s paintings, especially Vlaminck. He had seen works by Renoir, Monet and Sisley in the gallery of the Impressionists’ dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, where he had admired their nuanced depictions of the landscapes and wished he had the facility to paint as they did; van Gogh was another matter. These vivid, imaginative colours, these expressive brushstrokes … Now this was exactly how Vlaminck felt when he looked at the landscapes the Impressionists had painted, but he had been frustrated – so far – by his own attempts to depict his strong feelings for those familiar places in his own paintings. Perhaps if he allowed himself to paint those same landscapes more freely, like this … van Gogh’s work was a revelation. Derain shared his enthusiasm. In October 1901, after the exhibition, he wrote to Vlaminck, ‘I believe the Realist period is over. We have only just begun … lines and colour are enough … to enable us to discover a simpler kind of composition.’ He stressed that ‘feeling and expressing are two entirely separate actions. [The latter] presupposes that you have previously analysed your means of expression.’ By then, Derain had already produced a sufficiently impressive portfolio of work to be accepted for membership of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. But now it was his turn, in this autumn of 1901, for the mind-numbing distraction of three years’ military service.

  • • •

  Vlaminck and Derain had known each other only a few months when they went to see van Gogh’s work together. Vlaminck, aged twenty-five in 1901, four years older than Derain, was already married with two children. The two artists had met the previous summer, when a train they were both travelling on derailed on the way back from Paris to Chatou. Vlaminck was familiarly known around Chatou as the ‘bougre des guinguettes fleuries’ (‘the chap from the open-air bars’). Like Derain, he had grown up in the riverside banlieues in the vicinity of Chatou. He was born in Paris; his father was a tailor who later gave music lessons, his mother a gifted musician who had won second prize for piano at the Paris Conservatoire. They moved when he was three, first to Le Vésinet, a leafy suburb, like Chatou, with grand villas in walled gardens, a district generally regarded as distinguished, though the Vlaminck family house was modest and they were by no means wealthy. Later in life, he once said that, even if he came into a fortune of millions, he would never attain that air of security and belonging he had observed in the rich kids in Le Vésinet. He had spent his childhood on the river, on the barges among the dockers and watermen, with no artistic aspirations: ‘You need to be rich to paint!’ He was one of four, and his father’s main concern had been to provide them all with food and shelter. He did have one childhood memory of walking with his father: ‘I must have been about eight or ten. It was in the plaine de Rueil in midsummer, we followed a path beneath the scorching midday sun and [suddenly] before me there was a field of corn – a cornfield with poppies and cornflowers and humming flies. I painted the cornfields. And every time I painted them it was with the same feeling, that feeling of astonishment I had when I was ten.’

  Vlaminck was fearless. He looked at the world head on, perceiving the grandeur in sadness, seeing things from an angle no one else would have dared look at them from. And he was outspoken, ‘fauve’ by temperament, rough, with a burly appearance that made him seem even rougher. He was musical rather than academic, a free spirit, like Derain. He once said that, as an artist, he had had two teachers, a Monsieur Robichon of the Société des Artistes Français, hired by his parents to give him lessons, and a local saddler who painted portraits on bits of glass. His sensibility, he said, had been more deeply touched by the latter. When he met Derain, just after the latter had been demobilized, Derain’s parents forbade their son to mix with him, so Vlaminck would go to their house after dark and whistle beneath the window until Derain leaned out. Then, in a stage whisper, ‘Hey, look, André, it’s amazing! I’ve painted it all in red.’ ‘Oh yes? …’ came the reply, ‘I’ve done mine all in black!’ Soon afterwards, they rented a makeshift studio together in an old disused restaurant not far from the Maison Fournaise, where Renoir had painted Luncheon of the Boating Party back in 1881, and where, in 1869, Renoir and Monet had painted the Grenouillère, the open-air bar tethered to the banks of the river to which the Sunday crowds flocked from Paris to bathe before repairing to the bar to drink and dance the night away.

  Vlaminck had loathed army life, too, particularly since it had followed the abrupt curtailment of his career as a racing cyclist (brought to an end in 1896, just as he had been selected to ride in the Grand Prix de Paris handicap, by an attack of typhoid fever). No sooner had he recovered from his illness than he found himself separated from his wife and daughters and packed into barracks with hordes of disenchanted men, to tramp all day across fields, four abreast, pursued at night by the whores who followed the regiment from town to town, in the name of the military apprenticeship he regarded as worse than futile. With the help of a friend, he managed to gain access to the officers’ library, where he read Victor Hugo, Zola, Maupassant and the Goncourts, and the philosophy of Pascal and Diderot. Army pay was five centimes a day, which meant that the men had to work to earn enough for anything more than the meagre food and lodgings supplied by the army, so Vlaminck gave violin lessons to the local children and played for anyone who would employ him in the village where he was stationed. His only solace was to focus on the skies flecked with clouds and think of van Ruysdael’sseventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, his contemplation ‘a nobler occupation and much more important to me than my apprenticeship as a murderer’.

  Released from the army, tired out by life in barracks, craving the privacy and personal freedom he had been deprived of for three years, he took a casual job as a violinist in a low café-chantant, but he found the experience hardly more inspiring than army life; it, too, seemed deadening, decadent and sexually disquieting. From the orchestra pit, the musicians were obliged to spend the night looking straight up the skirts of the chanteuse; Vlaminck would then have to watch her, ‘wrapped in an expensive fur, going off on the arm of a lucky escort, oblivious of the desire she had distilled in me’. It was a nocturnal existence which, he considered, could easily have sent him off the rails.

  In 1900, he had been enthralled by the gypsy orchestras who played at the World Fair. Inspired by them, he left his job in the café-chantant to play in one of them in an expensive nightclub, but playing for the rich was not exactly uplifting. The only consolation for being poor amidst waiters bearing trays of crayfish, lobster à l’américaine and other artfully prepared dishes to revealingly dressed women and their escorts was that the rich clients se
emed as bored and disenchanted by it all as did the orchestra, which valiantly attempted to churn out sufficiently romantic music to seduce one or two of the rich punters into taking the chanteuses off for the night. Walking home across the Pont des Arts in the early hours one morning, Vlaminck had enviously watched as the coal heavers unloaded a barge, their sacks on their shoulders, running down the ramp like acrobats. He asked the skipper for work but was refused on the grounds that he was not a member of the union.

  He finally managed to find a job he enjoyed, playing in the orchestra of the Théâtre du Château d’Eau, which had an ambience that seemed to him ‘more serious, more worthwhile’. (He would work there until 1903, when he lost his job with the closure of the theatre.) In the daytime, he painted out of doors, where ‘with a few colours in a box, a canvas and a cheap easel under my arm … on the banks of the Seine I would forget everything. I painted to restore my peace of mind.’ He had no training other than a few lessons from a local painter, and no desire either to master the classical tradition or to break new ground. He was not intrinsically an experimentalist; still less a theorist. His aim was not to capture the fleeting beauty of nature so much as to find a way of expressing himself.

  For Vlaminck, subjective expression was not so much an aesthetic as a personal compulsion, a private quest driven by ‘a tremendous urge to re-create a new world seen through my own eyes, a world which was entirely pure. I was poor, but I knew that life was something pure, and I realized that all I wanted to do was to find some new and profound way of identifying myself with the soil.’ Questioned some years later about his reinterpretation of colour, he replied that he simply put down the colours he saw. When he painted with Derain on the bridge at Chatou, the locals always gathered to see what they were doing, startled by their pictures. They were painting at the riverside there one day when Henri Matisse came across the bridge. The next day, he came again. He told Vlaminck, ‘Je n’ai pas pu dormir de la nuit’ (‘I haven’t been able to sleep all night’).

  The riverside area, with its farms, barns, factories, châteaux and loop of pretty villages, was Vlaminck’s native land, the terrain he felt passionate about. He painted red, blue, green – whatever colour seemed to express his response to the scene before him – without worrying about the critics, the amateurs, the connoisseurs or the dealers. ‘I really do not care what anyone thinks of me,’ he would say. He was nostalgic, too; he regarded the railway as a gaping sore running through the landscape and hated the factories, but, unlike Monet before him, he had no thought of choosing a spot from which the view of them would be obscured: he painted them, venting his indignation in hot tones of yellow, purple and scarlet red. He scattered his fiery red landscapes with shreds of crimson, bathing the river in a strong, ragged light, rendering the land the Impressionists had painted not as they had seen it – soothing, leisurely, essentially pastoral – but, rather, vulnerable in the face of the invasions of factories, industrial buildings, the machine that pumped water at Marly: all, to him, indications that the modern world threatened to slice up the cornfields and poppy fields of his childhood.

  On his release from the army, Vlaminck had remained friends with some of the more subversive members of his regiment, anarchists who held their meetings in Montmartre, in the offices of Le Libertaire in the rue d’Orsel. They invited him up there to meet their comrades, though Vlaminck was hardly interested in the cause of reigniting the flame of the 1871 Commune. There was nobody up here resembling the intellectuals from the old Chat Noir. On the contrary, most of the ‘apostles’ he met struck him as ‘hard-bitten and tenacious old liberals’. He wrote a few articles for the newspaper for the pleasure of seeing his name in print, but was never really persuaded by the anarchists’ idealism. The male company was welcome, and he must have been popular, since he used their offices to work on a scurrilous novel based on stories he had heard in the army, hoping to make some literary capital out of his fellow soldiers’ off-duty experiences. The book, D’un Lit dans l’autre, was published the following year, 1902, with illustrations and cover design by Derain.

  Meanwhile, the two artists exhibited their paintings where they could – at a colour merchant’s on the corner of the Pont de Rueil, where their bold colour schemes and Vlaminck’s use of thick impasto caused another minor scandal – hardly surprisingly, if he was showing Sur le Zinc (At the Bar), one of his rare figure paintings, done in 1901, a startling almost-caricature of an old whore with red hair, crimson corsage and rouged mouth brandishing her glass of beer, or even Portrait of a woman at the Rat Mort – almost as startling, for 1905–6, with its bold lines and strong use of scarlet. By his own account, ‘I heightened all my tone values and transposed into an orchestration of pure colour every single thing I felt. I was a tender barbarian, filled with violence. I translated what I saw instinctively, without any method, and conveyed truth, not so much artistically as humanely. I squeezed and ruined tubes of aquamarine and vermilion which, incidentally, cost quite a lot of money at the paint shop at the Pont de Chatou where I used to be given credit.’ On rainy days he made his way up the steps of the hillside of Montmartre to the offices of Le Libertaire, where he was already writing his next shady novel, Tout pour ça (published in 1903), again with illustrations by Derain.

  Also living in Chatou, in one of the large riverside villas inhabited by the wealthier residents, was 22-year-old Paul Poiret, stylishly turned out in top hat and cane and soon to become the most influential fashion designer in Paris. In 1901, he had just been taken on by the illustrious House of Worth, where he had been told that the Worth brothers (sons of the couturier Charles Worth) needed a new recruit to design the ‘pommes frites’ of fashion targeted at the younger clientele, rather than the glorious ‘gâteaux’ in which Worth himself dressed the upper crust of Paris. Poiret had noticed Vlaminck at his easel at the riverside and seen the ‘ferocious air and savage look’ he adopted if anyone approached him as he worked. Poiret had also heard tell of the exhibition at the colour merchant’s, of which one of his friends had remarked that, if one sped past the window in a carriage going fast enough, ‘they produced quite a good impression’. Many years later, Poiret remembered watching Vlaminck and Derain as they trudged along the riverside, forced to move out of their lodgings (their shared studio, presumably) when the landlady grew tired of giving them credit. ‘I can still see them by the flowery banks,’ he reminisced, ‘their boxes of colours under their arms, their canvases piled in a wheelbarrow.’

  7.

  Poiret: Art and Design

  Poiret had been more fortunate than his artist-neighbours. His unusual ingenuity, and an advance from his mother on his inheritance of fifty thousand francs, had ensured his rapid success. Within two years of joining the House of Worth, in 1903, he would open his own premises at 5, rue Auber, at the corner of the rue Scribe, attracting customers with his innovative window displays, which he created himself, using artfully placed natural foliage from the Forest of Fontainebleau. In autumn, he introduced golden leaves into assemblages of velvet and other fabrics; in winter, he draped white tulle and muslin against dried branches. As he himself eloquently remarked, he ‘dressed the passing moment’, capturing a mood of modernity in the making and ravishing all who passed his window. Soon ‘all Paris had stopped at least once’. In dressing the backdrop as well as the figure, Poiret was already anticipating the holistic approach to the stage and costume design which came to fruition in 1909 with the debut performances of the Ballets Russes. The production by Sergei Diaghilev and his set designer Léon Bakst would send the world mad for the ballet, and women from all over Paris to Poiret, who would make them clothes mimicking the exoticism of the Russian dancers’ costumes.

  Poiret’s first employer, the couturier Jacques Doucet (known for his elegant, flimsy dresses in pastel-coloured, semi-transparent fabrics with ruffles and frills and sinuous curving lines), had realized early on that young Poiret’s interest in dress was essentially theatrical. He had sent him to the Comédie
-Française, the Théâtre Libre and the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, with young models dressed in Doucet’s creations hanging on his arm, initially with a view to circulating his dresses among the haut monde. Even Doucet, however, underestimated the extent to which his young recruit instinctively understood the connection between fashion and drama. For Poiret, haute couture was itself a form of theatre. He would soon be dressing leading actresses and designing outrageous confections inspired by the ‘orgy of colours’ that caught his attention when one of the department stores displayed a consignment of carpets from the Far East. When he moved from Doucet’s to the House of Worth, he dressed Worth’s clients in the soft lines, brilliant hues and rich fabrics of the Orient, designing Oriental-inspired jackets in rich silks and satins decorated with flamboyant motifs and vivid colours. At the time, the vogue was for lilac, sky blue or straw: ‘anything that was cloying, washed out, and dull to the eye’. Poiret changed all that, creating gowns in reds, royal blues, bright oranges, ‘and my sunburst of pastels made a new dawn’.

  Poiret was soon being sought out by the great actresses, dressing both Gabrielle Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt’s rival and one of the most popular actresses of her day, and ‘la divine Sarah’, darling of the turn-of-the-century stage. In 1900, Bernhardt had a theatre in Paris refurbished throughout in red and gold, decorated with her insignia and renamed after her. She was also one of the leading actresses of the silent movies, making her debut that year in the two-minute Duel d’Hamlet, one of the first examples of the sound-and-image synching system (ear-pieces plugged into a phonograph) pioneered at the World Fair. The year he opened his own premises (1903), Poiret reproduced the costume he had designed for Réjane hundreds of times in many variants, an initiative which anticipated his later invention (in 1922) of the ready-to-wear system of charging a royalty on each garment sold rather than a set price for one individually made garment. This system forms the basis of modern fashion manufacture.