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

by Sue Roe

  At the Closerie des Lilas one evening, Leo Stein finally met Picasso, through journalist, art critic and dealer Henri-Pierre Roché. He was a friend of Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, in Paris since 1900, whom the Steins, coincidentally, knew from their San Francisco days, when they had been neighbours as children. Roché, as Gertrude Stein remarked, was ‘one of those characters that are always to be found in Paris’ – an ‘introducer’ with a reputation for knowing foreigners. ‘He had … gone to Germany with the Germans and … to Hungary with the Hungarians and … to England with the English. He had not gone to Russia although he had been in Paris with Russians. As Picasso always said of him, “Roché is very nice but he is only a translation.”’ He was also a keen collector of contemporary art, and later became a successful writer (his works include Jules et Jim, later made into a film starring Jeanne Moreau). Sometime in late 1905, he met Marie Laurencin, adding her to the not inconsiderable number of women with whom he maintained amorous liaisons; for her, it must have been a challenging first romance.

  Roché it was, then, who took the Steins up through the lanes of Montmartre to the Bateau-Lavoir to meet Picasso, where, amidst the usual disorder of tubes of paint, dogs, his pet mouse, bowls of unemptied liquid of varying description and piles of Fernande’s clothes, they found Picasso himself, ready and waiting for his visitors. He brought out some drawings to show them, and Leo noticed how closely he scrutinized his own work; he was ‘surprised that there was anything left on the paper, so absorbing was his gaze’. The artist seemed vividly alive; somehow (in Leo’s words) ‘just completely there … more real than most people while doing nothing about it’. Gertrude thought he looked like a boot-black. Shortly afterwards, they invited him to dinner at the rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude observed him more closely. She found him oddly seductive, ‘thin, dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not a rough way’. At dinner, he picked up her bread, mistaking it for his. When she retrieved it and he protested, her laughter broke the ice. After dinner, Leo showed the guests his fine collection of Japanese prints, ‘beautiful masterpieces’, according to Fernande, which she admired, lost in contemplation. As for Picasso, he ‘solemnly and obediently looked at print after print’, then said ‘under his breath to Gertrude Stein, “he is very nice, your brother, but like all Americans … he shows you Japanese prints. Moi, j’aime pas ça, no, I don’t care for it,”’ whereupon ‘Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso immediately understood each other.’ Picasso and Fernande now became regular guests at the Steins’ Saturday soirées at 27, rue de Fleurus, bringing with them various members of the motley crowd from the Bateau-Lavoir.

  Ambroise Vollard also managed to secure an invitation, through one of his mysterious high-society friends (the Marquise de S— ). He remarked that ‘outsiders might easily have imagined themselves in a public gallery; no one paid any attention to them’. But the inner circle was routinely treated to a detailed recitation of the artistic opinions of Leo, who barely moved from the armchair on which he lay, half reclining, his feet resting on a bookshelf, a position he considered ‘excellent for the digestion’ – and for orating. As for Gertrude, Vollard got the point of her immediately, seeing eyes that sparkled with intelligence and finding her attractive and observant, ‘the investigator whom nothing escapes’. (When, some years later, she published her memoirs, he had no trouble identifying himself as ‘the fellow leaning with both hands on the doorposts, glaring at the passers-by as though he were calling down curses on them’, making him wish, for once, he had been endowed with a more naturally benevolent nature.) He also noted that the Steins were becoming serious collectors of modern art.

  On 23 November, Vollard paid another visit to Derain in Chatou. This time, he left with eighty-nine paintings and eighty watercolours, the bulk of Derain’s output, presumably, since his last visit in February, including the results of the artist’s productive summer in Collioure and his subsequent trip to London. The rumour in Montmartre was that he had piled the works into his carriage without even opening the crates, paying Derain in wads of banknotes (3,300 francs in total) secured with an old elastic band, which he peeled from his pocket. It was at around this time that Picasso had a brainwave: he asked Gertrude Stein if she would be willing to sit for her portrait.

  9.

  Picasso and Gertrude Stein

  Until she came to live with Leo in the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein had shown no particular interest in painting. As a child in Baltimore, she had managed to win the weekly school drawing competition only by getting one of her brothers to produce her entry, whereupon she promptly mislaid the winner’s trophy. In late 1905, aged thirty-one, when she met Picasso her ambition was to write a novel. She was the youngest of the Steins, and a graduate of Radcliffe (the ladies’ branch of Harvard University, in those days called Harvard Annex), where she had studied medicine, obstetrics and psychology, and philosophy with William James. She had been fascinated by philosophy and psychology and bored by medicine and her study of deviations from the norm. She decided she disliked abnormality: ‘the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting’. She had joined Leo in Paris in late summer 1903, following a traumatic season in London trying to recover from a disappointing lesbian attachment. London had merely depressed her: it seemed to consist only of drunken women and children, gloom and loneliness; she thought it ‘just like Dickens and Dickens had always frightened her’. She had arrived in Paris still unsure of herself, reticent, shy and decorous-looking in those days, in her dark suits, high-collared blouses and smart hats, her long hair twisted into a neat bun.

  On her first day in Picasso’s studio, she took her pose, while ‘Picasso sat very tight on his chair and very close to his canvas and on a very small palette which was of a uniform brown grey colour, mixed some more brown grey and the painting began …’ Towards the end of the afternoon, Michael and Sarah Stein arrived, anxious already to see the result. Picasso had produced a sketch which excited them all; they begged him to leave it just as it was. ‘‘Non,’ he replied. It would in fact be months before he was ready to show anyone the finished picture. For the rest of the autumn, and on through the winter, almost every day Gertrude left her spacious apartment near the Jardins du Luxembourg, took a horse-drawn omnibus from Odéon as far as the place Blanche, then climbed the steps of the Butte to the place Ravignan to sit for her portrait in the ramshackle disorder of the Bateau-Lavoir. Sometimes, Fernande entertained her with the fables of La Fontaine, reading aloud in her beautiful, musical speaking voice; or Gertrude sat in silence. When there were just the two of them, she and Picasso talked, at first just about ordinary things. On Saturday evenings, Picasso and Fernande walked back with her to dine at the rue de Fleurus.

  Picasso and Gertrude Stein had established an immediate rapport. Whatever the rest of the bande thought of the Steins, with their artistic leanings, strong opinions and obvious wealth – at least by Montmartrois standards; André Salmon called them the ‘millionaires from San Francisco posing as transatlantic bohemians’ – Picasso took to Gertrude at once. Naturally, he recognized her as a potential purchaser and needed her patronage, but also, right from the start, she seems to have evoked in him ‘some kind of visceral reverence’. As an intellectual bohemian lesbian with a complex knowledge of philosophy and psychology, she was, after all, unusual in his experience. They were flirtatious together; her androgyny intrigued him and they were on first-name terms from the beginning. As for Gertrude, she clearly indulged him, attracted not only by his obvious talent but by his vivacity, intensity and boyish good looks. Everything about him interested her. Furthermore, he was her discovery. Although Leo had initially brought Picasso’s work to her attention, it was Gertrude who responded to the appeal of Picasso the man, at a time when the other Steins, including Leo, were still being swept away by Matisse.

  As she watched Picasso at work, Gertrude pondered on her own creative techniques. If, in later years, Picasso was quick to dismiss any connection between his e
xperiments in painting and hers in writing, there is no doubt that watching him paint made her think about the texture and structure of her work. When she met him, she was experimenting with methods of extracting meaning from the texture of her prose in ways that would liberate her from traditional narrative forms and conventional grammar. The whole problem of composition, and the possibility of freeing narrative from the constraints of plot, fascinated her; and since she first saw Cézanne’s painting The Artist’s Wife she had also begun to take an interest in how paintings were constructed. In 1905, she was writing short stories inspired by Flaubert’s Trois contes, which she was translating to help her learn French. (She must surely have known that Cézanne was a great admirer of Flaubert’s work.) As she posed for her portrait, she sat silently composing in her head the story she was writing, inspired by the people she had moved among when she studied obstetrics in Baltimore (reminded of those days, perhaps, by life in Montmartre). It was a story about an African girl, Melanctha, and her boyfriend, Jeff, that explored mainly through dialogue the subtle nuances of the couple’s personalities and the intricacies and impress of their gradually unravelling relationship.

  She had put aside the substantial work she had already begun, an ambitious study of psychology she called The Making of Americans, to write the story of Melanctha. Since Harvard, she had been concerned with exploring ‘what was inside myself to make me what I was …’, and, at the basis of The Making of Americans, lay her fascination with what she called the ‘bottom nature’ of every human being, which she believed to be discernible despite attempts by people to deny their fundamental nature through social dissemblance and habit. As she translated Flaubert’s Trois contes, with Cézanne’s painting as a reference point above her desk, she had begun to experiment with language, using insistent phrasing to urge her meaning home through nuance and suggestion, paying more attention to the significance of individual words than to the structure of sentences or paragraphs. In the process, she invented a new style of dialogue which closely reflected the rhythms and repetitions of actual speech. (‘“Melanctha Herbert,” began Jeff Campbell, “I certainly after all this time I know you, I certainly do know little, real about you. You see, Melanctha, it’s like this way with me … Sometimes you seem like one kind of a girl to me, and sometimes you are like a girl that is all different to me, and the two kinds of girls is certainly very different to each other …”’) At the time, as she wrote some years later, ‘I was obsessed by this idea of composition, and the Negro story was a quintessence of it.’ Soon, she was making her sentences and paragraphs longer and longer, until the preoccupation with narrative structure seemed to exhaust itself. ‘I began to play with words then. Picasso was painting my portrait at that time and he and I used to talk this thing over endlessly.’

  Since neither she nor Picasso had either a good command of French or any command at all of each other’s native language, they devised their own way of speaking French, discovering in the process that they had similar ideas about human equality. Gertrude thought children should be given the vote. ‘After all,’ as she pointed out, ‘to me one human being is as important as another.’ She related her social ideas to her study of composition in both writing and painting: ‘you might say that the landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the same value as a tree’ – her own version, perhaps, of Signac’s pictorial anarchy. In her writing, she was interested in ‘the essence or as the painter would call it value’, an emphasis she had so far discovered in writing only in the works of Russian authors. Though her concern was primarily with writing rather than painting, she claimed her ideas came ‘largely from Cézanne’.

  These ideas, if expressed somewhat elliptically, were path-breaking. She devised ways of telling a story in a series of frames, enabling her to depict what she called a ‘continuous present’ and to dispense with conventional structure and plotting devices. In this, as she later remarked, ‘I was doing what the cinema was doing.’ In seeking new ways to evoke the passage of time in a story – what she called ‘the time-sense in the composition’ – she predated Proust (first published in 1913), Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, taking her cue from Flaubert. When she talked about ‘the quality in a composition that makes it go dead just after it has been made’, she was expressing a concern, shared by painters including Picasso, with the problem of the duration of the image. In painting, Cézanne had already found ways of addressing this problem. His treatment of perspective in The Artist’s Wife had given the figure a ‘sprung’ quality that invited the viewer to look ‘round’ the figure, rather than across the canvas from left to right in search of a narrative.

  Gertrude also understood the demands the work of art makes on the artist, appreciating the degree of self-immersion required to sustain the artist’s (paradoxical) search for impersonality, the forgetting of time and identity: ‘And yet time and identity is [sic] what you tell about as you create.’ As she expressed it, ‘I am I not any longer when I see …’ Her development of ideas was infinitely nuanced and subtle; she envisaged life as an artist and thought like a philosopher, working all the time in her head with paradoxes and parentheses as she pondered the role of time in the creation of a work of art:

  Time is very important in connection with masterpieces, of course it makes identity … and identity does stop the creation of masterpieces. But time does something by itself to interfere with the creation of masterpieces as well as being part of what makes identity. If you do not keep remembering yourself you have no identity and if you have no time you do not keep remembering yourself and as you remember yourself you do not create …

  Perhaps it was just as well she and Picasso were unable to converse very fully in the same language – though she is unlikely to have spoken in quite the way she wrote. She also understood that only profound engagement with a particular phase of work creates the conditions for progressing to the next. She wondered why Picasso had chosen at this point to paint directly from a model, since he rarely did so, and concluded that ‘everything pushed him to it, he was completely emptied of the inspiration of the harlequin period’.

  Winter wore on and still the painting was not finished. Picasso’s problem was the modelling of Gertrude’s head. His notebooks for the next year or so were filled with numerous sketches of heads, as he worked continually on the problem of how to angle those of a variety of figures. All through the winter and on into the spring, Gertrude patiently made her way up to the Bateau-Lavoir, where she sat many times for Picasso (some ninety times in all, she claimed; she was exaggerating, it must just have felt like ninety – or perhaps she had heard the story of Vollard’s 115 sittings for Cézanne). In the evenings, back in the rue de Fleurus, she continued writing her story of Melanctha and Jeff. ‘And so Jeff went on every day, and he was quiet, and he began again to watch himself in his working … He knew he had lost the sense he once had of joy all through him, but he could work, and perhaps he would bring some real belief back into him about the beauty that he could not now any more see around him.’

  In December 1905, Kees van Dongen, his wife, Guus, and their baby, Dolly, moved into a minuscule studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. They became acquainted with Picasso through another couple of Dutch artists who had been living with their baby in the studio above Picasso’s. When van Dongen expressed a wish to move into the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso arranged it for him. He got along well with the Dutch painter; he may also have imagined that having him under his roof would limit the opportunities for van Dongen to develop any further intimacy with Fernande. And Picasso loved Dolly. He played with her for hours, training her to be an acrobat by swinging her above his head. The relationship was reciprocal: the child adored Picasso and called him Tablo. Fernande whittled her a little doll from a piece of wood. Van Dongen tried to persuade Picasso to do some illustrations for L’Assiette au beurre – why not try something lucrative? – but Fernande heroically dissuaded him, saying she did not want him distracted from his art.

  Van Dongen�
�s work had been shown for the past two years at Vollard’s, the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne; at the exhibitions, he had made the acquaintance of Derain and Vlaminck, who now came for the first time to the Bateau-Lavoir. On his first visit to Picasso’s studio, Vlaminck, enchanted by the unusual experience of a captive audience (Picasso, van Dongen, Salmon), sat recounting anecdotes from his novels, complete with incidental detail and annotation. He was not a boring storyteller and his subject matter was far from banal. This taciturn man, usually more likely to explode with rage than laughter, was reduced to tears of laughter telling his own stories. Having talked himself out, he asked for anecdotes from the others in return. They needed little encouragement, producing stories of their own lives, largely fictionalized. Vlaminck listened to every morsel, doubting nobody’s word. ‘And to think,’ he said when everyone had finished, ‘it was supposed to be I who was invited to entertain you!’ Picasso’s circle now began to broaden considerably, as artists continued to gather round him, attracted by his magnetic personality.

  So the days went by, Fernande observing that Picasso’s life seemed to be gradually changing, a process she put down to her influence – having a woman in his life surely counted for something. The dark winter evenings they still whiled away smoking opium, which had become a regular habit among the inhabitants of the Bateau-Lavoir. Picasso got a little lamp and a ‘marvellous amber-coloured bamboo pipe with the penetrating smell’, and twice or three times a week they indulged in ‘that wonderful oblivion, when all sense of time and of oneself is lost’. Friends came to join them and they sat together drinking cold lemon tea, talking and smoking: ‘Everything seemed to take on a special beauty and nobility; we felt affection for all mankind in that skilfully muted light from the big oil lamp, the only lamp in the house.’