by Sue Roe
6.
At the Circus
On 3 September 1905, Picasso was rewarded for his patience when Fernande Olivier finally decided to move in with him. Perhaps his tales of buxom Dutch girls had sounded a warning bell. He had been in the Netherlands with a Dutchman he met in Paris who had introduced him to Kees van Dongen before persuading him to accompany him on a visit to his homeland. Picasso returned with little more to show for his trip than some gouache and oil paintings of his landlady’s monumentally tall daughter, who had scandalized the locals by posing in the nude. What had struck him was how tall the Dutch girls were, those ‘little girls’ who towered head and shoulders above him, kissing him and sitting on his knee, or so he told Fernande. In any case, he assured her, the Netherlands had been uninspiring – too foggy.
Fernande moved in with all her clothes, her perfume, her books, justifying the decision to herself as a reckless impulse. She still blamed the storm for her impulsiveness, telling Picasso, ‘A caprice had flung me into your arms on a stormy night.’ Paris had been stiflingly hot all summer; in early September, the heat was still torrid. Once installed in Picasso’s studio, Fernande had little incentive to move very far. She spent her time stretched out on the divan enjoying her new situation, happy at last, resolving to live a life of leisure, content to be pampered and adored. She had already broken the news to the painters for whom she modelled. One complained that his picture was nearly finished; he only needed her for another week or two. She relayed this to Picasso. ‘Mais je m’en f—’, he replied. Fernande’s reputation for laziness dates from this period. In fact, she had thought long and hard about relinquishing her independence, and when she finally made up her mind she committed herself fully to being with Picasso. Her decision was really more about collusion than indolence: she was finally allowing herself to be indulged and cherished, which was what Picasso wanted for her. She had got into the habit of going to bed early after a long day posing; this, she continued. Picasso still sat at her bedside until she slept, then spent the rest of the night working.
At the back of the studio, Fernande found a small shrine, with two cerulean-blue vases of artificial flowers like the ones in Cézanne’s paintings, and a white, fine silk blouse. Picasso’s biographers have tended to assume the shrine was to Fernande, but Fernande herself does not say so; she assumed it was ‘erected in memory of a woman he had loved’. It sounds like a traditional shrine to the dead, such as are kept in Catholic countries to guard the soul of the departed. (Perhaps it was to honour the memory of his sister, Conchita; or one of the romantically fragile women of Montmartre, fleetingly one of his models, perhaps, also tragically departed before her time.) She wondered what had inspired the composition of this carefully constructed installation, his ‘chapel’, and reflected that there was perhaps in Picasso an element of mysticism, a spiritual quality ‘inherited with his mother’s Italian blood’.
Picasso was still painting his usual Montmartroise models, working either from memory or from life. They sat for works such as Girl in a Chemise, the portrait of Madeleine in which she is semi-transparent in her thin, white blouse against shades of blue. It would be a while before he would use Fernande as his model. Hadn’t he insisted she give up modelling? He bought her Turkish chocolates and she lay reading novels in happy solitude while he worked. Picasso did the errands, locking her safely in before he left, bringing back macaroni and sardines. When they had no money at all, Paco Durrio, who still lived nearby, left food parcels on the step. Anyway, Picasso’s poverty seems to have ceased to worry Fernande – this was le grand amour.
In the evenings, everyone went to the circus – Max Jacob (now also living, for the past year, in the Bateau-Lavoir), André Salmon and the Catalan bande. They went mainly to the Cirque Medrano, a spectacular covered onering circus housed in a large permanent building at the foot of the Butte, at the corner of the boulevard Rochechouart and the rue des Martyrs, the steep lane leading up the hillside towards the Sacré Coeur. The original Cirque Fernando, where, back in 1879, Degas had painted Miss Lala on her tightrope, was British and had belonged to the Austen brothers. When they travelled to Europe they renamed the troupe ‘Robert Austen’s Mediterranean Circus’ – the MedRAno – also, coincidentally, the name of one of their Spanish clowns.
Picasso adored the circus, where, seated round the open ring with no footlights or railings, the audience was intimately involved with the performers. He loved the atmosphere and the spectacle, excited not only by the individual acts but by the whole ambience of the world of horse riders, acrobats and clowns, as well as by the pierrots and harlequins who appeared between the acts. He went to the Medrano every week, sometimes several times. For him, the big top was as exciting as the bullring, with its pool of spotlight and the palpitations of the crowd as the performers entered. He loved the heat, the skill of the performers, the smell of warm straw and animals, the heady excitement of it all. Acrobats piled one on top of another, balancing in pyramids just as Picasso had seen them do as a boy in Spain. Trapeze artists in skimpy costumes performed extraordinary feats of skill. The most popular acts were the riding stunts, performed by equestrians in skimpy, spangled costumes who spun on the backs of white horses. Circus performers, particularly the horse riders and trapeze artists, were regarded as skilled artists, and so they were, infinitely more so than the hammy actors who performed in the Théâtre de Montmartre or the vaudeville acts in some of the cheaper café-concerts. Circuses included elephants, lions and marvellous balancing acts, and there were theatrical performances between the circus acts, featuring illusionists, conjurers and magicians of all kinds.
Behind the scenes, the corridors of the circus provided another kind of theatrical arena. Picasso and friends made their own entrances backstage, dressed in outfits that could have been confused with the performers’. The women, for example, wore bright dresses and hats excessively decorated with feathers, since, in those days, the circus was patronized by celebrities and the fashionable, who turned the bars and corridors of the circus into places to be seen: in the Champs Élysées the stables of the Cirque d’Êté were as fashionable as the corridors of the Opéra. In the less salubrious Cirque Medrano, Picasso hung around all evening in the bar, ‘always thick with the hot, slightly sickening smell’ which seeped up from the stables, talking to the clowns.
Afterwards, everyone crowded into the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères in the rue des Martyrs, a popular bar where André Salmon joked that there were more Spaniards than he had ever seen in Spain. This was the international out-of-hours haunt of performers from the circus, music halls and variety theatres. The clowns gathered at the bar while, on the benches, the dancers relaxed, their chignons resting against the walls papered with posters advertising theatrical establishments all over the world. All the girls from the cabarets gathered there, together with those looking for work, some sent up from the rue de Clichy by their garrulous, swarthy employers with visiting cards literally, if somewhat unfortunately, translated from the Catalan: ‘Mme Conception facilitates Spanish dancers.’ Those who frequented the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères were friends of the circus performers and included people from all nationalities and walks of life. Even Prince Oznobichinie, aide-de-camp to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, had been spotted there. Picasso now began to introduce the circus performers into his work. He painted them off duty rather than in the ring, lone figures like the boy who appears in Boy with a Pipe (1905), pale and dreamy in his blue artisan’s overalls, posing with his opium pipe against a rough cement wall over which someone has painted a mural of a huge bouquet of flowers. Around his head is a garland of roses, echoing the background flowers, an affectation added by Picasso almost as an afterthought, giving the boy the aura of a poet or romantic hero. In a contrasting work, he painted a family of saltimbanques relaxing between performances with their ape, the great, primitive creature seated meekly at their side gazing adoringly at the baby. These works, predominantly in delicate tones of red and rose, added to the devel
oping body of paintings devoted to the itinerant actors and acrobats who had already become Picasso’s central subjects. As he mingled with the performers out of hours, they and their families directly inspired what came to be known as Picasso’s Rose Period, in which an atmosphere of freedom and lightness began to emerge in his work. He had left the melancholy of the Blue Period behind. The travelling performers who peopled his works of this later period were still outcasts but, unlike the beggars and prisoners of his Blue Period, they were not helpless; in his work, he was acknowledging not only their skills but their resourcefulness and independence, recognizing that they had devised a way of life that epitomized the freedom, rather than abjection, of the outsider. Just as the whores of Montmartre had seemed like actors from another world, so, too, the circus performers seemed to inhabit an alternative universe, a world of intensity and dynamic interaction, the contemplation of which took Picasso out of himself, away from his own painful memories and his preoccupation with the poverty of the streets. Their talent inspired him, and he was flattered by his intimacy with the clowns, the jugglers, the horses and their riders, proud to be moving in their circles.
At the circus, Fernande watched her lover with fascination, noticing how he admired the swarming crowds in the ring, their shouts and wild gestures, their tumultuous excitement, skidding from adoration to abuse, according to the skill or lack of it. She realized he was drawn to people with talents he would never acquire himself, stimulated by their difference; she also now observed that Picasso was not an intellectual. ‘He loved anything with strong local colour … It seemed as though nothing abstract or intellectual could move him.’ The paucity of entertainment in haute Montmartre made the circus utterly spectacular, and it was the spectacle Picasso adored, since in everything he did he was primarily an observer. ‘How foreign he was in France,’ Fernande reflected, ‘this Andalusian with Italian blood.’
Best of all, Picasso loved the clowns. Captivated by their oddness, the way they talked, their jokes, he took them seriously. He knew them all – Inès and Antonio, Alex and Rico. Once, he invited a Dutch clown and his wife, a Polish equestrian, home to dinner. In Fernande’s opinion, they were ‘the coarsest people imaginable’, but Picasso was delighted with them. More than thirty years later, he told photographer and film-maker Brassaï, ‘I was completely captivated by the circus! I sometimes spent several evenings a week there. That’s where I saw Grock for the first time.’ As Picasso remembered it, ‘He was debuting with Antonet. It was wild. I especially liked the clowns. Sometimes we went backstage and stayed all evening to chat with them at the bar. And did you know that it was at Medrano that clowns began to give up their traditional costumes and to dress in burlesque outfits? A regular revolution. They could invent costumes, characters, indulge their fantasies.’
Grock had made his debut only a few months earlier, in December 1904, causing ‘tornadoes of laughter and hysteria’ when he appeared with Albert Fratellini, the Medrano’s resident star clown; together, they ushered in an era of change for clowning. Born in Moscow, trained in Russia under the Durov Brothers, Fratellini, like Grock, was of the genre of clowns known as ‘auguste’. Unlike the traditional white-faced, scarlet-mouthed clowns, the auguste clown still wore exaggerated make-up but with a flesh tone rather than a white base. He wore a tiny hat and oversized shirt and a tweed or checked brown coat, both with oversized, wide lapels. His movements were exaggerated and his demeanour bewildered, he was unintelligent but lovable and his appearance was urban rather than fairground (a precursor in the ring to Charlie Chaplin on the cinema screen).
Popular culture sowed the seeds of the twentieth-century avant-garde. With the appearance of Grock, audiences followed the trend set by the performers; the new ‘chic’ in Montmartre was the misfit costumes of the clowns. Harlequin costumes were abandoned in favour of cheaply made versions of ill-fitting English tweed, or the clothes of English jockeys, as worn by Chocolat, a freed African slave born Rafael Padilla in Cuba, who usually performed at the Medrano or the Nouveau Cirque with Footit, a white English clown from Manchester, in a double act in which Footit played the authority figure, Chocolat the abject misérable. Their antics were hugely popular with a wide range of audiences – working people, artists and intellectuals alike.
Appearances were important in Montmartre; bohemianism, even for those down on their luck, was a studied affair. In the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso and his friends put on shows for one another, mimicking the clowns at the Cirque Medrano and the actors and singers at the Trianon Lyrique. Picasso, still invariably wearing his outsized overcoat, grew his hair long on one side so that it hung over one eye. Derain and Vlaminck trailed around the streets of Montmartre dressed in baggy tweed overcoats and brightly coloured cravats, like the new urban clowns. Seen together, they made a highly colourful double act in the lanes, Derain in a tweed suit with a bowler over one eye, Vlaminck in baggy old tweeds, dressed like a clerk but for his bright-red neckerchief.
And the circus was influential in one further significant respect. In the early days, people went to circus venues to see the movies, since designated cinema spaces were still relatively rare. Pathé reels may even have been shown at the Cirque Medrano, as well as in makeshift cinema sites such as the open-air one in the rue de Douai, at the foot of the Butte just off the rue Pigalle, which consisted simply of a screen and a projector pitched on a bit of waste ground. (When, in 1962, Fellini remarked that the cinema was ‘very much like the circus … carnival, funfair, a game for acrobats’, he was acknowledging its roots.)
In 1905, motion pictures were still new. The first film ever made had been shown as recently as 1896, in the basement of the Grand Café, when the audience had watched, enraptured, as the stream of workers leaving the Pathé factory at the end of the day passed jerkily before their eyes. Soon afterwards, a film featuring an approaching train had been so startling that the terrified audience fled the picture house in fear of being mowed down. The following year, 1897, the sceptics’ worst fears were realized when a projection lamp caused a fire at the annual Bazar de la Charité, reviving general suspicion of the disconcerting new medium. Only since films were shown at the 1900 World Fair had public confidence in the medium been revived.
Picasso later remembered going to the movies during those early years without thinking about it, just the way everyone went to the cafés. The first film screenings he and his friends saw were still very much entertainment for the working classes. In the silent movies, the actors depended on exaggerated gestures that imitated theatrical melodrama and urban clowning. Cinema, like vaudeville, was a subversive, irreverent art. Animated cinema soon followed, lasting only a few minutes and consisting of sequences of a few simple line drawings. Audiences watched, transfixed, as a man removed and replaced his own head. A man first blew smoke in a woman’s face, then grew ‘old’ with the acquisition of beard and wrinkles; his little dog jumped back and forth through a hoop. To the first cinema audiences, all this was astonishing; like the conjuring tricks of magicians, an art of prestidigitation. In the theatre, dramatic action moved progressively through time; while a painting or sculpture presented a durable image, the cinema defied the laws of time, rendering images fluid, unfixed and unpredictable. One of the earliest film-makers, Georges Méliès, had begun his career as an illusionist, performing magic tricks in the vaudeville theatres. The world of the movies unfolded like magic as extraordinary, backlit images rose and fell, appearing, disappearing and reappearing in Méliès’ first films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904). It would be a while – though not long – before narrative techniques evolved and sirens of the silver screen began emerging; at that point, enthusiasts of the cinema would include Fernande.
The luxuries Fernande craved were never going to be hers while Picasso remained unsuccessful in finding purchasers for his work; so far, all attempts at substantially improving his prospects seemed to have failed. He invited Clovis Sagot, the dealer and former clown, to the Bateau-Lavoir
to see his recent output. Sagot picked out two of the Dutch pictures and Girl with a Basket of Flowers, a nude portrait of a little flowerseller outside the Moulin Rouge, and offered seven hundred francs for the three, which Picasso refused. A few days later, Sagot visited again, this time offering five hundred. Again, Picasso declined. By the time Sagot made a third visit, the offer had been reduced to three hundred – a simple tactic among dealers. Vollard had learned it by observing another dealer at the start of his career. Then Sagot turned up once more, this time producing with a flourish from behind his back an armful of flowers, ‘So that you can make a study of them, and give it to me for a present.’ He was, Fernande observed, a sly old fox, unscrupulous and merciless. She once noticed him attempting to slip a couple of extra drawings in with some he had already paid for. His methods were not atypical of the way business was conducted in Montmartre.
7.
Wild Beasts
The third Salon d’Automne, held at the Grand Palais in October 1905, caused a sensation and had a lasting impact on retrospective perceptions of the history of modern art. In room 7, colour blazed from the walls – and it was not only the high-key colour but the subject matter that earned some of that year’s painters their lasting reputation as ‘wild beasts’. Van Dongen was exhibiting two paintings surely submitted with the express intention of shocking his viewers; both La Chemise and Torse showed single female figures posing unashamedly in their undergarments. That year, he also painted a portrait of a woman in hot reds, greens and yellows, one breast bared, almost certainly modelled by Fernande, perhaps while Picasso was in the Netherlands, and certainly not with his blessing. It emerged that van Dongen and Fernande had already established a close rapport.