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

by Sue Roe

  It had been not Matisse but Vlaminck who had made the greater impact at the 1904 Salon des Indépendants, where he had been accepted for the first time, with four of his works showing. This was only the second time he had ever shown his work, the first, earlier that spring, in a group exhibition at Berthe Weill’s gallery, where his paintings had seemed to make the walls explode with colour. Although Vlaminck himself was completely indifferent to the business of exhibiting his work, Matisse took the opportunity of introducing him to Vollard, who had already noticed him in the rue Laffitte, ‘a tall, powerful fellow whose red scarf, knotted round his neck, might have suggested some militant anarchist, if, from the way in which he was carrying a canvas, I had not immediately recognized him for an artist’. As for the picture, a sunset, it seemed to have been ‘squeezed out of tubes of paint in a fit of rage’ – a description not inconsistent with Vlaminck’s own explanation of his methods. As for Vollard’s first impressions of Vlaminck, he thought the man’s eyes looked kind, but also that, if crossed, he would probably put up a strenuous fight.

  Vlaminck had received Matisse and Vollard in his studio, Vlaminck this time somewhat bizarrely wearing ‘a wooden tie of his own invention, the colours of which he changed to suit his fancy’. In his memoirs, Vollard adds that he bought all his pieces, but he is conflating two occasions; his purchase of Vlaminck’s work was still to come. After effecting the introduction, Matisse continued to frequent Vollard’s gallery, despite having little respect for the dealer, who saw him (or so he assumed) as a potential money-spinner rather than a cutting-edge artist of the future, like Vlaminck or Derain. Matisse’s patience was eventually rewarded when Vollard promised to give him an exhibition in June. Meanwhile, in St Tropez, he wilted in the heat, enervated by the sun and the change of location, irritated by Signac and feeling uncomfortable and isolated, since, apart from Signac, there seemed to be nobody in the place but wine-growers and fishermen.

  In June, as promised, Vollard exhibited Matisse’s work. No one could have guessed from the exhibition the new directions his work had begun to move in, since the show consisted entirely of old, unsold work from the mid-1890s. Matisse had included a few early experimental works painted in Corsica but, otherwise, Vollard was showcasing only work painted in the shades of grey he still believed his clients preferred. In the event, neither style seemed to appeal; there were no purchases. After the close of the show (for his usual sum of two hundred francs), Vollard contrarily purchased The Dinner Table, Matisse’s first strongly experimental work, which had scandalized his appreciative viewers and ruined his reputation; the dealer promptly sold it on to a German collector. From every point of view, Matisse’s prospects still seemed wildly unpredictable.

  3.

  Fernande; and the Lapin Agile

  All summer long, Picasso kept catching sight of the striking redhead. Sometimes, he saw her hanging around with other painters in the place Ravignan. Then, one day in the Bateau-Lavoir, he met her at the communal tap at the foot of the staircase and they started a conversation. Picasso’s command of French was halting, but Fernande had an enticing way of leaning in as she listened or spoke. At the end of August, the weather broke, in a sudden, dramatic storm. Fernande, caught in the rain, came rushing into the Bateau-Lavoir, where Picasso seemed to be waiting for her. He had a kitten in his hands, which he playfully held out to her. She smiled and took it, and he invited her up to his studio, where, for the first time, she sensed the full impact of his magnetism. He said he wanted to get to know her better, and she realized she wanted that, too. During the next few days, she told herself she was probably about to do something silly, but she blamed her mood on the storm.

  In his studio, she looked about her in dismay, seeing works that fascinated and astonished her. The painter seemed to live in a state of total disorder. Canvases of all sizes stood all over the studio: everything there suggested work, ‘but … what chaos!’ Picasso’s washing arrangements consisted of an earthenware basin propped on top of a small, rusty stove, with a towel and a bit of old yellow soap lying on a table amidst tubes of paint, brushes and plates. He had only a straw-seated chair and a small trunk, painted black; the bed was a mattress balanced on four wooden feet. The floor was littered with paints, brushes and bottles of paraffin. In the drawer of a table lived a white mouse, which the artist had tamed. As for Picasso, he had changed his sartorial style and now wore a workman’s ‘meccano’ or ‘monkey suit’ (washed-out blue overalls, the belt left undone at the back like a monkey’s tail), with an old cotton shirt, canvas shoes and a cap. No longer the budding artist-about-town, he had become the humble artisan.

  Fernande began to look closely at the canvases. One painting in particular caught her attention, of a man leaning on one crutch, a basket of flowers on his back. Everything was painted in monochrome blue except the basket of flowers, which was in fresh, brilliant colours. The contrast between the gaunt, bowed man and the brightly coloured flowers seemed to her ‘strange, tender and infinitely sad’. She wondered about the basis of Picasso’s vision: was it merely intellectual, or did it reveal ‘a deep and despairing love of humanity?’ Picasso, watching her as she looked at his work, saw that Fernande was not only beautiful and seductive, she was also intelligent and interested in his work. For him, the attraction was instant. He painted them as two lovers entwined and levitated by love, flying through the air; he begged her to come and live with him. However, for her, things were not so simple.

  By the time she met Picasso in August 1904, Fernande had been living with Laurent Dubienne for five months in the Bateau-Lavoir, on the ground floor, in room number three, on the rue d’Orchamps side. In the evenings, she sat in the square and watched the artists gather on the doorstep of this ‘étrange et sordide maison’, in front of the dirty, ochre-painted wooden portal, ‘like the doorway of a Protestant chapel’. She loved Montmartre, with its harmonious mix of amateur painters, office workers, labourers and streetwalkers, admiring the theatricality of the women with their vampish clothes and painted faces who unashamedly strolled through the lanes. She enjoyed watching the merchants who pushed their barrows up and down the lanes, the poets and the ‘gnaf’ on the corner, the coal merchant, the fried-potato seller, the stringer, the urchin, the old man, the Italian model, the young girl, the shop assistant, the hat-box seller, all chanting their wares or singing popular street songs – ‘C’est moi qui les fais/C’est moi qui les vends/C’est ma femme qui boulotte l’argent.’ (‘It’s me who makes them/Me who sells them/The wife who scoffs the takings.’) She even liked the sordid old Bateau-Lavoir, noisy from morning until night with the sounds of talking, shouting, singing, doors slamming, the din of buckets which people dragged along the corridors then left to roll around the floor. Would she really be happier there with Picasso than with Dubienne?

  Despite these ruminations, what neither Picasso nor Dubienne realized was that Fernande was already married. When she arrived in Paris in 1900, she was running away from her husband, Paul-Émile Percheron, who had been abusive and violent. She had met him through her aunt’s maid (he was a friend of the maid’s petit-ami) and run away from her aunt’s house to live with him – until her aunt discovered her whereabouts. Arriving on the doorstep one day accompanied by a policeman, her aunt had announced that, since Fernande had already brought the family into disrepute, she had no choice but to marry. Fernande had done so under duress, suffering a miscarriage in the bitterly cold winter of 1899/1900, when the snow froze over and she slipped on the ice. By spring 1900, she could bear it no longer. She fled the house early one morning and caught the first train to Paris, where Dubienne discovered her as she waited outside the employment agency.

  During the day, she sat for him and for various other artists, mainly the genre painters and ‘pompiers’ (hacks) who still aimed in their work for exact copies of nature. She posed in Flemish costume before a window for a painter working in the ‘Dutch’ style and veiled from her chin to her eyes for a Turkish artist; she sat in p
lace of the femmes du monde far too busy with their social lives to give time to the tedious business of posing for their own portraits, posing ‘en grand tralala’ as Madame or Comtesse so-and-so. All had gone well until the day she returned from work to find Dubienne sound asleep with a young model. He disappeared for a few days, then returned announcing he wanted to marry her, not realizing this would have been impossible. In fact, it had begun to occur to Fernande that the ideal life would be to live alone, as an independent woman. She spent everything she earned on stockings, handkerchiefs, hats and perfume – rose, or her favourite, chypre – and the artificial violets she wore in her hair, placed just above her large, almond eyes to create an air of mystery. She was happy with her new self-image and had no intention of giving up her freedom.

  Yet she had also begun to succumb to the attentions of Picasso. She told herself that she had always thought, ‘perhaps I could love this boy one day’. Of course, to go on seeing him, she had to keep deceiving Dubienne. She woke sometimes to find Picasso keeping vigil at her bedside. He made drawings of himself sitting beside her as she lay asleep. Once, he drew Dubienne at her bedside instead, reading a poetry book, thus endowing him with accomplishments beyond his own reach (Picasso still barely spoke French). In another drawing, Dubienne appeared as Christ on the cross, ascending into heaven. Picasso, a mere mortal, the sketch implied, would remain rooted, earthed, at her side. While she tried to make up her mind, Fernande moved out of Dubienne’s studio and went to live with friends, continuing to see Picasso when Dubienne’s back was turned. Then Dubienne was called up for a week of military service, giving the two lovers free rein. Perversely, at this point she decided she would not live with Picasso. He was jealous by nature, had absolutely no money and he had already said he did not like her going out to work. And she did not want to live in another miserable studio. She began to sit for the Catalan artist Ricard Canals, who had known Picasso in Barcelona. He posed her and his wife, Benedetta, as two Spanish majas in glamorous lace mantillas. When she told them she wanted to leave Dubienne, the Canals invited her to stay with them. In the evenings, they were usually joined by Picasso.

  Fernande’s overriding need to be admired led her into a series of unsatisfactory relationships. She was followed down the street one day by Joaquim Sunyer, an artist, who she thought looked like a Spanish guitarist and had exhibited at the previous year’s Salon d’Automne. Soon, she became his mistress, a decision as baffling to her as any other she had yet made. What did he have, she asked herself, that Picasso lacked? (Prospects, perhaps?) By now, she seemed to be refusing Picasso almost as a kind of ritual, without really understanding why. Her liaison with Sunyer was predictably brief but, while it lasted, it meant her moving permanently out of Dubienne’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. When the affair came to an end, she moved in with a friend, a girl named Renée. Nevertheless, when spring came, she began to feel obscurely melancholy. Though she could see no reason other than habit to return to her former lover, she did so.

  Back in the Bateau-Lavoir, she watched Picasso and his friends as they came and went. Sometimes, she joined them for an opium-smoking session in Picasso’s studio, during which she was suddenly able to see with great clarity that life was beautiful … After one such evening in early 1905, she suspected that she might after all be falling in love with him. Three days later, under the influence of love and opium, she was still there. Picasso told her she should stop her modelling work and come to live with him, but she was concerned about her commitments to her artists. When he made sixty francs from the sale of some drawings, he took her to dinner at the Lapin Agile, the first time she had entered the cabaret artistique; she was embarrassed by the sight of Frédé, whose grimy appearance, shabby clothes and matted beard shocked her – it was the first time she had seen him at close quarters. She found the place sordid and crowded, and the couple were constantly disturbed by a group of strangers who said they wanted to talk to Picasso. Irritated, he eventually attempted to deter them by firing a few shots from his revolver, whereupon Fernande fled back to the Bateau-Lavoir, and Dubienne.

  In her search for adoration, Fernande gravitated towards people who let her down. She had escaped from her cruel aunt into the arms of Percheron, who had turned out to be more vicious by far. Now, Dubienne had cheated on her. Being bullied seems to have been habit-forming; she had been used to it since childhood. ‘Fernande Olivier’ was in fact just a name she had assumed (as she also sometimes used the name Belle-Vallée); she was born Amélie Lang. The child of an illicit love affair, she had been left soon after birth with her paternal grandparents and raised by her aunt, who had a daughter of her own. The aunt was mercilessly mean to Fernande, who always felt self-conscious and gauche compared with her pretty cousin. They lived in an apartment crowded with ugly furniture next door to her uncle’s shop and workshop, where he made and sold wonderfully delicate ornamental flowers and feathers, then the height of fashion as adornments for corsages and hats. Sometimes, Fernande was allowed to wrap these beautiful objects in fine, silk paper and lay them carefully in long boxes, ready to be sent to Paris. She acquired an appreciation of beautiful things – a taste for luxury otherwise sustained only by reading romantic novels – but it had become a need. Her perfume, her hats, her ornamental flowers were more than baubles, they were essential to her view of herself; more than an effort to keep up appearances, she needed to keep acquiring them to maintain a sense of self-worth. She was still hoping for the romantic vision of her dreams. So why would she contemplate life with an unknown Spanish artist? Picasso was mercurial, but he was worryingly insistent. Perhaps he would make too many demands on her. Perhaps he, too, would make her feel in-tolerably trapped. Perhaps even he would turn out to be a bully. And, anyway, he was penniless. As the summer wore on, she remained undecided.

  • • •

  While Picasso waited for Fernande to make up her mind, he spent his evenings in the Lapin Agile. The cabaret artistique was a dark little two-roomed cottage nestling beneath the trees at the corner of the rue Cortot and the rue des Saules. Picasso had rediscovered Frédé, its new proprietor, here – it was a step up from the old Zut. The place had been rescued from demolition the previous year by Aristide Bruant, former cabaret singer and comedien of the Chat Noir, immortalized, in black sombrero and vivid red scarf, in the famous poster of 1892 by Toulouse-Lautrec. The Lapin Agile exists to this day, ivy still bordering the blue, yellow, red and green harlequin-style windowpanes, trees shading the small paved terrace outside.

  The place had an illustrious history, since the original part had been a shooting box built to the order of Henri IV, whose mistress had lived secretly at the top of the Butte. In the eighteenth century, it became a rendezvous for highwaymen until, at some stage, the second part was added, when it became a country tavern under the name Ma Campagne, frequented by local gangsters and their molls. In the mid-1880s, Mère Adèle, a former dancer at the Élysée Montmartre, acquired it and renamed it the Cabaret des Assassins, a soubriquet inspired not by the dubious clientele but by the scenes from the underworld a local artist had daubed on the walls. It gained its familiar name, Lapin Agile, in 1875, when caricaturist André Gill famously painted the jaunty red and green sign still there above the entrance – a rabbit dressed in conductor’s cap, bow-tie and cummerbund leaping out of a saucepan and balancing a bottle of wine on its paw. The Lapin à Gill (‘the rabbit by Gill’) became the Lapin Agile (‘the agile rabbit’), the name soon adopted by everyone, and ‘Cabaret des Assassins’, still scrawled across the outer wall, was partially whitewashed and amended to reflect Frédé’s new ambition for the bar: it now read ‘Cabaret Artistique’.

  By 1904, when Picasso began to frequent it, the clientele mostly consisted of the motley inhabitants of the Bateau-Lavoir. The old, sinister murals were gone and the interior walls decorated with paintings, poems and posters. Above the door, Frédé had inscribed his personal motto, ‘Le premier devoir d’un honnête homme est d’avoir un bon estomac.’
(‘The first duty of an honest man is to have a good stomach’.) Just as before, in the sleazy old Zut, Frédé created the atmosphere, bringing the Lapin Agile alive with his drinking songs and his music (continuing the tradition established by Aristide Bruant, who had made a fortune in cabarets at the foot of the Butte, entertaining the rich with the street songs of the poor, all sung in the authentic argot of Montmartre). The Catalan artists, particularly, loved the Lapin Agile; it reminded them of the inns in Spanish villages where everyone sat in the shadows cast by similar red-shaded lamps. When the place became so dirty people could barely see, Frédé got the locals to help him paint the walls, paying them in the cocktail de la maison, his own special concoction of Pernod and grenadine. Picasso contributed a mural, an improvisation of The Temptation of Saint Anthony. On the far wall, Christ on the cross dominated the scene, between a statue of Apollon Musagète (the subject, coincidentally, some years later, of one of Diaghilev’s ballets) and one of a Hindu divinity. Other contributions included a harlequin by Picasso and paintings by Steinlen and Maurice Utrillo, the son of Suzanne Valadon and Miquel Utrillo, Picasso’s old friend from Barcelona, master of shadow puppet shows at Els Quatre Gats. Frédé even provided a visitors’ book, which over the years accumulated some illustrious signatures, including those of Renoir and Georges Clemenceau, who was to lead France throughout the First World War.

  The Lapin Agile was the inspiration for one of Picasso’s most striking early works, Woman with a Crow, a portrait of Frédé’s stepdaughter, Margot, hunched over her pet bird. She leans on the bar, absorbed in her crow, so wrapped up in it that the two forms, woman and bird, seem fused; Picasso has given Margot a crow’s head, wing-like shoulders and elongated, claw-like fingers. The following year, in 1905, he gave Frédé another painting, which he called Au Lapin Agile, in which Picasso himself, in full harlequin costume, sits morosely at the bar, a girl at his side, exotic in feather boa, pill-box hat with jaunty feather and jewel-encrusted collar, her face garish with white rice powder and red lipstick. The dress code at the Lapin Agile varied widely in those days: some really did arrive looking like shepherdesses or harlequins, others as if dressed for a Louis XV costume ball; perhaps these were mostly artists’ models, still wearing the costumes they hired to pose in from the model market in Clichy. Frédé, seated in the background of Picasso’s painting in his distinctive wooden clogs, looks as if he has been imported from an early work by van Gogh. The vibrant reds and yellows of this painting distinguish it from other works of 1904 and 1905, most of which show Picasso moving more tentatively from monochrome blue to shades of muted red and pale rose. In fact, though he gave Frédé Au Lapin Agile in 1905, the work may have been painted earlier, dating back even to the days of the Zut, or perhaps Picasso painted it in 1904, soon after his definitive return to Paris.