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

by Sue Roe

  Picasso had surely seen La Joie de vivre, the large Arcadian work Matisse had exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, and perhaps also his sailor portraits, before he embarked on the work he began that autumn. Even if he had somehow missed the former there, he would certainly have seen it regularly that autumn on the wall of 27, rue de Fleurus. It is thus possible, even likely, that Matisse’s large work (and perhaps, too, Luxe, Calme et Volupté) was one influence on the development of the painting Picasso now began work on in earnest, alone in his studio, inspired also by Cézanne’s Bather compositions. He clearly had great expectations for this work; Leo had already noticed with amusement the huge canvas, eight feet square, he had had relined, as for a classic piece. Since it would have been impossible to work on a painting of this scale amidst the cramped and chaotic conditions of his current studio, the Steins rented a second for him, on a different floor of the Bateau-Lavoir.

  Matisse left Paris in November for Collioure, first making a detour to visit Derain, who was in L’Estaque, painting the landscapes which had inspired Cézanne. By the time news of Cézanne’s death (in Aix on 23 October 1906) reached Paris, Derain was not the only painter to have returned to Cézanne as one of the major influences on his developing work. In L’Estaque, he and Matisse set up a wager as to who could paint the better blue nude, then Matisse retreated to Collioure for the winter. As for Picasso, all that autumn he painted alone in his new studio, locked away by himself with the large new work of which nobody, not even Fernande, had yet been permitted so much as a glimpse.

  PART III

  Carvings, Private Lives, ‘Wives’

  1.

  Picasso and Matisse: The Two-man Race

  At 27, rue de Fleurus, Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra glowed from the wall – the result of his wager with Derain. The concierge’s five-year-old son had come running into the room and stopped in his tracks: ‘Oh la la! Quel beau corps d’une femme!’ Picasso stood discussing it with Walter Pach, a 23-year-old artist on his first visit to the Steins’. The painting was certainly arresting. A broad-shouldered, flesh-coloured, blue-tinted nude with large breasts reclines in a contorted pose in an outdoor setting; perhaps a garden, but with jungle foliage. Matisse had developed the figure from drawings he had made from a male model in Algeria; the painted nude was blatantly erotic and hintingly androgynous. ‘Does that interest you?’ Picasso asked Pach, who replied that it struck him rather like a slap in the face; he did not really understand Matisse’s thinking. ‘Neither do I,’ replied Picasso. ‘If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design.’ This was somewhere between the two.

  By early 1907, the Steins’ Saturday-night soirées were crowded with artists, dealers and bohemian hangers-on. The house at 27, rue de Fleurus was becoming a sort of sparring ground where artists could confront and debate with one another. It was also a place where they could see new work at a time when reproductions were rare and only in black and white – and paintings that had scandalized the public. Matisse had just shown Blue Nude at the Salon des Indépendants, where Leo Stein had quickly snapped it up. When Sarah Stein saw it, she decided she would from now on collect nothing but Matisse. She had already acquired over fifty of his works; she visited him nearly every week and would spend the rest of the year going through her collection, replacing other artists’ work with his and in the process wresting a dozen recent works from Leo and Gertrude, including Blue Nude. By this time, she was not Matisse’s only supporter: interest in his work had steadily begun to increase. In February, Félix Fénéon, now acquiring new work for the Bernheim-Jeunes, wrote offering him a one-man show. Soon afterwards, he visited Matisse in his studio, where he bought three paintings and made him a proposal: the Bernheim-Jeunes were offering to purchase the bulk of all his future work in return for first refusal. With the Steins as competitors, the Bernheim-Jeunes would soon be setting prices for Matisse’s work at thousands rather than hundreds of francs.

  Now that the Steins were entertaining both the ‘Matisseites’ and the ‘Picassoites’ (as Gertrude Stein had divided them), Picasso could no longer keep out of Matisse’s way. He, too, began to visit him regularly, keeping a close eye on his rival’s emerging work and beginning a life-long competitive dialogue which they played out in their work. Picasso and his friends knew nothing of the struggles Matisse had endured throughout the preceding years. They saw only a well-dressed Frenchman beloved of the Steins, achieving ever more resounding successes with the Bernheim-Jeunes and other young dealers, travelling and exhibiting abroad and effortlessly articulate in the cause of promoting himself. In actual fact, Matisse was struggling to stay aloof from incessant criticism and taunts.

  Sometime in 1907, observing a long-established tradition among artists, Picasso and Matisse exchanged paintings. Although Picasso later insisted they had both picked a painting they could learn from, Gertrude Stein remarked that each had surely chosen the picture he considered the worst example of the other’s work. Matisse picked an experimental still life of a pitcher and a lemon, with unusual rhythms and slightly distorted forms. Picasso selected a simple portrait of Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, painted in the style of children’s art, the features drawn in with a few broad lines, the nose added in profile. The intentional naivety of the picture was emphasized by the incorporation of the name ‘Marguerite’ scrawled in childlike lettering across the top. In painting it, Matisse had been inspired not only by the work of the artisan painters he had seen in Algeria the previous year, but also by his own children’s art. Picasso hung the picture in the Bateau-Lavoir, where his friends (if not Picasso himself) used it for darts practice. By now, the rumbling feud between the two men was clearly in place, intensified because there were no other obvious candidates; Leo Stein called it a ‘two-man race’. If Sarah Stein continued to champion Matisse, Gertrude still quietly favoured Picasso.

  Before returning to Paris in spring for the 1907 Salon des Indépendants, Matisse had been in Collioure for almost the whole of the past year. On 30 April, he left Paris once again to return there. The work he did in Collioure that summer included a series of studies, La Musique, La Coiffure and Three Bathers, each of which revealed the extent to which his figures were becoming expressive, simplified shapes, none resembling any particular sitter, all liberated completely from the restrictions of likeness and dynamically modelled as if freed into pictorial space to find their own way into the overall design. One painting in particular, La Musique (Esquisse), seemed to be a vivid study in rhythm. A seated nude figure lies curled in the foreground as a violinist serenades two lightly draped girls dancing together. The whole painting is vibrant with the dynamic motion of the dancers. This work, which Matisse modestly called ‘a painted sketch’, announced his first real departure from the Fauve style, anticipating the appearance two or three years later of two of his greatest works, La Danse and La Musique (1909–10). The issue of spatial design was now his main preoccupation, as Picasso had already shrewdly observed.

  That spring, Picasso paid his first visit to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l’Homme). When he first saw the neglected, musty rooms full of ethnic sculpture, he found them disgusting; they reminded him of the fusty old bits of bric-a-brac for sale at the flea market. He wanted to go straight out again, but something made him stay. When he looked more closely at the exhibits, he was amazed. Like Vlaminck, Derain and Matisse, he was struck by their difference to Western art; unlike them, he also perceived their power as fetishistic objects. Years later, he could still recall the intensity of their impact on him at the time: they weren’t like any other pieces of sculpture.

  Picasso’s discovery came at a time when he was searching for new forms of expression. As he put it to himself later, he was rebelling against traditional definitions of beauty. Already, particularly following the exhibition of Gauguin’s carvings at the 1906 Salon d’Automne, ‘beauty’ itself was open to redefinition. And, in spring 1907,
Picasso was still impressed by magic and sorcery; a conjuring trick at the circus or on film could interest him as much as the classical art shown in the museums. The African artefacts in the Trocadéro made him think about – perhaps even identify with – the people who had made them and their motives for doing so. Perhaps it was with the idea that making art was a kind of magic that he continued to develop his new, large-scale work, hoping to create something similar on canvas: a work that would realize in artistic form – and thus guard against – the deepest terrors of desire. Whether the new work turned out to be a way of taking power or a kind of magic trick, at a time when he felt particularly insecure as an artist this discovery seemed to offer the possibility of new forms of expression.

  Georges Braque (like Derain) had spent the winter months in L’Estaque. He returned to Paris in March in time for the Salon des Indépendants, where he was showing his work for the first time. (So, with Braque’s encouragement, was Marie Laurencin, though the prospect of public exposure made her so unbearably nervous that, as soon as the exhibition opened, she fled to the coast with her mother to stay with friends.) The exhibition brought Braque his initial successes. Five of his works were purchased by William Uhde, the young German dealer who had already discovered Picasso and now acquired these works for the cautious sum of 505 francs, despite the warnings of friends, who urged him to invest more sensibly in better-known artists. The sixth work of Braque’s to be purchased was bought by another German dealer new to the scene, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who was just opening his first, tiny gallery, sublet from a Polish tailor, in the rue Vignon, near l’Église de la Madeleine in the 8th arrondissement. For Braque, the support of Uhde and Kahnweiler amounted to public recognition that he was actually an artist. ‘At that moment I understood that I was a painter. Until then I had not believed it.’

  In L’Estaque, he had been working on paintings he had begun to think out in Paris. In their intricate construction, they bore the earliest marks of what would soon be readily identifiable as Braque’s distinctive geometry. The significance of L’Estaque for Braque (as for Derain and Cézanne before him) was the special quality of the light in southern France, which affected the spatial qualities of what he saw. The unusual light of the region seemed to open up the sky, making it look higher than it did in the north; while there, Braque experienced a breakthrough of sensation. He had gone to the south specifically to examine the influence of this light on his work and had been surprised by its impact on his emotions: ‘Just imagine,’ he told his friends, ‘I left the drab, gloomy Paris studios where you were still working in bitumen. There, by contrast, what a revelation, what a blossoming!’

  It may have been William Uhde who first put Picasso in touch with Braque (assuming their paths had not crossed before). Although Picasso may have seen the latter’s work at the Salon des Indépendants, if they met at all that spring it cannot have been more than fleetingly. On two occasions in March 1907, Braque went up to the Bateau-Lavoir and left visiting cards in Picasso’s studio. On one he jotted ‘memories in anticipation’. Picasso scrawled reminders in the sketchbook he was using – ‘Write to Braque’ and, inside the back cover, ‘Braque, Friday’ – these notes suggesting they may have been briefly introduced. Whether they had or not, there would have been no opportunity to follow up any initial contact, since, as soon as the exhibition closed, Braque went travelling again; from May to November, he was constantly away, in Le Havre, La Ciotat and L’Estaque. In the meantime, Picasso retreated again into his new studio, where he was still making studies of heads and drawing numerous experimental figure sketches, some in pencil, some in shades of pink or vividly coloured in blues, greens and yellows, in preparation for his major new work. Fernande was making plans of her own.

  2.

  Raymonde

  On 9 April 1907, Picasso and Fernande made their way through the lanes of Montmartre, past the little restaurant Au Coucou where they lunched out of doors when they had the money, along by the dilapidated houses Utrillo liked to paint, down the steps of the hillside to the orphanage run by the nuns in the rue Caulaincourt. At the orphanage, they were shown the children and invited to take their pick. They selected a girl, said to be nine years old, who was appealing, friendly and ‘d’une beauté grave’.

  The adoption of a child had been Fernande’s idea. Picasso was ambivalent – though he loved children, he was under no illusions how disruptive a child’s presence was likely to be. Since the beginning of the year, Fernande had sensed that he had been growing distant. He had been happy in Spain the previous summer but, since he had returned, and completed Gertrude Stein’s portrait with that strange, mask-like head, his work had continued to change. He seemed to be searching for new subjects now that he had exhausted, at least in his work, the acrobats and circus performers he continued to spend time with at the Cirque Medrano and in the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères, where the clowns, trapeze artists, dancers and prostitutes still gathered. Fernande sensed that she, along with the acrobats, was gradually being moved from centre stage. He used to idolize her in his work, but now he seemed obsessed with his mounting collection of photographs of African women. He still sat in the square in the evenings, chatting to Derain and Vlaminck and his Catalan friends, but the talk had become less comprehensible to her. He was working incessantly on his sketches of individual figures, many of which had a carved appearance; he drew the human form over and over again, devoid of mood or setting, always improvising and experimenting.

  Among the works of Picasso’s Rose Period that Fernande particularly loved, some of the most affecting were of mothers, some with children in their laps or playing around their skirts; melancholy mothers tending shadowy infants or veiled madonnas with wispy, scaled-down acrobats at their feet. His own childhood, as the only, pampered boy in the family, had given Picasso a deep, even religious sense of the rhythms of life and of the significance of maternity. He took maternal love for granted and saw women as potential mothers. In Spain, Fernande had understood him better, observing that, there, he seemed different from the Picasso she knew in Paris, ‘less wild, more brilliant and lively and able to interest himself in things in a calmer, more balanced fashion; at ease, in fact’. Spain had seemed to transform him: in the vast, empty landscape among the mountains, the paths bordered by cypress trees, he appeared ‘outside society, of a different species’. Since they had returned from Spain, however, Picasso had seemed increasingly introspective, irritable and secretive about his work. These days, he had more to do with Derain, who since his return from Collioure had defected from the ‘North’ to the ‘South Pole’ and, like Picasso, seemed to be searching for a new direction in his work. Derain was intellectual; he had theoretical aspirations and ideas about geometric space. Between them, he and Picasso seemed determined to discover how to paint a future masterpiece. The French painter was pleasant enough, full of charm and bonhomie, but he was not a friend Fernande could share with Picasso, as she had shared van Dongen, the only one of the painters she had seemed able really to talk to.

  She could see that Picasso was making significant changes in his work. His figures looked sculptural; the women he depicted had solid arms, thick legs and tiny feet, like the feet of the peasant women they had seen in Spain. When he made sketches of dancers, they were nothing like the dancers in the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères, with their elaborate chignons and flamboyant costumes. Picasso’s figures now were clearly based on primitive peasant dancers. In Negro Dancer (1907) he wraps the head of the dancer into the folding planes of the picture like leaves around a flower, creating a sculpted figure fashioned from the breaking surface of the painting which renders it almost abstract, elemental. His work perhaps harked back to the wooden bust of Fernande he had carved in Gosol, a work that was impersonal, multifaceted, with broken surfaces that did nothing to enhance her natural beauty. She continued to take an interest in his work, but these new ideas did not interest her as his earlier work had, and she was beginning to feel excluded and rejected.<
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  Picasso had tried to find Fernande a new friend. In Austin’s bar that spring he ran into Guillaume Apollinaire again. Apollinaire was the illegitimate son of a Belarusian countess, born a Russian subject in Rome, a lover of art and literature who had written poetry about the saltimbanques. In 1907, aged twenty-seven, Apollinaire moved from his mother’s home in Le Vésinet to a small, bourgeois apartment of his own at 9, rue Léon, at the foot of the Butte. He was gracious and learned, fascinated by Picasso’s work and, from this point, they began to meet regularly to discuss poetry and painting. At about the same time, Picasso came across Braque’s friend Marie Laurencin in Sagot’s gallery. When he met her a second time that March, she struck him as the perfect fiancée for Apollinaire. Though he turned out to be right in one respect (Apollinaire was besotted), if he had envisaged Marie as a possible distraction for Fernande, Picasso had misjudged. Far from recognizing a potential soulmate, Fernande was horrified by Marie; she thought her silly and self-conscious, with a face like a goat’s. Uncharacteristically, in judging her she looked no further than the surface, seeing only that she ‘took a good deal of trouble to appear to be just as simply naive as she actually was … like a rather vicious little girl, or a little girl who wants people to think she’s vicious’.