by Sue Roe
On 10 August 1908, the head of the police in Paris released a statute, to take effect from 1 September, issuing new regulations designed to introduce a degree of law and order into the theatres and cinemas of Paris. The main problems were risk of fire (the peculiar smell of burning oil or acetylene mingled with waffles, absinthe, incense or horse dung drifted from the cinemas), hygiene, and hats – more irritating in those days than mobile telephones in ours, since someone’s elaborate hat could obscure an entire performance, and people often wore them just for the fun of causing annoyance to those in the rows behind. Under the new rules, the municipality was required to address the risk of fire by forbidding the conversion of certain music halls to cinemas; to demand that the picture houses keep their halls a little cleaner; and to resolve the question of hats (Article 220: ‘It is forbidden to disturb the performance with hats, in whichever manner’). For the audiences, none of these problems detracted from the appeal of films such as those featuring Nick Carter, in which, in keeping with the books, the scene was urban and edgy, the story gripping and the hero the epitome of modern machismo. The Nick Carter films may have had an additional appeal for Picasso, since the French Nick (unlike the young, muscular, white American in the United States version) was played by Jean-Baptiste Bressol, an actor with a compact but agile body and dark Mediterranean features. Perhaps it was not only Fernande who had begun to identify with the new screen celebrities.
• • •
At the Salon d’Automne that October, Modigliani and Paul Alexandre joined the crowds gathered in the Grand Palais around Rousseau’s Tiger in the Jungle. Modigliani steered Alexandre away to show him ‘a painting that enchanted him’: The Wedding, Rousseau’s portrait of two peasants dressed to be married, stiffly and incongruously posed in a jungle setting. Alexandre and Modigliani both knew Rousseau, and sometimes passed a quiet evening with him in his studio. By now, Vollard had also met the douanier, who had arrived in his gallery one day with two or three small canvases under his arm. He told Vollard he had fallen on hard times. He had been supporting himself by giving music lessons, but that had got him into a spot of trouble when one of his pupils had asked him to cash a forged cheque. No sooner had he done so than he was arrested. When he saw Rousseau between the arms of two policemen, the culprit had bolted. When he could not be found, Rousseau was brought before the judges. The case seemed to be a lost cause, until his advocate had the bright idea of showing the magistrate one of the defendant’s paintings, which he happened to have with him, and declaring, ‘Can you still doubt that my client is an “innocent”?’ Rousseau had then, he told Vollard, approached Monsieur Jourdain, president of the Salon d’Automne, to ask him for a position as a guard. Suspecting one of the Fauves of playing a trick on him, Monsieur Jourdain had replied that, if Rousseau were employed as a guard, he would have no credibility as a painter and his paintings would have to be removed from the walls. So now Rousseau went regularly to the Salon d’Automne to make sure his work was still on display.
Sometime later, he arrived outside Vollard’s gallery again, this time with a painting two feet high, battling with the canvas against the wind. When he finally got it through the door, Vollard complimented him on it, remarking that the painting was surely good enough for the Louvre. In that case, said Rousseau, would Monsieur Vollard consider giving him a certificate, just something to prove he was coming along? It would help his case with the father of the woman he wished to marry, since the man, a high official in the customs office where Rousseau had been a lowly clerk, had forbidden the liaison and had since discovered that his daughter had been secretly meeting Rousseau. Vollard advised him to be careful, since, if the girl was under sixteen, he could be prosecuted. ‘Oh! Monsieur Vollard! She is fifty-four …’ As if that were not enough, there was the problem of his name; if only it had been not Henri but Léon. Why? asked Vollard. Well, the girl’s name was Leonie. ‘So you see, Léonie … Léon …’ In later years, Vollard often wondered whether Rousseau’s naivety might have been a mask he hid behind. Whether or not, like everyone else, he could not help but see him as ‘good-nature personified’. Derain and Vlaminck were both fond of him (he was, said Vlaminck, like a concierge who had retained the imagination of a five-year-old) and both admired his work.
After purchasing the portrait of the schoolteacher, Picasso received an invitation to one of Rousseau’s evenings at home with friends. In his minuscule studio, Rousseau regularly entertained, and Picasso and Fernande arrived to find the place crowded with people: the grocer, the milkman, the butcher, the baker, their wives and various others, perhaps the neighbourhood concierges, who stood around looking embarrassed, together with actresses, poets and artists, including Apollinaire, Salmon and Braque. According to Salmon, everyone (perhaps even the tradesmen) had dressed for the occasion – to visit Rousseau, one dressed more carefully than when invited by Poiret, and certainly more flamboyantly than for an evening at the Steins’. Rousseau’s studio was lit with Venetian lanterns and decorated not only with beautiful paintings but also with French flags and yellow banners stamped with the eagle of the tsars. He also owned all manner of military paraphernalia which had been produced (along with memorabilia including cigar cases, glassware and jigsaw puzzles) to celebrate the Franco–Russian alliance, which Rousseau had taken as a sign that universal peace was at hand. He looked after his souvenirs, Salmon remarked, the way maids in the old houses of France took care of the best linen. When Rousseau had guests, at one end of the room a small stool served as a stage. The chairs would be put in rows, one close behind another, the benches against the walls. The soirée would begin with various people singing, then Rousseau would play the violin, and follow up with a vaudeville song, ‘Aie! Aie! Aie! Que j’ai mal au dents!’, miming all the gestures.
Perhaps to return Rousseau’s hospitality, on 21 November 1908 Picasso threw a party for the douanier, which has gone down in history as the culminating banquet of the ‘banquet years’ that characterized life in Paris before the Great War. The story of Picasso’s party for Rousseau is legendary. Fernande, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas have all described it, in marginally differing versions. As the time approached for the guests to arrive, up in the place Ravignan, Fernande was preparing for the party by producing vast quantities of the riz à la valencienne she had learned to make in Spain. To accompany it, she had ordered ready-made dishes from Potin, a local restaurateur who delivered prepared food in his smart, covered van. But her party was already in crisis. Her guests were due and the dishes she had ordered had still not arrived. (They finally turned up, too late, the following day.)
Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice made their way to a nearby café, where they had arranged to meet Harriet, to find Marie Laurencin, already high on Dutch courage, falling in and out of the arms of Apollinaire. Fernande, as Alice recalled it, ‘burst in upon us filled with the tragedy of Félix Potin not having delivered the dinner she had ordered’, despite his reputation as ‘le “premier” de l’alimentation à Paris’. Alice suggested telephoning, an indication of the scale of the emergency – or perhaps she thought of it because she had just seen Lucien Guitry in a play by Bernstein which featured portable telephones, the first she had seen. Fernande duly telephoned, but Potin’s was already closed, so she prepared to scour the district and pick up whatever she could from wherever was still open. They agreed that, while she did so, Leo would help Apollinaire get Marie Laurencin up the hill; Gertrude, Alice and Harriet would follow. By the time they arrived at the Bateau-Lavoir, Fernande had managed to find enough dishes to supplement the mountain of rice. She was arranging these on trestle tables, warning everyone not to lean on them and decorating them with ivy leaves, when Frédé from the Lapin Agile arrived, uninvited, with Lolo the donkey. They were abruptly ushered out again by the hostess.
In some versions of the story, Marie Laurencin entered the Bateau-Lavoir and fell straight into a plate of jam tarts. By now, she was more or less accepted by the male painters as one of the ba
nde, though not by Fernande. Gertrude and Leo had just purchased Marie’s group portrait Apollinaire et ses amis, in which she appears with Apollinaire, Picasso and Fernande, an endorsement of her talent – and of her place in the bande – which (especially given that Gertrude had already been shown Fernande’s work and made no such investment) could hardly have endeared her to Fernande.
When Rousseau arrived (accompanied by Apollinaire, Picasso or alone, depending on the version of events), he was shown to the seat of honour at the centre of the table. Seated opposite him was his portrait of the Polish schoolteacher, Picasso’s purchase and the reason the party had come about. Picasso opened the proceedings. Monsieur Rousseau, he announced, cher grand maître, we are very honoured by your presence. Braque played a little fanfare on his accordion to welcome the honoured guest to his garlanded throne. Rousseau responded in a formidable tone, and the celebrations began. Apollinaire then stood on the table to read his celebratory rhyming poem ‘À Notre Rousseau’; everyone joined in the chorus. When he had finished, he jumped off the table, whereupon Salmon seemed spontaneously to disappear. In some versions of the story, Rousseau then serenaded the company on his violin; in others, he sat stupefied beneath a lighted candle, unaware that it was slowly dripping cooling wax on to his head. Apollinaire asked Alice and Harriet to sing ‘the national song of the Red Indians’ and was perturbed to be told they did not think the Red Indians had one.
It was late by the time everyone retired to André Salmon’s studio to retrieve their coats. They discovered that Salmon, now apparently comatose, had eaten a telegram, a box of matches and Alice’s best hat with the yellow feather trimming (at least, according to Alice’s version). An open carriage was ordered to take the guests home, Rousseau, Gertrude, Alice and Harriet, with Leo sitting up front with the driver. As they drove down the hill, ‘Salmon came running past us with a wild cry and fled ahead of us in the darkness.’
PART IV
Street Life
1.
Modern Dance
Matisse had spent February 1909 in Cassis, studying the rhythms of sunlight on water as preparation for La Danse, the wall panel he was painting for Shchukin. Although he had begun tentatively, with a pale, dreamlike scene, by mid-April he had produced a second, more dynamic variant, quite different from the first. It showed dynamically charged nudes dancing in a ring against flat bands of abstract green and blue. Its overt, uncanny physicality unsettled even Matisse himself; he suffered months of nervous tension and insomnia as he continued with his work.
Shchukin, back in Moscow, had been disconcerted by the sketch Matisse had sent him in early March, alarmed by the naked dancers and the clearly bacchanalian mood and style of the piece. In fact, Matisse’s influences had been varied – some classical, some personal. The work was inspired partly by Greek vases and also by his happy memories of the dancers at the Moulin de la Galette performing the farandole; he had always admired its ‘fast tempo and beautiful movement’. Shchukin, however, initially saw only that the depiction of stark-naked figures might cause consternation if the painting were a decorative piece in his Moscow mansion. Nevertheless, having expressed his concern, he had swiftly followed up with a telegram and a letter confirming the commission: ‘I have decided to defy our bourgeois opinions and display on my staircase a subject with THE NUDE.’ At the same time, he commissioned a second panel, this on the theme of music.
The retreat to Cassis had been an escape for Matisse from the demands of Paris and his school. Students were still arriving in steadily increasing numbers from all over Europe and America, each hoping to see the wild leader of the Fauves at work and disappointed when the legend turned out to be a reserved, bespectacled gentleman who retreated behind a screen to paint. By the time he moved, that spring, across to Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had his studio, he was already finding his students a source of stress – they seemed to expect spiritual guidance as well as technical instruction, and he was beginning to feel overburdened. With the prospect of funds forthcoming from Shchukin, Matisse began to investigate the possibility of moving his family as far from the centre of Paris as possible while still remaining within reasonable reach of the capital. When he found a house for rent at Issy les Moulineaux, Amélie was ecstatic. She recklessly took a cab all the way there and made the driver wait while she picked spring flowers in the big, rambling garden, where Matisse would paint in a portable studio among the lilac trees. The story astonished even Gertrude Stein, who remarked: ‘In those days only millionaires kept cabs waiting and then only very occasionally.’
In fashionable Paris, the season was already in full swing. Posters in the streets from Montparnasse to Montmartre were advertising the imminent arrival of the Ballets Russes; photographs of the dancers adorned every Morris column in town. Articles appeared in the press even before the first performance, Le Figaro reporting daily on rehearsals and preparations for the opening night, 17 May. By the 10th, tickets were selling so fast that extra performances were announced. Diaghilev had worked hard on pre-performance publicity. In the spring of the previous year, he had followed his 1906 exhibition of Russian art with an entirely different kind of spectacle, realizing an ambition he had harboured since putting on musical concerts for the visitors to the exhibition. He had successfully produced Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Paris Opéra, in the process courting influential figures including Gabriel Astruc, a concert promoter and theatre manager (and Rimsky-Korsakov’s publisher) who was familiar with the financial and bureaucratic infrastructure of Paris. With their support, since the close of the opera, Diaghilev had been working on a new idea – to put before Parisian audiences a novel style of dance drama. Despite the success of Boris Godunov, it had been made clear to him that the Opéra would not this time be at his disposal; the only available venue was the Théâtre du Châtelet, in those days normally home to operetta and variety shows, which sometimes included ballet (danced by the indifferently talented little ‘rats’ of Montmartre) in the interludes. He had spent the weeks leading up to the first performance supervising the refurbishment of the theatre.
Since the events of 1905 the young generation of dancers in Russia had become increasingly restless with the traditions of Theatre Street and hungry for innovative ideas. In St Petersburg, the previous two years or so had been a period of passing fads, including a short-lived attempt to introduce into the traditional repertoire ideas inspired by the cabarets of Paris. In Montmartre, the music halls and variety theatres were full of Russian dancers, including some from the Ballets Russes, since their shows were cheap to produce and the emigrées needed the work. In the Russian capital, such ideas had been tried, tested and abandoned until the arrival on the scene of the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who had studied the theories of Stanislavski. A gifted dancer himself, he had debuted on his eighteenth birthday with the Imperial Ballet School (now the Mariinsky) and taught Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislaw. He believed that virtuoso ballet techniques did not constitute an end in themselves; his genius lay in his ability to reconcile a more liberated style of dance with the techniques of classical ballet. In Moscow, Fokine had seen Isadora Duncan and recognized her as the first serious dancer to perform the art as pure self-expression. He had also discovered and recruited young Vaslav Nijinsky, twenty in 1909 and still completing his training, who seemed to dance by instinct, propelled by some inner force, his leaps apparently defying gravity. He could even dance en pointe, a skill rare among male dancers at the time. Fokine stressed the importance of the ballet as a medium in which all the elements should work together to draw the spectator into an all-encompassing experience and sought original ways of staging the integration of music and gesture, seeing the music as not merely the accompaniment to but an organic part of a dance.
Diaghilev’s production of Boris Godunov had been not only a musical triumph but a visual marvel – the star of the opera, renowned Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, had worn a resplendent robe encrusted with embroidery and beading; the stage, as one member
of the audience had remarked, had ‘streamed with gold’. Diaghilev had spent the previous year in St Petersburg, visiting scene-painting workshops, production studios and sewing-rooms, as well as attending orchestra rehearsals, wanting to be involved at every stage and with every element of the production. His aim was to revolutionize not merely dance but sets and costumes, to create a radical whole. He told Serge Lifar (later his premier dancer and biographer), ‘Artists, who all their lives deal with epochs, styles, plastic forms, colour and line, elements with which no ballet master can hope to be equally familiar, must in the very nature of things be their closest and co-equal collaborators in the process of creating a ballet. Then, in full awareness of the scenic effect of decor and groupings, the ballet master works out his choreography accordingly.’ When he commissioned Léon Bakst to design and paint the scenery for the new production, he boasted that, for the first time in the history of the stage, the sets were to be painted not by the usual hack scene-painters but by an artist of distinction.
The fortnight preceding the first performance was ‘arduous, feverish, hysterical’ for the dancers. Since 1900, the Châtelet had produced little other than operettas, variety shows and, occasionally, films, and Diaghilev had ordered a complete transformation of the theatre. The proscenium arch was to be redecorated, all six floors recarpeted, most of the seats reupholstered and the first five rows of the stalls demolished. The pit was to be removed and boxes installed. At the back of the stage, workmen hammered and sawed at a new trapdoor and, beneath the stage, laid pipes so that water from the Seine could spout from fountains in the final act of the ballet. Works were still under way when the two hundred and fifty dancers, singers and technicians converged on the theatre, together with the eighty-piece orchestra. The stage hands regarded the ballerinas as lunatics: ‘Ces Russes, oh la la, tous un peu maboule’ (‘They’re all a little bit crazy’). Squashed in between workmen, the dancers rehearsed amidst a din that tested everybody’s powers of concentration and drowned out the sound of the piano. ‘For mercy’s sake, I cannot work with this blasted noise,’ yelled Fokine. A voice from the dark kept promising all should soon be quiet … and, suddenly, silence descended. It was noon, when everything stopped, as if by magic; the French workmen had disappeared for lunch. The Russians, sustained by dishes ordered in from local restaurants, worked on.