by Sue Roe
Alice B. Toklas, Fernande announced to Picasso, would be taking French lessons from her. ‘Ah, the Miss Toklas,’ replied Picasso, ‘with small feet like a Spanish woman and earrings like a gypsy and a father who is king of Poland like the Poniatowskis, of course she will take lessons.’
The following evening, Alice arrived early at the Grand Palais for the vernissage. She found Picasso surrounded by his gang, all except Braque, who once again seemed to be hanging around Fernande. Recognizing Alice and her friend Harriet, Fernande wandered over and introduced them to her friends Alice Princet and Germaine Pichot. The conversation turned again to the French lessons. Alice suggested mornings, from ten until one, and that Fernande come over to her hotel. Fernande said she would charge ‘Mees Toklas’ two francs fifty an hour. When Alice said that she would of course pay her taxi fares, Fernande assured her there was no need, she would take the bus or the Métro. They arranged to start the following week. The room was crowding now, filling up with visitors and painters of all nationalities – American, Hungarian, German, Russian – and the odd student from Matisse’s school. Among them, ‘a very small Russian girl was holding forth explaining her picture, a nude holding aloft a severed leg. It was the beginning of the Russian horrors’. These were the catastrophic events of 1905, which brought large numbers of Russian emigrés to settle in Paris, including many of the dancers soon to be associated with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
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The 1907 Salon d’Automne opened to the public on 1 October. This year, the exhibition was more extensive than ever; it was a monumental show including retrospectives of Berthe Morisot, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Paul Cézanne. According to Félix Vallotton, who reviewed the show in La Grande Revue on the 25th, the main draw was a gigantic work consisting of fragments of a mural for the Vich Cathedral near Barcelona by Catalan muralist José-Maria Sert. Though Vallatton had reservations – he found the finished sections somewhat unattractive and the colours a little vulgar – he praised Sert for the gesture, since ‘To exhibit frescoes for a cathedral is not an everyday thing to do.’ Sert was a man of grand gestures. Descended from an immensely rich Catalan family of textile manufacturers, he had been commissioned to decorate the cathedral by King Alfonso XIII of Spain. A favourite of the royal family, he was flamboyantly talented, mercurial in temperament and immensely knowledgeable. In sombrero and cape, noticeably hirsute, he dashed around Paris, endowing every drawing room he entered with the kind of charisma so appreciated by the artistic upper crust of Paris. His passions were alcohol, morphine and the art of the museums, and his work included flourishes of quotation from not only Tintoretto but Goya and Velásquez.
For Picasso and his friends, the 1907 Salon d’Automne was significant not for the audacious mural but for the retrospective exhibition of forty-eight paintings by Cézanne. At this exhibition, where Parisian audiences saw Cézanne’s luminous oranges for the first time, the artists of Montmartre first understood the extent of his genius and experienced what it felt like to be in the presence of his vivid colours. The objects seemed so alive on his canvases that their textures seemed to invite the viewer to touch them. To coincide with the exhibition, in October, Le Mercure de France published extracts from Cézanne’s correspondence with Émile Bernard, a painter and friend of van Gogh and Gauguin who had lived for a while, as had van Gogh, at 10, rue Cortot. (It was there that Renoir painted the local girls in the garden; it is now the Musée de Montmartre.) Bernard had first noticed Cézanne’s work in the cramped, dingy shop where Père Tanguy, friend to Cézanne, van Gogh and the Impressionists before him, had sold artists’ materials and a few paintings before the turn of the century, sharing a smoke with them in the back room and taking their work off their hands for the price of a few tubes of paint. After discovering his work, Bernard visited Cézanne in 1904, and stayed with him for a month (publishing an article on his work in L’Occident that year), after which they exchanged letters (which appeared in Le Mercure de France in October 1907). The posthumous publication of these letters constituted the first public insight into Cézanne’s thinking about art and created the first opportunity for painters of the younger generation to view his paintings in the light of his reflections. For the next few weeks – months – everyone was talking about Cézanne.
Cézanne’s letters to Émile Bernard include the famous advice that there is no line in nature: ‘In an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point and this point is always – despite the tremendous effect of light and shade and sensation of colour – the closest to our eye.’ Cézanne saw no separation between drawing and colour, since for him the process of harmonizing colour established form. (‘Quand la couleur est à sa richesse, la forme est à sa plenitude.’) To explain this more graphically, he added that the painter should ‘see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything in proper perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point’.
In fact, there are no visible cylinders or cones in Cézanne’s work; no parallel or perpendicular lines – line being, for Cézanne, effectively the place where colour planes converge. His advice to Bernard was mainly that of a master to a new student, an attempt, perhaps, to find a way of simplifying or finding metaphors for things he himself understood without needing to analyse them. As he remarked to his son, Paul, it was easy to develop theories with Bernard, given his logician’s temperament. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, back in Paris working on his monograph on Rodin, wrote to his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff, throughout that October about the impact on him personally of this intensity of Cézanne’s work, in which things seemed more real even than in reality. In the room of the artist’s works at the Salon d’Automne, he marvelled at his ‘dense quilted blue’, ‘shadowless green’ and the intense, reddish black of his wine bottles; ‘the apples are all cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the roundly bulging pockets of an old coat’.
As did many artists, Rilke returned to the Grand Palais several times, always making straight for the Cézanne room. He reflected deeply on the artist’s working methods, remarking that he had painted throughout the last thirty years of his life in a state of constant rage in the attempt to achieve ‘la réalisation’, as he called it. After studying landscape painting in the open air at Pissarro’s side, Cézanne had recognized what he wanted to achieve in the works of the Venetians whose paintings he had seen and admired many times in the Louvre. For his wife’s benefit, Rilke described Cézanne’s passionate will to achieve in painting: ‘the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object’; this was arrived at only as the result of a rigorous ongoing interior dialogue. As Rilke understood it, Cézanne approached the object he was studying with complex circumspection, first describing the darkest tones then covering those deep notes with a layer of colour and continuing until he established a contrasting element. Then he would begin again, continuing in the same way. He sensed a conflict within Cézanne between his perception and the struggle to make use of what he perceived; and that for him the process of painting involved a perpetual inner dialogue, which he spent a lifetime struggling to endure. During the last years of his life, Cézanne’s reputation had been steadily growing in Paris. He still kept his studio in the Villa des Arts and he was flattered that young painters had begun to admire his work, but he had no time for celebrity, preferring to return continually to Provence, where the motif that now most occupied him, the Mont Sainte Victoire, rose up before him, presenting a multitude of challenges. Cézanne remained humble in the face of his own work. As Rilke wrote, ‘it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it’. Here, he put his finger on the paradoxical quest for impersonality on which the painters and poets of the early twentieth century, each in their different way, had begun. No serious painter who attended it was
unaffected by the 1907 Cézanne exhibition; Picasso was no exception. Cézanne, he told the photographer Brassaï in later years, ‘was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.’
Georges Braque went to the Salon d’Automne in 1907 to see Cézanne’s work, rather than his own, which this year was not being shown. Following his success the previous year, he had submitted eight works to the Committee, which still included among its members Matisse. It rejected all but one. Salon rules would have allowed Braque to re-submit two, but instead he withdrew all eight in disgust. Apollinaire went to visit him shortly after this rejection in his lodgings in the rue d’Orsel, where he found him reading sixteenth-century polygraphs and smoking his pipe, trying to forget his disappointment. Though Braque had a low opinion of the art criticism Apollinaire had begun to publish, he respected him as a poet, acknowledging also that from now on, ‘The poets of that time were our best disseminators.’ In their own medium, poets such as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and, soon afterwards, Pierre Reverdy, would soon be producing concrete poetry based on contingency and juxtaposition, moving away from the Symbolist techniques of comparison and abstraction and bearing out the new maxim: No ideas but in things.
The emphasis in both poetry and painting was now on making, rather than mimesis. Modern poetry insisted on its own reality as a construction, artefact or art object instead of merely reflecting, illustrating or copying the ‘real’ world. Like the painters, the poets were searching for ways to express the inner structure of things. When, some years later, bookseller Adrienne Monnier (business partner of Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Co. and in 1922 published James Joyce’s Ulysses) described cubism as the search for ‘a new classicism based upon inner constraint – no development – the emotion caught at its source’, she was acknowledging the impulse in art that emerged during the first decade of the century, which began in poetry, with Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, among others; in prose with Gertrude Stein; and in painting with Picasso, Braque and Matisse. As Reverdy was to put it later, what mattered in art were not illustrations or reflections but rapports.
Early in 1907, the year Braque met Picasso, Braque’s paintings still showed the influences of van Gogh and Matisse: paintings such as Le Golfe des lecques (1907), its vivid dash of red reminiscent of van Gogh’s Self-portrait in a Landscape; and Femme nue assise (also 1907), in which a green line connects the female figure, one hand raised to her hair, down through the background to the shadow at her feet. But the landscapes Braque brought back from L’Estaque that autumn were different. They seemed to be variations on landscape compositions – geometric improvisations, or riffs. From now on, his work continued to develop in drastically new directions as he began to turn his back on the influence of Matisse and the Fauves. Nevertheless, the work Matisse produced in 1907, the towering Le Luxe and his dynamic, rhythmical painted sketch La Musique (Esquisse), confirmed that he was still the acknowledged leader of the avant-garde. The Steins purchased both Le Luxe and La Musique (Esquisse). They displayed the latter at 27, rue de Fleurus, where it quickly attracted the attention of Sergei Shchukin.
One surprise exhibitor at the 1907 Salon d’Automne was Modigliani. He showed five watercolours and two paintings, both portraits, one of a friend (Ludwig Meidner), the other of a hauntingly beautiful woman, Maud Abrantes, with fine high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Though his work went unremarked, he triumphantly wrote home to tell his mother, Eugenia, of his success in Paris. He, too, explored the works of Cézanne, and read and absorbed the letters in Le Mercure de France. To his collection of photographs of paintings, which he pinned to his wall or carried around in his pockets, he added one of Cézanne’s paintings in the exhibition (lent by Vollard, who had purchased it in 1900), Boy in the Red Vest (or Boy in a Red Waistcoat; 1888–90).
The catalogue listed Modigliani’s address as 7, place Jean-Baptiste Clément, where the artist had lately discovered an old shed made of swollen wood and crumbling brick, no less dilapidated than his old shack in the Maquis but with a small garden plot which had a view across the square and down the rue Ravignan, opening on a vista of Paris which stretched as far as the hillside of Meudon. Still intermittently homeless despite this discovery, Modigliani had been seen sleeping rough on a bench in the waiting room of the Gare Saint-Lazare. When he did find lodgings, he moved so often between them during these early years that no one could keep track of his address (so the addresses he gave galleries or dealers did not always tally with where he was actually living). André Salmon provides an itinerary; by his account, Modigliani lived first on the edge of the Maquis in the rue Lepic, then in the rue Norvins, then in the place Jean-Baptiste Clément. Utrillo’s only other friend, André Utter, a blond, blue-eyed electrician and self-taught painter, helped him find this last. During the next year or so, Modigliani and Utter became close friends, and they and Utrillo were close companions until 1909, when Utter fell in love with Utrillo’s mother, Suzanne Valadon (who was twenty-one years his senior). When her husband retreated, Utter moved with Suzanne and Utrillo to a studio at the foot of the Butte, where their turbulent existence attracted the attention of the neighbours, regularly alerted by the sounds of screams and breaking glass – the locals called them La trinité maudite. From 1908 onwards, Modigliani’s only addresses in Montmartre appear to have been in the rue Delta (where he never actually lived) and an abandoned convent in the rue de Douai; he also lodged for a while on the Left Bank in the Rotonde, an old pavilion with caryatids at the entrance on the plaine Vaugirard left undemolished after the World Fair, and converted now into sordid, unsanitary artists’ dwellings. He still occasionally slept on the floor of someone’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, which he sometimes gave as his address. He remained the outsider, although in his own way he was concerned with the same formal challenges and problems as Picasso’s bande, most of whom – despite them keeping him at arm’s length – continued to notice his comings and goings.
The following year, Modigliani was befriended by Dr Paul Alexandre, a young dermatologist native to Paris, who was then twenty-seven, loved Montmartre and had rented a large, near-derelict house at the foot of the Butte, behind the Moulin Rouge. It was set in a courtyard behind a wall plastered with peeling posters, at number 7, rue Delta. There, Alexandre created a colony of artists, who spent their time making life studies modelled by the local seamstresses, staging theatricals, or playing cards bent over flimsy tables (the rickety leg of one propped up by an old spoon) like Cézanne’s card players. On the walls of the ground-floor room that functioned as a gallery, Modigliani displayed his work.
A frequent visitor to the Delta was Romanian sculptor Brâncus¸i, who had been in Paris since July 1904. His ambition was to create huge sculptures which would stand in the open air. He wanted to create a sense of artistic totality in space, the first inspiration for Modigliani’s own dream of producing large sculptures to be exhibited outside. The elongated stone figures he had been carving now metamorphosed in his imagination into a vision of life-size caryatids that would stand at the entrance of a great Temple to Humanity, its weight borne by his ‘columns of tenderness’. Though Modigliani never actually lived at the Delta, finding a room for rent in a disused convent in the nearby rue de Douai, Dr Alexandre put a studio at his disposal, where he worked intermittently for the next six or seven months.
In the evenings, Paul Alexandre and Modigliani also went to the circus, where the latter sketched the circus performers and harlequins, or to the Gaîté-Rochechouart theatre at 15, boulevard de Rochechouart, where he made line drawings from the auditorium. They sometimes had seats in the dress circle, so that he could draw the actors and actresses from above. Alexandre thought that the attraction of the theatre for Modigliani lay in its blend of reality and dream, since, with footlights still in use, stage lighting at that time, with its intense colours and strangely placed sources, was so unnatural that, to an artistic eye, it could
seem dreamlike. In the Gaîté-Rochechouart, there were mirrors on the side walls, so from some seats the image of Miss Lawler, star of the Gaîté, was multiplied into a whole succession of small Miss Lawlers, each in the slender, ultra-modern dress that showed off her ankles and high heels. The stage itself was ‘a brilliant rectangle at the end of a long dark corridor with its four walls blazing with colourful humanity’. Alexandre’s description imagines the stage almost as a vehicle of projection, with rapidly changing perspectives, fluctuations between surface and depth, and the breaking surfaces that Picasso was already concerning himself with in his work. The spectacle of moving images seemed to be everywhere – as if the cinema had disrupted all the old ways of seeing. Modigliani took Alexandre to the Egyptian Galleries and ethnographic section of the Louvre, and to the fusty old Trocadéro, where they saw the row upon row of figures, masks and carvings that had made such a deep impression on Picasso. Though the sculptures from the Baoulé state (in what is now the Ivory Coast) were to show their influence on his work only two or three years later in his drawings and sculptures of caryatids, the African art Modigliani saw as early as 1908 impressed him as profoundly as had the works of the Italian primitive painters; the elongated faces of the African statues reminded him of the early Italian works he had seen in Florence, Venice and Rome. ‘What I am searching for,’ he wrote in one of his sketchbooks, ‘is neither the real nor the unreal, but the Subconscious, the mystery of what is Instinctive in the human Race’. The new goal for the modern artist was to find ways of expressing the interior life. In their own way, Picasso and Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, Diaghilev and Poiret, Marie Laurencin and Gertrude Stein were all by now engaged in this quest.