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

by Sue Roe

  To the 1906 Salon des Indépendants, Matisse had submitted only one painting, La Joie de vivre, the large Arcadian work painted in Collioure he had not been ready to exhibit in 1905. With this painting, he caused a sensation. Nothing quite like it had been seen since Vollard had exhibited Cézanne’s Three Bathers (one variant of which Matisse had purchased in 1899). Signac had already seen La Joie de vivre (in January) and delivered his own verdict – Matisse had clearly ‘gone to the dogs’. To him, the painting demonstrated nothing so much as Matisse’s effective break with divisionism. In fact, the new painting clearly revealed the extent of his technical innovation, signalling his definitive departure from the conventions of illustrative art and a bold move towards abstraction. Though, at this point in his life, Matisse showed no particular interest in the theatre, one distinctive feature of the painting is its resemblance to a stage set, consisting of ‘multicoloured flats arching over a vista of yellow ground to a backdrop of horizontal blue sea and violet pink sky’. The figures are posed like dancers, composed in groups that look choreographed.

  Relatively new to the Parisian art scene was the wealthy Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. In Moscow, he lived in the grand Palais Trubetskoy, where the walls were lined with works of art. He had been collecting modern art for eight years, starting with the Impressionists; first Monet and Renoir, then van Gogh. More recently, he had acquired works by Gauguin, which, had he displayed them, would have shocked his associates in Russia, so he kept them discreetly out of sight. He had noticed Matisse’s work when he first came to Paris and, by 1906, already owned a few of his paintings. He had seen the show at the Galerie Druet by the time he saw La joie de vivre at the Salon des Indépendants and asked Ambroise Vollard to introduce him to the artist. During the next decade, Shchukin was to become not only Matisse’s main financial backer but also a friend whose ambitious artistic taste and judgement he trusted and came to rely on. That relationship would soon bear fruit; in the meantime, however, it was not Shchukin but Leo Stein who purchased the painting.

  Perhaps Shchukin’s appearance on the scene – or, equally likely, the Steins’ – had been responsible for Vollard’s major acquisition of 1906. He had always particularly admired the eye-catching colours and bold lines of Derain’s and Vlaminck’s landscapes of the borders of the Seine. A new generation of painters was rapidly emerging and, alongside them, some powerful new buyers. Though always careful, Vollard realized he needed to stay active in the face of emerging competition. He had been daring in acquiring Impressionist works when there was little interest in them, and successful with the works of Bonnard, Vuillard and Maurice Denis by ignoring those who had advised him to be cautious. More recently, he had been equally successful with van Gogh and Cézanne. Among the new young painters now beginning to emerge, there were bound to be new prospects, and he was prepared to take the occasional gamble. In February, he visited Vlaminck again, this time at his home in the village of Rueuil, where the artist had moved with his family, who welcomed Vollard and made a place for him at their table. He accepted the offer of a cigarette, as did Vlaminck’s little daughter, who lit up, coughed, took a deep breath, then another drag.

  ‘How old are you?’ Vollard asked her.

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘And you’re already smoking?’

  She turned aside. ‘What’s it got to do with you, you old geezer?’

  Her father seemed delighted.

  Vollard selected forty-eight works, for which he paid Vlaminck twelve hundred francs, and promised to purchase everything he subsequently produced. He then went to Chatou to visit Derain, where he bought the entire contents of his studio, again with the exception of the one work which Derain insisted on keeping: the copy of the painting by Ghirlandaio he had made in the Louvre, in his student days. On the proceeds, Derain was able to spend the entire summer in the Midi, including a period in L’Estaque, where Cézanne had worked. For Vlaminck, in particular, the sale of his works was life-changing. He immediately left the house where he had been living and set up home – by himself, for a while – in the bois de la Jonchère, in the middle of the forest. Though he kept his local pupils, he resolved to have as little as possible from now on to do with other painters, ‘frightened of any revelations and hints which might have made me doubt the value of my painting; it would have been too distressing to find that, after all, I might have made a mistake’. He seldom went to exhibitions, feeling exposed by seeing his own work on display. He spent the rest of the year painting landscapes throughout the valley of the Seine, liberated from worry for the first time in his adult life, enjoying, at least from an artistic point of view, ‘undoubtedly the happiest and most fruitful period of his whole career’.

  Finally, in spring 1906 came the long-anticipated meeting of Picasso and Matisse. They were introduced by the Steins, who took Matisse and his daughter, Marguerite, now aged ten, up to the Bateau-Lavoir to see the portrait of Gertrude. As they made their way up the hillside through the lanes of Montmartre, people stopped to stare at the curious-looking group: the tall, lanky, golden-haired brother and his stout, bohemian-looking sister, both dressed in brown corduroy and wearing the distinctive, ‘Grecian’ leather sandals they now wore all the time, designed by Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond and inspired by a frieze on a Grecian vase in the British Museum. Matisse was, of course, no stranger in Montmartre. His nickname around the rue Laffitte was ‘the doctor’ because of his gold-rimmed spectacles and the frock coat and neat cravat Amélie insisted he always wear in town. In Montmartre, he was not a popular figure. Since his success at the previous Salon d’Automne, posters warning artists of the hazardous effects of lead paint had been defaced by graffiti and now warned against the effects of Matisse – the work, it was assumed, of one of the Picasso bande. (André Salmon vehemently denied this.) At the Bateau-Lavoir, the visitors were received by Picasso, Fernande and a very large dog.

  Fernande’s first impression was that there was ‘something very pleasing about Matisse … he really looked like a grand old man of art’. She guessed his age at forty-five (she was adding ten years). She thought he seemed to be hiding behind his thick spectacles, and that although he talked incessantly he gave nothing away. He was dauntingly articulate, exuding self-assurance as he spoke persuasively about his work. She felt herself in the presence of an astonishingly lucid mind, ‘precise, concise and intelligent’. She also suspected he was probably ‘a good deal less simple than he liked to appear’. She realized that he and Picasso were already being pitched against each other as the two most promising painters of the time. Whether or not (as Picasso later claimed) both knew this from the start, Leo encouraged them to think so, although in Fernande’s private opinion neither of them was actually the best painter in the Fauves style. She reserved that particular accolade for Derain, who, as she recalled it, had been the first to earn the soubriquet from Vauxcelles. As for what Picasso thought, ‘Matisse talks and talks,’ he told Leo. ‘I can’t talk, so I just said oui, oui, oui …’ As personalities, they had nothing in common, as Matisse quickly discerned. ‘As different as the North Pole is from the South Pole,’ he would say, when talking about the two of them.

  Shortly after the openings of both the Druet and the Indépendants shows, Matisse left Paris for his first ever visit to North Africa, dropping off his luggage in Collioure (in anticipation of his return) and his family in Perpignan before travelling on to Algiers. On the way back, he broke his journey at Marseilles to visit an exhibition of tribal artefacts from the French colonies before returning to Collioure for the remainder of spring and summer. While he was there, his work was shown (in May) with the Modern Art Circle of Le Havre, newly founded by Charles Braque, father of Georges. In Collioure that summer, Matisse painted three new portraits, a self-portrait of himself in striped mariner’s jersey (Autoportrait, 1906, Collioure) and a portrait in two variants of a local boy, a work he called The Young Sailor. One of these, with oval head and almond-shaped eyes, could have been a caricatur
e portrait of Picasso. The other, with a more square-shaped jaw and black curly hair, bore a passing resemblance to Georges Braque.

  In April, Michael and Sarah Stein travelled to San Francisco, where they still had property, following the devastating earthquake of 18 April. They took with them two canvases by Matisse. This would be the first time his works had been seen in America. Matisse’s work struck the Steins’ fellow citizens, no less than his own fellow Frenchmen, as ‘gross, mad, monstrous products of a diseased imagination’, reactions which did nothing to deter Sarah Stein. Later that year, she purchased the portrait of Madame Matisse entitled The Green Line, La Gitane and other works exhibited at Druet’s, together with at least four more works by Matisse. When she departed for America in April 1906, she left her other significant new purchase behind for safe keeping at 27, rue de Fleurus – the seven-feet-high painting by Picasso from his Rose Period, Boy Leading a Horse, which Vollard had dismissed as worthless.

  Sometime during 1906, Picasso painted Leo Stein’s portrait, depicting him, in the style of Goya and using his new palette of earth colours, as a venerable old man with sparkling eyes and a long, golden beard. Portrait of Leo Stein was among the last works in the style to which Leo, Vollard and Fernande all longed for him to return. That April, Vollard paid an unexpected visit to the Bateau-Lavoir. He gave Picasso two thousand francs in exchange for virtually his entire output of recent work.

  12.

  Sculptures, Carvings, Icons

  That summer, Picasso travelled with Fernande to Spain; with his two thousand gold francs from Vollard he could finally afford to take her to visit his native country. They were heading for the remote village of Gosol, above the Val d’Andorre in the Pyrenees. Fernande had never before travelled beyond France. She found the three-day journey by rail exhausting; she lay sleepless all night in their third-class compartment waiting for daybreak, rattled by the jolts of their carriage, which seemed to have no suspension. Picasso, a more seasoned traveller, passed the time reading Miquel Utrillo’s just published monograph on El Greco.

  Their arrival in Barcelona on 21 May coincided with a noisy and tumultuous Catalan demonstration: the anarchists were protesting about political issues largely to do with their antipathy to the Church. Fernande found the crowds and noise overwhelming and begged Picasso to take her home. Had there been a train about to leave, she might have succeeded in persuading him. Instead, they spent the next fortnight visiting family and friends, including Ricard and Benedetta Canals; she discovered that social life in Barcelona took place mainly at night, when the city became gay and animated. Then they resumed their travels. The journey to Gosol meant several hours on the back of a mule, Fernande’s hands and knees scraped as they trotted for miles along the edge of a sheer drop.

  Gosol itself she found enchanting. After Paris and Barcelona, the air was pure and the local people, most of them smugglers, were entertaining and hospitable. She sat with them, making out what they said through their gestures, while Picasso worked. He was painting a local man, Josep Fontdevila, aged at least ninety, his teeth wasted up to his gums, every single one either missing or decayed, giving his face a carved, primitive appearance. The sun gilded the houses ochre, turning the stony ground white beneath a sky so blue she had never seen anything like it. Everything delighted her. In the village, old customs prevailed. The women rarely dined with their menfolk; they ate by themselves, standing in the kitchen, while the men talked, completely ignoring them. The saints, on the other hand, were greatly revered; the locals seemed to take a day off to celebrate once, sometimes even twice a week, when there was dancing in the square and an atmosphere of festivity and celebration.

  On 27 June, Picasso wrote to his friend Casanovas, back in Paris, asking him to send some chisels so he could work the wood he had been given by the villagers. In July, he wrote again: ‘I want you to buy or send me by mail a roll of twenty sheets of papier Ingres and as quickly as you can because I have finished the small stock of paper I bought in Barcelona … Could you send me in the same package two or three small eines [chisels] to work in wood?’

  In Paris, the impact on everyone (not least Picasso) of Cézanne’s portrait of his wife and Picasso’s own experience of painting Gertrude’s portrait had presented him with new formal problems. Now, in summer 1906, he began to approach his work in new ways. Perhaps taking his cue from Modigliani, he started to work on several woodblocks, making sculptures, including a boxwood figure which became known as the Bois de Gosol. In his paintings, he depicted carved-looking, sculpted figures which clearly showed the influence of ethnic figure carvings – his own, and those he had seen earlier in Paris, the statuettes Vlaminck had found in Argenteuil as well as the Iberian sculptures that went on display at around that time in the Louvre. Already, the delicate, elongated figures of the Rose Period had given way to a quite different treatment of the human form. His new painted figures were chunky, sturdy, the volumes clearly delineated. As his way of modelling forms changed, the surface of the paint became increasingly tactile and raw, his earlier rose palette replaced by brick and earth tones. And the proportions of his figures were changing, as he moved away from the classical ideal of beauty, creating instead larger heads, heavy shoulders and narrow hips, in keeping with the forms and features of Iberian sculpture.

  Sometime in 1906, perhaps also in Gosol, he painted another self-portrait, a small, simple oil painting on canvas mounted on wood, which, though modest in size (26.7 x 19.7 cms) was radical in its treatment of self-portraiture. The figure of Picasso in a white, open-necked shirt, palette in hand, has a sculpted appearance, influenced perhaps by his own and Gauguin’s rudimentary woodcuts. The face, mask-like, with one eye completely blanked out, recalled Cézanne’s treatment of his wife’s face in The Artist’s Wife. In Picasso’s self-portrait, the face and figure are stripped, pure, elemental, as if something is being pared down to the essence. In Gosol, his paintings of Fernande began to change, too. He depicted her without facial expression, treating her like a statue, breaking up the form of the face into facets and creating strange, sombre angles. He continued to work in this way throughout the summer. For three months, as one commentator put it, il prépare sa révolution. The summer wore on, neither Picasso nor Fernande showing any sign of being ready to leave, until, in mid-August, their stay came to an abrupt end. On the 13th, Picasso suddenly wrote again to Casanovas, telling him to forget the errands he had asked him to run; within a few days, he and Fernande would be returning to Paris. The landlady’s daughter had contracted typhoid fever, and Picasso was always frightened of illness; he lived in mortal fear of contagious disease.

  • • •

  Back in the Bateau-Lavoir, it was stiflingly hot. They had a cat now, so at least the stench of mice was no longer overpowering, but the place was still airless. Picasso reverted to his habit of painting all night and sleeping all morning, though sometimes he was not allowed to sleep on undisturbed. Visitors unfamiliar with his timetable, including any potential purchasers, tended to come in the morning. ‘M’sieur Picasso! M’sieur Picasso!’ the concierge would shout up at his window. ‘Get up at once, it’s a serious visitor come to see you!’ A young German dealer William Uhde, who had bought Picasso’s painting The Tub back in 1901, had begun to mingle with the Picasso bande, often joining them in the Lapin Agile. Now, in 1906, he bought the painting that seemed to signify the end of Picasso’s concern with the acrobats and itinerant performers who had peopled a whole era of his work. The painting, Death of a Harlequin, shows a harlequin lifeless in his coffin. The Rose Period was almost over.

  Gertrude Stein bought Picasso’s self-portrait in a white vest, just for herself, she said; she thought it too intime for public display. Sergei Shchukin had also begun to take an interest in the painter. From now on, the pattern of sales of Picasso’s work was set: his purchasers would always be friends or private collectors who exhibited his work in their own salons rather than in public exhibitions. He disliked negotiating, hated selling wor
ks he was not satisfied with and always said a painting was never finished, he was simply forced to part with it to buy painting materials for the next work. Even in the early days, he sold discreetly. After a visit from one such individual, Olivier Saincerre, who loved modern art and regularly bought a small piece, Fernande could again buy shoes, hats and perfume.

  Despite the heat, on their return from Spain, Picasso got straight back to work. To Fernande’s despair, he began to paint over some of his old canvases. She felt she was witnessing the passing of an era; she had loved the old melancholy Blue and delicate, early Rose Period works. Picasso embarked on various works, including Nude Combing Her Hair (1906), a carved-looking figure of a girl, and Two Nudes (1906), in which two squat, carved figures stand face to face – both resembling the works he had produced in Gosol. He was also working on ceramic sculptures, including a Bust of Josep Fontdevila, the all but toothless nonagenarian of Gosol; and a sculpture of Fernande, probably inspired by Gauguin’s wood carvings, Fernande Combing Her Hair. Then he got out his unfinished portrait of Gertrude Stein.

  Before leaving for Gosol, he had wiped out the head, telling Gertrude, ‘I can’t see you any more when I look.’ He now repainted it, from memory. Perhaps, having read Noa Noa, he had also somewhere read Gauguin’s words, ‘It is well for young men to have a model, but let them draw the curtain over it while they are painting. It is better to paint from memory, for thus your work will be your own.’ The new face was almost expressionless; like a mask, or the mask-like side of Madame Cézanne’s face in Cézanne’s painting. And the portrait of Gertrude Stein was finished. ‘But it doesn’t look like me,’ said Gertrude when he showed it to her. ‘It will,’ he replied. The Picasso bande had all read Oscar Wilde. But perhaps the remark referred not backwards to the Decadents but forwards to the art of the modern age. In its striking formal resemblance to Cézanne’s The Artist’s Wife, the portrait suggested more profoundly than any photographic likeness the concerns and principles that characterized Gertrude as she was that winter; and (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s idiom) it exactly reflected what it actually depicted – Gertrude Stein, posing for Picasso.