by Sue Roe
5.
The French Lessons
A week after meeting everyone at the vernissage of the 1907 Salon d’Automne, Alice B. Toklas was given a lightning introductory tour of the Louvre by Michael Stein, who, during lunch one day at the rue Madame, declared it scandalous that she had not yet found time to go there; she had already been in Paris several days. As soon as lunch was over he walked her down to the Seine, across the bridge and into the Louvre, where she found herself abruptly before the Victory of Samothrace. She was then rushed up the stairs to the Salle Carré: ‘It was a gorgeous surprise but only a moment was allowed me before Giorgione’s La Fête champêtre. Down the long gallery I was rushed. So that you may know where to find things, explained Mike as we hurried past miles of pictures.’
Next, she was received by Fernande in her new studio apartment at 5, rue Girardon, which she had already furnished with a very large bed, a small tea table and a piano. With her again were her two friends Alice Princet and Germaine Pichot (wife of Ramon Pichot, one of the Catalan gang who had visited the World Fair with Picasso back in 1900). Alice B. Toklas now learned that Germaine was the wife of a Spanish painter and the lover of a circus performer. A Montmartroise born and bred, she had many sisters, each of whom had different fathers and were now married to men of different nationalities. As for Alice Princet, according to Fernande, she was the daughter of a workman, which explained the coarseness of her thumbs. Alice B. Toklas noted in her namesake ‘a certain wild quality that perhaps had to do with her brutal-looking thumbs and was curiously in accord with her madonna face’.
The extent of this wildness was revealed, either on this occasion or soon afterwards. Married on 30 March 1907 to Princet, after years of being his lover, she had just that autumn been introduced to Derain, an encounter that had brought to a dramatic end her brief marriage. The meeting with Derain had been love at first sight, a coup de foudre. When Princet, normally a mild-mannered man, discovered the deception he tore up the fur coat Alice had bought to celebrate her marriage: ‘That settled the matter.’ She left Princet, never to return. That October, she and Derain set up home together at 22, rue Tourlaque, at the top of the Butte, near the Château des Brouillards and the police station, the latter, in Derain’s opinion, lending the address a certain cachet. (Alice and Princet were divorced on 26 February 1910; she and Derain finally married on 10 July 1926.) Vlaminck supported Derain, going up to visit him in his new apartment, where the more respectable clients of the Rat Mort, a café-restaurant at the foot of the Butte, came up the hill to offer their services as sitters. As for Princet, he took to spending much of his time with Picasso in the Bateau-Lavoir; for a while, he was there every day.
The French lessons took place not, as initially proposed, at Alice’s hotel but at 27, rue de Fleurus (Gertrude paid Fernande’s taxi fares). Fernande would arrive at the rue de Fleurus promptly at ten o’ clock, and she and Alice B. Toklas would begin: ‘Of course to have a lesson in French one has to converse and Fernande had three subjects, hats, we had not much more to say about hats, perfume, we had something to say about perfumes.’ By now, Fernande was known throughout Montmartre for her passion for perfume. She had loved it when people said they could tell Picasso was not far away because the air was full of Madame Picasso’s perfume. Everyone knew the story of the bottle of ‘Smoke’ for which she had paid eighty francs, which had no scent at all despite its glorious colour, ‘like real bottled liquid smoke’. Her third subject of conversation was the categories of furs. She instructed Alice in all three: ‘first category sables, second category ermine and chinchilla, third category martin fox and squirrel. It was the most surprising thing I had heard in Paris.’ Their only other dialogue concerned descriptions and names of dogs then fashionable in Paris. The subject was here passed to Alice to initiate. She first had to describe a dog then, after some hesitation, Fernande would guess the breed. It was all becoming a little monotonous, until Alice suggested meeting for tea or going for strolls around Montmartre, which improved things somewhat. They attracted attention as they took their turn around the square, Alice dressed like a Spaniard, all in black but for the flowers in her hat, Fernande in her draped, sack-like dress (inspired, perhaps, by Poiret) and broad-brimmed hat, trimmed with a jaunty dash of muslin. There, you see, Fernande would confirm, smiling radiantly, ‘our hats are a success’.
Fernande confided her opinions of her other friends and acquaintances, including Marie Laurencin, whom she said was peculiar, nasty, made strange noises and irritated Picasso. She told Alice about van Dongen, who (she claimed) had made his name with his portrait of her; about the circus people and all the past and present inhabitants of Montmartre. She also discussed her ‘one ideal’, Evelyn Thaw (née Nesbit), the popular American chorus girl turned silent-movie actress, and heroine of the moment. According to Alice, ‘Fernande adored her in the way a later generation adored Mary Pickford, she was so blonde, so pale, so nothing,’ though she reduced Fernande to sighs of admiration – which suggests that Alice, though she knew Evelyn’s story was in all the newspapers, had not seen Siegmund Lubin’s 1907 film The Unwritten Law (subtitled ‘A Thrilling Drama Based on the Thaw White Tragedy’). This early documentary film was the talk of Paris, based on the dramatic murder the previous year (on 25 June, while Fernande and Picasso were in Gosol) of Evelyn’s devoted benefactor, eminent architect Stanford White, shot dead in Madison Square Garden Theatre by her millionaire playboy husband, Harry Thaw.
Though she appeared blonde in black and white photographs and in the film, Evelyn Thaw was actually, like Fernande, a striking redhead. Far from being ‘nothing’, Evelyn had worked her way out of poverty by becoming a photographic model and showgirl. She was adored and revered by her fans, a celebrity in her native America as well as in France. On the streets outside the courtroom where she testified to Harry Thaw’s innocence, a crowd estimated at ten thousand gathered to catch a glimpse of her. The case had hinged on whether or not, at the moment Thaw shot White in the head, Thaw would be judged to have been insane. In the courtroom, Evelyn, dressed like a schoolgirl in demure navy-blue suit and white blouse, had coolly recounted tales of sexual degradation at the hand of Stanford White, stories she was alleged to have told Harry Thaw, making him fatally jealous and determined to have his revenge. The newspapers in June 1906 had run headlines such as ‘THAW MURDERS STANFORD WHITE’; ‘“You’ve Ruined My Life,” He Cries and Fires’. There was some confusion as to whether he had actually said ‘You’ve Ruined My Life’ or ‘You’ve Ruined My Wife’.
Fernande was smitten. If, in the witness box, Evelyn was intelligent, wily and quietly powerful, as a screen idol she was provocative. Her performance eventually secured Thaw’s release, though he was later revealed to be a dangerous psychopath. Throughout the trial, the attention was all on Evelyn. On both sides of the Atlantic, her story had been the talk of 1906; in 1907, audiences watched it all over again on the cinema screen. Visually, she was riveting. Even the journalists were swooning. The Evening World’s reporter declared her ‘the most exquisitely lovely human being I ever looked at’, with enormous eyes like pansies and a mouth like crumpled rose petals. Evelyn had it all. Columnist Ada Patterson described her performance on the witness stand: Evelyn was like a little schoolgirl on speech day, helpless as a child. And, as the Evening World’s Irvin S. Cobb assured his readers, she was not merely acting a part: ‘She could never have counterfeited it’ – her vibrant, red lips trembling, her eyes mutely crying for mercy, her voice shaking with childlike emotion – ‘The best emotional actress in America couldn’t have done it as well.’ Evelyn had become a star of the silent screen simply by playing herself.
Fernande could hardly have picked a more apposite role model. She may have admired Evelyn’s beauty, her talent, her shrewdness – or all three; or she may simply have admired her celebrity, even before the Thaw–White case burst upon the world, as a photographic model and variety star. A photograph of Fernande taken in a photographer’s studio show
s her lying back against a cushion, one breast exposed, her arms full of roses; had she, too, had ambitions to be a photographic model? Or perhaps she just admired Evelyn’s success in securing a husband who (never mind his psychopathic tendencies) was a glamorous millionaire. Most likely, Evelyn impressed her from every point of view, not least for her ability to make herself the centre of attention. The comparison with Evelyn Thaw reveals much about Fernande, in particular her sense of self-dramatization and her strong self-image.
On 8 October, Fernande had written to Gertrude to confirm that Alice had paid her for the first week; the French lessons were under way, and going fine. In the same letter, despite this display of independence, she confided to Gertrude that she was very upset, and thinking about Picasso a lot. She hardly saw him and was making no attempt to do so; she was fully occupied looking for more work. She was also trying to harden herself so that silly reminders of their life together did not tempt her to return to him. She was with Alice more or less constantly, and they were almost always out, so if Gertrude wished to visit her she should let her know in advance, so that she could arrange to be at home. Gertrude had evidently congratulated her on her talents as a painter, since, in a postscript to her letter, Fernande modestly protested that she had overdone her praise.
Soon the French lessons were taking place three times a week. They spent the rest of their time going to exhibitions, or in Fernande’s apartment, where they were usually in the company of Alice Princet and Germaine Pichot. Alice B. Toklas once suggested inviting them all back to her hotel for tea, but Fernande explained that Alice Princet’s conversation would be too frank for Toklas’s friend Harriet. The truth, as Alice B. Toklas soon deduced, was that Fernande was not an easy companion. She was jealous of other women, envious of their beauty and their ability to attract male attention. ‘But she went into ecstasies over Evelyn Thaw …’
• • •
After a while, Alice and Harriet began to hanker after an apartment of their own. Harriet thought it should probably be furnished. Alice consulted Le Figaro and found a discreet advertisement that a Count de C had a floor for rent suitable for two people in his home in the rue de la Faisanderie. When she arrived, the door was opened by a butler, who led her into a room full of eighteenth-century furniture, fine hothouse flowers and a piano. The apartment had three rooms and a bath, and two of the bedrooms faced on to a courtyard, where she saw a coachman cleaning an open carriage; there was even a telephone. After asking what she was paying for her hotel, Monsieur de Courcy said he would charge one third less. Food of gourmet standard would be provided, since he and his mother employed an excellent cook and there were good markets in the district. She and Harriet moved in without delay. On their first day, they were given lunch at a table laid with heavy silver and cut glass. The food was indeed exceptional – shellfish salad and a wild-strawberry ice, with a delicious white wine from the property of the Count’s friends in the Loire. In the reception room, they were served coffee while Monsieur de Courcy entertained them with some Chopin studies, proving himself an accomplished, expressive player. They were then invited to accompany him that evening to the Folies Bergère.
They rested after lunch, before going out to do some window-shopping, returning in time to dress for the evening’s entertainment. ‘The performance at the Folies Bergère was elaborately staged and what was not understood was happily not understood.’ It was evidently understood by Gertrude Stein, however, who had been sent the news of their fortunate new situation. A few days later, she arrived for lunch and put an abrupt end to their life in de Courcy’s apartment. She had established that his mother was absent from her own home, explicable only if she knew nothing of the arrival of her new lodgers, and peremptorily advised Alice and Harriet to leave before they encountered any further complications. A hotel near the rue de Fleurus would naturally be the most expedient solution: ‘“Find a hotel in our quarter at once and move over,” she said.’ This time, if there was a problem, Alice was to send her a telegram. She recommended the Hôtel de l’Univers on the boulevard Saint Michel, perfectly situated for Alice to walk across the Jardins du Luxembourg to the rue de Fleurus, thus convenient for them to take walks together, and half the price of the Hôtel Magellan. They had hardly finished packing before she arrived, bearing gifts: chocolates for Alice and a little bouquet for Harriet.
• • •
Away from Picasso, Fernande found herself thinking about his work. Perhaps, she reflected, this continual struggle of his was actually a rebellion against his deepest inclinations. Among his portraits of Fernande, there was one that particularly appealed to her, a classical study, quite different from his recent work. Looking at this, she began to wonder whether it was not simply inhibition that made him dissatisfied with the kind of art on which he was turning his back, since she was convinced it was really closest to his heart. Perhaps it was a kind of desperation that compelled him to develop his work in ways others would approve and admire. Or maybe he was in some way in revolt against himself, and that was why he needed to make dramatic changes that seemed to some as if he had begun to go too far. It was clear that he was determined to find a way of expressing something no one had expressed before. Whatever it was that had brought him to such a decisive turning point, Fernande had tried and failed to fathom it. He was already deeply embroiled in a new quest, which she suspected he would ultimately need to continue without her. For the time being, they remained apart, though she was invited back to the Bateau-Lavoir when Picasso finally unveiled his mysterious canvas.
6.
The Demoiselles Unveiled
The day finally came when Picasso was ready to reveal the painting that came to be called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. He uncovered it first to Fénéon, then Uhde, Kahnweiler and Shchukin, before showing it to Fernande, Braque and Apollinaire. Fénéon’s reaction did not bode well: ‘You ought to do caricatures,’ he suggested. (‘And yet Fénéon was quite somebody,’ mused Picasso later.) As far as Kahnweiler was concerned, the painting was unfinished. Shchukin kept his opinion to himself, confiding only in Gertrude Stein: ‘What a loss for French art.’ Braque afterwards described seeing it as his first encounter of any consequence with Picasso:
My true meeting with him was in his studio, in the Bateau-Lavoir, in front of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I was with Apollinaire. There at once I knew the artist and the man, the adventurer, in the work he set down in spite of everything, as it seemed. People have talked about provocation. For my part, I found in it an unswerving determination, an extraordinary yearning for freedom asserted with a daring, one might almost say a calm fieriness, already sure of itself … But Picasso was very anxious, watching for my reaction.
At first, Braque was silent. Then, without revealing his true reflections, he said, ‘It’s as if you wanted to make us eat tow [hemp] or drink kerosene …’ (In other words, who do you expect your viewers to be, circus performers and fire-eaters?) Next to see it was Derain. He drily predicted that Picasso would probably be found hanged behind his own canvas. By any standards, the painting was shocking. A group of five nude women stared out at the viewer, looming larger than life, all nearly seven feet tall, like a startling cinematic close-up – almost as disconcerting, perhaps, as that train in the first film Parisian audiences ever saw, which had seemed about to come roaring out of the screen into the auditorium. The gigantic figures were outrageously, disconcertingly present, pressing to the surface of the picture plane, arrested in the moment as if placed on pause for a mere second, if at all. The scene was obviously a brothel. (But of course it was a brothel painting, Picasso told Braque, where else would you expect to find a group of naked women?) He was calling it El Bordel. Years later, André Salmon renamed it Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, after a bar in the Carrer d’Avinyó in Barcelona which (for no good reason) he claimed was a bordello. In the meantime, he, Max Jacob and Apollinaire nicknamed the painting Le Bordel philosophique (presumed to be their nod to the Marquis de Sade).
; The disturbing nature of the work had to do not only with the size and attitude of the women: the flesh colours were disconcerting, rendering them starkly naked rather than acceptably nude. Unlike some of the earlier studies for the work, the final painting had a radically flattened perspective. Even the way the women were grouped was startling; there seemed to be no connection between them; each was engaged only with the viewer. They were clearly prostitutes – real prostitutes in the here and now, not artfully depicted courtesans distanced by their position within the frame with discreetly averted expressions or strategically placed drapery. Here, the drapery, such as it was, did nothing to subdue the overt sexuality of the figures; these were not only whores, but whores with attitude.
Though their impact was shockingly fleshy, they also had a carved appearance, like Picasso’s individual figure drawings, but they lacked the exuberance and vitality of the Fauvist-style coloured figures that animate the sketchbooks he filled while he worked on the initial stages of the painting. Individually, the outsized figures on canvas were equally disconcerting. The head of one standing figure was mask-like, like the head of an African or Iberian carving. Another masked figure squatted, legs splayed, to face the viewer. The gazes of at least two of the three others were so rivetingly expressionless – fixed in time – that the feeling of being watched by them seemed literally momentous, as if at any moment the expression of any one of the staring women might change. The sense of being locked by them into the moment, or frozen in time, only added to the bewildering impact of the work. The overall effect was of a moving image only momentarily stilled. ‘For me the role of painting,’ Picasso once said, ‘is not to depict movement, to show reality in movement. Its role, for me, is rather to halt movement. You must go further than movement in order to halt an image.’ The difficulty for the viewer was how to look at the picture. If you let the eye move across the frame from left to right, as in a conventional painting, you moved from naked, staring faces to masked ones. Looked at that way, there seemed to be no connection between the masked and the unmasked figures – no story. But, of course, that was not the intention: the impact was in the juxtaposition, and in the shock of the present moment there was no story, just the shock of confrontation.