by Sue Roe
The relationship between Picasso and Derain seemed to have developed since Derain moved to the rue Tourlaque. When Derain had first arrived in Montmartre, André Salmon had noticed him making his way down the hillside in the mornings, always affable, always willing to surface from his reveries to give a friendly smile and bid whoever he passed good day, but he was surprised how little Derain seemed to have to do with Picasso. Since then, some said Apollinaire had engineered a renewal of their earlier acquaintance; or perhaps Fernande had done so, hoping to encourage a stronger friendship between Picasso and her friend Alice’s new lover. Or perhaps the four appeared to be a more intimate group than they actually were.
Whatever the truth, the new gang that surrounded Picasso (Derain, Vlaminck and Braque) made an impact in the streets of Montmartre, where people would turn round to look at them. Derain was still working on his (quasi-) English image, though even Fernande considered his elaborate waistcoats and green and red ties somewhat overdone.
Vlaminck struck her as the most confident of the four – with good reason. In February, Vollard had given him an exhibition of landscapes, seascapes and figures. His paintings had rendered the window of the gallery vivid with colour in the lilac-grey, early-evening light of Montmartre, turning the heads of those who wandered along the rue Laffitte. And where Vollard went, Kahnweiler followed; throughout March 1908, he had shown twenty-seven paintings by Vlaminck. None of this seemed to interest Vlaminck particularly; his apparent nonchalance puzzled Fernande, to whom he seemed (perhaps intentionally) inscrutable. She was unaware that the apparent social solidity of the gang did not necessarily signal consensus on artistic ideas and developments. In that respect, the gang of four was about to split down the middle.
As for Braque, Fernande distrusted him implicitly, seeing only his ‘powerful head which made him look like a white negro’, curly black hair and boxer’s shoulders. She thought him studiedly casual in his ready-made department-store clothes and narrow black ties worn in a loose knot in the Norman style, believing him to be ‘suspicious, able and clever’, in her view, a typical (French) Northerner. She also notes a hint of affectation in his casual gestures, coarse voice and brash expressions – the influence of the movies?
Among the most popular forms of entertainment in Montmartre was boxing. The Picasso gang were enthusiasts – all, that is, except Vlaminck, who was not above using brute force to make a point and was strongly of the opinion that it was more effective than any boxing manoeuvre – until, that is, Derain and Braque both challenged him to a fight. Picasso and Fernande met Vlaminck as he was leaving Derain’s studio, ‘his nose swollen like a potato and in a pretty sad state, though totally convinced’. Picasso’s passion for the sport was as a spectator; one lesson with Derain had been enough to last him a lifetime. However, he liked to think that, given his thick-set build, when they went about as a gang of four he would surely be mistaken for a boxer (much as, in the early years, he always hoped to be taken for a clown). Braque, on the other hand, was not all machismo; his friends still included Marie Laurencin and Georges Lepape, now an illustrator for the fashion journal La Gazette du bon ton. (Within three years, he would be designing fashion plates for Poiret.) On Sunday afternoons, Braque still went waltzing at the Moulin de la Galette; on visits to the Bateau-Lavoir, he sat calmly smoking his pipe and playing his accordion.
However he fitted into the bande, Braque quickly became an indispensable companion for Picasso. Temperamentally, though, they were quite different: Picasso was volatile and expressive; Braque, friendly yet inscrutable, exuded sangfroid. Since his visit to the Bateau-Lavoir to see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, however, Braque had begun to show a serious interest in Picasso’s work and, as artists, they were almost uncannily complementary. Still only twenty-six and twenty-five respectively, they quickly became inseparable allies. (Matisse, at thirty-seven, with his increasing commissions, his family life, his idyllic vision of Arcadia, suddenly seemed to belong to another generation.) Both Picasso and Braque relished the street life and popular culture of Paris and followed the new urban heroes of popular literature and the screen. They loved cowboy and adventure stories and were avid fans of the ‘Nick Carter Library’ of cheap, bi-weekly paperbacks, booklets with trendy, full-colour covers like movie posters. Nick Carter was the quintessential urban hero, swaggering, knowing, always able to outwit his enemies; the epitome of urban cool. The two exchanged paperbacks and went regularly to the movies together. And they were on a shared quest to discover in painting new ways of depicting the modern world. Despite his comments about eating tow and swallowing kerosene, Braque had in fact quickly realized that, with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso was breaking new ground. From now on, they began to develop similar ideas and Braque introduced Picasso to aspects of his technical repertoire. Braque understood, too, the significance of the ethnic art Picasso had seen in the Trocadéro; l’art nègre had been displayed in the museum at Le Havre since at least 1904 and, in 1905, he had bought his first tribal mask, from a sailor or a friend of his father. Fernande distrusted Braque from the start, understandably, since in many respects he had already begun to replace her. Picasso sometimes even referred to him as ‘ma femme’ (a safe tag since, like Picasso, Braque obviously loved women); Max Jacob waspishly referred to him as the ‘disciple’.
Picasso now began the process of trying to transform Braque’s love life, with a view to finding him someone more suitable than the woman he seemed to be involved with, Paulette Philippi, a notorious femme galante who ran a sophisticated opium salon patronized by the literati. The extent to which Braque enjoyed her favours as a courtesan was never really known but, according to Henri-Pierre Roché (one of her coterie), Braque was regularly invited to her parties and was one of her special favourites: ‘She set Braque apart, because he worked by inclination – enough but not too much’ – which seems to have been how he went about most things.
It was decided among the bande that the daughter of Max Jacob’s cousin, who owned the hideously tasteless Cabaret du Néant, might prove a more appropriate choice. The introduction was planned and the Picasso gang hired formal evening clothes for the occasion. After an evening in the Néant of such uninhibited pleasure that nobody was in a fit state to identify their own discarded finery, they were asked by the management to leave. They obliged, helping themselves to whatever garments they found in the cloakroom. Eventually, Picasso and Fernande came up with someone more suitable, Marcelle Lapré, a friend of Fernande. She lacked the more overtly decorative appeal of Jacob’s cousin, being short and plump with unusually protuberant eyes; Jacob referred to her as the little sea-monster. But Picasso and Fernande thought her charming, witty and discreet, so much so that it took Kahnweiler to reveal that she also went by the name of Madame Vorvanne and was probably thus living with, or even married to, a Monsieur Vorvanne. Picasso’s matchmaking skills had once more been put to the test. Eventually, because (or in spite) of Picasso’s intervention, Marcelle did indeed become Madame Braque, but not for some years. For the time being, Braque kept his own counsel – and Paulette.
Throughout the early months of 1908, nevertheless, he and Picasso were constantly in each other’s company, exploring rather than denying the similarities in their work. Both were striving for a new kind of pictorial synthesis, moving away from mimesis and aiming for the creation rather than simply the illustration of an experience on canvas; they were creating formations that were three-dimensional, sculptural and poetic and challenging the relationships between surface and depth. Though in a sense Picasso had begun that endeavour in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in terms of subject matter the painting had been a one-off. Having gone as far as he could with the need to explore a particular kind of pictorial brutality, it was as if Picasso had freed himself to absorb other influences. Alongside him, Braque calmly developed his own ideas along similar lines, introducing a new geometry into both his figure studies and his landscapes. He saw Picasso frequently throughout the spring, but left Paris
on 2 May for a brief trip to Le Havre to help organize an exhibition (mounted by the Cercle d’Art Moderne) of works by artists including himself, van Dongen, Derain and Matisse. In the middle of the month, he left again for L’Estaque.
9.
Festivities, Prospects, Tragedy
The tenor of life in Montmartre was gradually changing. One day at around this time, the spring of 1908, Paul Poiret arrived at the Bateau-Lavoir, immaculate in white gloves, with black cane and fashionable trilby, impressing Fernande with ‘the most sensational of entrances’ amidst all the general squalor. Surveying the scene for a masterpiece and seeing only a jumble of African carvings, collections of curious bric-a-brac, a pile of Fernande’s blouses, a clutter of unwashed pots and pans and a mountain of ashes higher than the stove, he at last spotted with relief a little gouache portrait of a woman. ‘Oh! Remarkable! Delightful! Admirable! A portrait of Madame?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Picasso, ‘it’s a portrait of Madame … by Madame.’ Despite his faux pas, Poiret began inviting Picasso and his friends to dinners and parties at his lavish apartment in the rue de Rome, where he made Fernande a gift of a rose-coloured, gold-fringed shawl and a spun-glass accessory for her hats the like of which she had never seen before.
Since 1906, he had been running his couture house more discreetly, from premises in the rue Pasquier, where, during the past two years, he had accumulated a cache of seriously rich and well-connected clients. Under his influence, fashionable women seemed to be becoming ever slimmer and more provocatively lithe. The Paris correspondent for Vogue reported in May 1908 on the new silhouette:
The fashionable figure is growing straighter and straighter, less bust, less hips, more waist, and a wonderfully long, slender suppleness about the limbs. Here even the cab drivers and butcher boys have already become accustomed to seeing ladies stepping along sidewalks, holding closely in one hand the long skirt, which reveals plainly every line and curve of the leg from hip to ankle. The petticoat is obsolete, pre-historic. How slim, how graceful, how elegant women look! The leg has suddenly become fashionable.
(The following year, Poiret moved again, to a fabulously ostentatious dwelling with gardens backing on to the Faubourg St Honoré.)
For all his charismatic charm and flamboyant mannerisms, Poiret was personally unpretentious. The parties he threw were friendly, lively occasions. Fernande, understandably, admired him. ‘He saw things on a large, a grand scale. His extravagant tastes were part of this and so was the total absence of any kind of meanness in him when it came to questions of value, whether in business or in art.’ At his parties over the next few years, the Picasso gang – Derain and Vlaminck had been Poiret’s friends from the early days in Chatou – mingled with other artists and designers of Poiret’s acquaintance. They included Georges Lepape, since, though he saw less these days of his old friends from the Académie Humbert, he was still in touch with Braque and Marie Laurencin. Poiret’s sister Nicole, recently married to one of the artists in Montmartre, also knew Marie Laurencin. Perhaps through Nicole, Poiret had discovered Marie’s talent for fencing; she had often been seen, ‘eyeglass in one hand and foil in the other, exchanging thrusts with the Pasha of Paris’. He designed a fencing costume especially for her and they fenced in his fabulous apartment, with its 50-feet-wide façade, from which ten doors gave access to the gardens, the lawns vivid with multicoloured crocuses in spring.
The network which would eventually link the bohemian world of Montmartre with the more elevated artistic circles Diaghilev moved in was thus gradually being established through chance acquaintances and social contingencies, and flitting easily between circles and providing stimulation everywhere he went was Poiret. He had begun to purchase paintings by each of the artists in the Picasso gang, unguided by anyone else’s opinion, making choices based entirely on his own personal taste. He would hang a still life by Picasso next to a nude by van Dongen, accumulating works by Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marie Laurencin, Utrillo and Modigliani. (Over the years, he amassed a substantial, eclectic collection, including, in 1911, Brâncus¸i’s large copper sculpture Bird in Space.)
• • •
Each year, in May or June, the students of the École des Beaux-Arts planned and took part in the annual Quatres Arts ball. It was held at the Moulin Rouge, which closed for one night to its regular clientele, was cleared of its usual attractions and decorated by the students of the École. On the night of the ball, great crowds of artists came surging out of the courtyard and on up the rue Bonaparte, walking in crowds or being carried on floats, all in fancy dress (many of the costumes run up by the seamstresses who posed as life models in Paul Alexandre’s house in the rue du Delta) as they processed from the Left Bank to Montmartre. In the small hours, the celebrations became increasingly decadent. Amidst the crowds of models and art students dressed in extravagant outfits, the life models from the studios paraded nude. Then came the mock Black Mass, which consisted of a naked woman stretched out on a cross covered with black velvet illuminated by flickering candlelight, a ‘bishop’ swinging a censer over the idol. This was followed by the ‘Peacock Woman and her brilliant portrayal of Venus’, crouching in a vast, shimmering peacock’s tail of emerald and lapis lazuli.
As the festivities went on, students in various stages of undress emerged from the Moulin Rouge in a state of high intoxication. One year, a group of artists dressed as acrobats scaled the walls of buildings, waking the respectable neighbourhood when one unfortunate reveller, climbing on to the pedestal of the sculpture by Cordonnier in front of the Grand Palais, slipped and ruptured a kidney. Everyone would attend, and almost everyone was high on hashish. On another occasion, the revellers included Braque, who in 1906 was spotted, dressed as a Roman, sitting chatting in the streets with Paulette. They kept being disturbed by a float from the procession, which eventually he threatened to overturn. When the driver of the float called Braque’s bluff, he peeled off his tunic and slid on all fours beneath the float. On the second attempt he caused a stir, as he managed to lift it, higher and higher, before a cheering crowd. Paul Alexandre hazily recalled walking with his brother Jean after the ball, late at night along the Champs-Élysées – or was it the Quai d’Orsay? ‘I could see the gas lamps rise up in tiers like notes of music on an imaginary stave and I began to sing the tune written there.’
Poiret also attended the ball, dressed in extravagant theatrical costumes of his own design. In 1911, he would send his models to open the ball, and they showed his latest creations, in sparkling textures and vibrant colours, as he had been invited by the École des Beaux-Arts to participate annually by organizing ‘some sensational entry’. This consolidated his feeling of being part of the artistic scene. When Vollard began producing albums of artists’ work (including, in 1908, an album of Picasso’s etchings), Poiret followed suit. In 1908, he published an album of his own designs, illustrated by printmaker Paul Iribe. Les Robes de Poiret racontées par Paul Iribe was a portfolio of eleven colour plates featuring ten new Poiret gowns. The album, beautifully printed on fine Holland paper and published in a limited edition, was technically innovative, Iribe’s illustrations announcing a significant departure in fashion illustration. His plates showed models in motion – leaning over, turning aside, conversing – against stylishly minimalist backgrounds. This was a new vision of women, quite different from the ramrod-straight models posed in ornate settings cluttered with plants, screens and art nouveau furniture which had characterized the fashion plates of earlier years. The decision to employ fine artists to illustrate designs was also novel; and the use of an innovative printing technique – pochoir, a kind of stencilling – made it possible to print with broad expanses of bright, strong colour and bold, simple lines. Poiret was one of the first to see the potential of this technique: it was one of the reasons he had chosen Iribe, a printmaker, as his illustrator. (For his next album, published in 1911, he would commission Braque’s old friend from the Académie Humbert Georges Lepape.) The new printing techniques enhanced the
simple cuts and elongated lines of Poiret’s garments, which were streamlined to suggest ease of movement and a more liberated lifestyle. In fashion, as in painting, the way the human form was presented was in the process of major change.
In addition to his albums of Picasso’s etchings, in 1908 Vollard sold one of his Rose Period paintings, Family of Saltimbanques, which depicted a family of acrobats resting between performances on the waste ground of the Maquis. The painting was purchased by André Level, leader of La Peau d’Ours, the society of young dealers who had purchased Matisse’s work two years earlier. Level paid a thousand francs for Family of Saltimbanques, a sum which, according to Vollard, had the effect of terrifying all the other collectors. These included Kahnweiler, who, after his initial reaction to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, had soon realized that Picasso might after all be the man to bring about a new era in painting. New to the scene and still in his early twenties, he was learning fast from the established dealers in Montmartre and had begun to acquire works by van Dongen, Derain, Vlaminck and Braque as well as Picasso.
Kahnweiler was sociable and knew how to talk to the young artists. He went to the Cirque Medrano and the Rat Mort with Picasso and regularly raced his skiff and his motor boat, the Saint Matorel, on the Seine. He had already followed Vollard’s example of mounting exhibitions of work by single artists and, when he saw his published albums of artists’ works, he brought out similar publications, which were soon being sought after by connoisseurs. He now began to attract the attention of Sergei Shchukin, who would soon begin acquiring paintings through him. (In recognition of their steadily improving standard of living, Fernande had already appointed a femme de ménage, though her housekeeping seemed to consist mainly of beating their ornaments with a feather duster that had lost most of its feathers before settling down to read the newspaper in Picasso’s armchair.)