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

by Sue Roe

  In autumn 1902, Poiret met a girl with brown eyes, tall and slender, with slim hips and long legs, whose influence on him would change the course of fashion design. However, since Denise was only sixteen, he resigned himself to a long wait; it took three years for her parents to consent to their engagement. They finally married in 1906. She became and remained his top model, ‘the inspiration for my creations … the expression of all my ideals’. During the next few years, inspired, too, by the paintings of Botticelli, and the statue of the Venus de Milo, which he admired above all works of art in the Louvre and had studied closely, he began to design garments to suit Denise’s slender figure. He would soon be creating the hobble skirt, which quickly became fashionable, despite the difficulty of getting into a carriage, or even walking, in them; then boat-necked, subtly draped, sheath-style garments with ankle-revealing skirts, and coloured, low-heeled boots. ‘To dress a woman,’ as he would one day tell readers of Vogue, ‘is not to cover her with ornaments’; the art of the designer was to show her to her best advantage, creating original garments with contours that accentuated her natural, individual grace: ‘All the talent of the artist consists in a manner of revealment.’

  All this might have seemed radical to the point of recklessness, but Poiret’s designs caught on immediately. Already, from about 1902 onwards, his pared-down forms and daring colour schemes became synonymous with the idea of freedom of movement and self-expression, in fashion as in art. Poiret was a true innovator, quickly taken up and feted when Réjane wore his clothes in America, where he was hailed as the king of fashion. In Paris, he made friends with his contemporaries, extending his circle during the next few years from Derain and Vlaminck outwards, to include Picasso, Matisse, van Dongen and, eventually, Modigliani and Brâncus¸i. He collected their works with no particular ambition as a collector; he was simply excited by the work of his new friends. In Montmartre, he befriended Max Jacob, to whom he sent those of his wealthy clients with leanings towards the occult to have their palms read.

  Poiret’s success left not only Derain and Vlaminck but all the painters of his acquaintance behind; none managed to rival his spectacularly rapid career rise. In February 1902, Berthe Weill included Matisse’s work in one of her first mixed shows of contemporary artists, but she was as unsuccessful as ever in converting her enthusiasm and support into sales. As for Picasso, he was exhibiting nothing. He had discovered the Saint-Lazare women’s prison, where artists were free to wander in and sketch the inmates at no charge. He was shocked by the presence of children and deeply affected by the spectacle of motherhood rendered poignant by penury and incarceration; at that time, fallen women were sometimes reduced to petty crime as a way of making sure they had a roof over their heads when they gave birth. When he worked up his sketches into paintings, Picasso based the forms of his figures on the simplified forms of El Greco, giving some of them a different setting, removing them to the seashore (taking them home to Barcelona), adding fathers and sons to some of the tableaux and painting whole families as well as individual men and women, in scenes of misery and tragedy that recalled the melancholy work of his friend Nonell as well as reflecting the influence of El Greco. These paintings, characterized by his use of elongated lines and monochromatic blue, were some of the earliest examples of the work he did in what would later be known as his Blue Period. Picasso was still haunted by the death of Casagemas; the misery he recognized and depicted in his subjects were powerful expressions of his own grief and sadness. In autumn 1901, he was living in cheap lodgings in the rue Clichy near the Gare Saint-Lazare, where he continued to mourn Casagemas as he roamed the streets, preoccupied by the sight of the abject poor, whose lives, to his dismay, had begun to seem not entirely indistinguishable from his own.

  By December, Picasso was growing restless. He had no money and no prospects and was becoming ashamed of as well as depressed by his poverty. His lack of success made him an outsider, too, casting him down with feelings of demoralization for which nothing could have prepared him. As the beloved son of doting parents, in Barcelona he had grown up with a sense of natural entitlement; in Paris, the world seemed to owe him nothing. Again, he began to yearn for home. At the end of the year, he broke his contract with Mañach, thereby risking his connection with Vollard, but by now that seemed unlikely to amount to much. When Vollard saw examples of Picasso’s work from the Blue Period – paintings of the women from the Saint-Lazare prison with their babies; a man with a blue guitar; a blind man with his frugal bowl of broth – he promptly lost interest; these were hardly works to gladden the hearts of prospective purchasers. Dejected, early in January 1902, aged twenty, Picasso returned to Barcelona, where his parents gave him back his old room.

  8.

  Reconstructions … and Ruin

  In 1902, developers sent construction workers to Montmartre, where they began to cut into the Maquis. As buildings were demolished, large areas of dusty waste ground appeared up on the northern flank of the Butte, between the Moulin de la Galette and the rue Caulaincourt. Each time another building was condemned for demolition, Frédé joked that he hoped the job would be carried out without disturbing the artist in the garret. In any case, work soon ceased, when the terrain beneath the surface proved unsuitable for laying proper foundations, leaving desolate empty spaces across which the very poor wandered, looking for shelter.

  In late spring, Berthe Weill sold a still life by Matisse and a smaller study, his first sales since he had begun working with strong colours and more simplified forms. She proposed to include more of his work in a mixed exhibition she was planning for June. In the meantime, Vollard had paid a thousand francs for five canvases, among which he had spotted three large ones that particularly appealed to him. Throughout 1902, Matisse continued to develop his new style, working on through significant stresses and strains in his domestic life (worries about his children’s health, disasters in the professional lives of his parents-in-law), painting in vibrant turquoises, violets, greens and crimson pinks, inspired by van Gogh and perhaps also by Vlaminck. At the same time, he began to pay attention to the work of Paul Signac and his friends Paul Seurat and Lucien Pissarro, who had been searching for a way of developing the discoveries of the Impressionists into a more scientific system. In 1899, Signac had brought out a collection of articles, previously published in La Revue blanche, which now appeared in book form as From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism. The book effectively laid out the method of painting the three friends had together discovered, a system of creating images through juxtaposition using only pure colours – a kind of democracy of tonal relations which at the time appealed strongly, both theoretically and as a practice, to Matisse. Signac’s critics were disparaging, calling the new method pointillisme (‘painting by dots’), but he did have followers. He was popular with young students in the academies and he regularly opened his studio in the boulevard de Clichy to them. Matisse, too, now began to spend more time in Signac’s company.

  • • •

  Back in Barcelona, Picasso was soon yearning for Paris. By contrast with Montmartre, the world of Els Quatre Gats now seemed frustratingly provincial, especially since its starriest artists all seemed to have moved to the French capital. The misty hillside, the proximity of the boîtes at the foot of the hillside, the world of cafés open until dawn – the ambience of Montmartre soon seemed alluring again. But the prospect of military service loomed; and, anyway, there seemed to be no way of resuming an independent life in Paris. Under the terms of the agreement, which still stood, any desultory income forthcoming from sales of his work was Mañach’s. While he was in Barcelona, Picasso had missed an exhibition of his work. Mañach had followed up the one at Vollard’s by showing Picasso’s work together with that of other artists at Berthe Weill’s gallery in the first two weeks of April. Included among Picasso’s works were his paintings of a glittering yellow clown, a fanciful pierrot (both, according to the catalogue preface, displaying the artist’s ‘facility in capturing attitud
es’) and his ‘brilliant, clamorous’ Fourteenth of July, in which he brings the streets of Paris alive with movement and festivity, the scene vibrantly evoked in reds and yellows. The catalogue preface hailed the talent of the young newcomer: ‘all nerve, all verve, all impetuosity’. Meanwhile, Picasso himself, stranded in Barcelona, had resumed his old routine of painting and sketching portraits of his friends. He received a number of commissions and several of his drawings appeared in Barcelona’s major newspaper, El Liberal, but life was dull. In Paris, Mañach’s attempts to promote him had evidently come to nothing. By the autumn, Mañach himself was back in Barcelona.

  In late October 1902, help came when Picasso’s uncle Salvador bought him out of military service. Picasso was free to return to Paris. Released from his commitment to Mañach, the artist reasoned that he could look for someone else to represent his work – at least, in theory. He put up at a couple of cheap hostels in Montparnasse, going up to Montmartre only to visit Paul Durand-Ruel; although he handled the work of another of the Catalan painters, Picasso’s friend Ricard Canals, the meeting with Picasso came to nothing. Otherwise, he stayed away from Montmartre, hoping to avoid running into old friends, embarrassed by what he felt was his failure to develop his work or make his way in Paris. In November, Berthe Weill included his work in another of her group shows. This time, the catalogue essay was positively off-putting. Picasso’s works were described as ‘cameos showing painful reality, dedicated to misery, loneliness and exhaustion’. He did have one new supporter, Symbolist poet and critic Charles Morice, who had promoted Gauguin. He was editor of the revised 1901 Louvre edition of Noa Noa, Gauguin’s published writings about his life in the South Seas, and may have become aware of Picasso’s work through Paco Durrio, the Catalan ceramicist who had known Gauguin in Montmartre. Morice gave Picasso a copy of Noa Noa and reviewed Berthe Weill’s show, albeit somewhat equivocally, acknowledging Picasso as a born painter – ‘What drawing! … What composition! … as disturbing and provocative as one of the Fleurs du Mal …’ Even that (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not lead to sales.

  It may have been reading about Gauguin’s earthly paradise in Tahiti that encouraged Picasso to make a break with the Saint-Lazare prison and his melancholy Blue Period. He now began to spend his days, instead, at the Louvre, producing gloomy old master-style drawings on scraps of paper which he hoped to sell for a few sous. He could no longer afford his rent and had been reduced to stealing bread and coins by the time he ran into Max Jacob, now working in a department store to make ends meet and living on the fifth floor of a house at 137, rue Voltaire, in what was then an unprepossessing industrial area of Paris; he offered Picasso a share of his lodgings. Since there was only one bed, Picasso painted all night while Max slept, going to bed himself in the daytime while Max was out at work. But such a way of life was not to be endured for long. By mid-January, Picasso was once again back in Barcelona, beneath the blue-black skies of Spain.

  • • •

  By February 1903, Matisse was also living in his parents’ home, in Bohain, northern France. The past year had been almost absurdly traumatic for his wife, Amélie, and her family. Her parents had been implicated in a devastating court case, ‘the greatest swindle of the century’, which had exposed their employers as crooks who had reduced their investors to penury. Though Amélie’s parents were proved innocent, they underwent humiliating public exposure and the loss of their professional positions before finally being reduced to destitution after the saga, exhaustively covered by the press, had dragged on for several months. By the time it was resolved, Matisse himself was overcome with exhaustion. The scandal meant that he and Amélie also suffered – Matisse’s studio was searched, they were forced to abandon their lodgings in Montmartre and Amélie’s millinery business went to the wall. Her premises were also searched, then closed. Matisse returned briefly to Paris, only to move out of the rue de Châteaudun and close up his wife’s shop. In spring, he moved within Bohain, into a vacant property owned by his father, where he set up his studio in a poky attic, lit only by tiny skylights. Not until July did his spirits begin to lift, when he and Amélie took a house eight miles away in Lesquielles-St-Germain, a quiet town, home to textile workers, where he was able to live calmly with his family for a while, painting domestic scenes and still lifes while he attempted to recover his equilibrium. When he returned to Paris, he and Amélie left their boys with their grandparents while they set up home with Marguerite in what had been Matisse’s studio, at 19, quai Saint Michel. Amélie returned to work as a modiste in her aunt Nine’s hat shop. Matisse resumed work on his views of the Seine and Notre Dame. Cézanne’s Three Bathers, one of the few possessions to have survived the family’s financial ordeals, hung for inspiration above his easel.

  9.

  At the Académie Humbert

  At the foot of the Butte de Montmartre, the women came and went, their hair dyed black as coal, their mouths and cheeks rouged the colour of poppies. In the cafés they sat hunched over glasses of blue-green absinthe. A few doors along from the Moulin Rouge, at 104, boulevard de Clichy, art students carrying portfolios could be seen wandering in and out of the Académie Humbert. Like Julian’s and Camillo’s, it was loosely affiliated to the École des Beaux-Arts, and provided sporadic or indifferent tuition. The Salon des Beaux-Arts was still (as in the Impressionists’ student days) the only real hope of exhibiting work. Back in 1884, the Salon des Indépendants had been founded with a view to showing more contemporary art, selected without the academic criteria (and retrograde prejudices) of the École des Beaux-Arts, but still by jury. Despite the fact that its members included Paul Signac, it had not so far succeeded in bringing anything particularly sensational to the public’s attention.

  There were, however, plans afoot for the creation of a new Salon. A group of liberal critics and painters, drawn by lot, had already formed to instigate a more radical annual autumn exhibition of work, which, like the Salon des Indépendants, would be selected by an unbiased jury whose mission was to champion new work by young artists. This time, the selection of artists would cover a broader range of styles, reflecting democracy of taste in practice rather than merely in theory. Despite attempts by the École des Beaux-Arts to stymie it, preparations were underway and the new Salon – to be called, simply, the Salon d’Automne – was due to mount the first exhibition that year. Meanwhile, progressive art was confined to the galleries of Montmartre. In the academies, tuition was still farmed out to lesser known academicians, and the students, who from autumn 1903 included Georges Braque, were left more or less to their own devices.

  Braque cut a stylish figure. A fashion trend-setter and natty dresser, he stood out among the students in his tweed suits, shiny white collars, heavy black silk cravats and black bowler hat. (He even carried a cane, of Javanese bamboo, which a decade or so later would again be all the rage when Charlie Chaplin made his appearance on the cinema screen.) He attracted the attention of the other students, particularly that of another recruit, Georges Lepape, then aged only sixteen but who later became a leading fashion illustrator for Vogue. Lepape’s schooling had been interrupted by a leg injury. When he showed a talent for drawing and a keen interest in illustration, his parents had sent him to the Académie Humbert in the hope that, despite his lack of formal education, he might become a draughtsman. On the Monday of his second week he noticed Georges Braque in the life class and engaged him in conversation.

  Unlike Lepape, Braque was athletic, with a strong physique, thick-set, with tight-curly hair, a broad face and solid shoulders, and he could swim, box and even tap-dance. In his native Le Havre, the sailors had taught him to dance the jig, to which he whistled his own accompaniment. ‘And what a teacher he was too,’ Lepape observed. ‘If only he’d been willing to pass on his tips about painting. But he never did anything but draw.’ Braque had enrolled at the academy after finishing his military service, reduced from three years to one because he had served an apprenticeship; he had begun his traini
ng as a painter and decorator in Le Havre with his father and completed it in Paris, under one of his father’s friends. In 1900, while Picasso had been living in Nonell’s studio in the rue Gabrielle, Braque lived just two streets away, in lodgings in the rue des Trois Frères – another significant encounter still, as yet, to take place.

  Born in 1882 in Argenteuil (home to Monet in the 1870s and the scene of many of his riverside paintings), at the age of eight Braque moved with his family to Le Havre. His father was a good semi-professional painter in the traditional style, respected in the art world of Le Havre, and had at least once exhibited in Paris. At weekends, he took his son, Georges, in the family horse-drawn cart to the countryside of Normandy to paint landscapes, where Corot was their great inspiration, though Braque (fils) always said his real education as an artist actually came from reading Gil Blas, the literary periodical, advertised by Steinlen’s posters, to which his father subscribed. As a schoolboy, Georges had visited Paris and seen the Impressionists’ work in the Musée du Luxembourg, where he had been particularly struck by a small landscape of L’Estaque by Cézanne. Like Monet before him (also a native of Le Havre), he had bunked off school to explore the port of Le Havre – the chandlers’ shops, the boats, the seashore – where he wandered about on his own, ruminating on the mystery of infinity. He was a natural solitary only in the sense that he kept his thoughts to himself; he was never melancholy or lonely, always effortlessly sociable.