by Sue Roe
The time had come for Harriet’s friend Caroline to return to America. Alice took her to the boat train. ‘I said to her, “Caroline dear, you must see that when Harriet goes back to America she does not return to Paris because it is already arranged that I should go to stay with Gertrude and Leo at the rue de Fleurus.” “That is what I suspected,” said Caroline, “you can count on me.”’
4.
Flight
In January 1910, Fernande underwent surgery for her illness, from which she made a good recovery. Picasso had put the lease of the new apartment in her name, a sign, perhaps, of his insecurity about the move, as well as a way of placating (or reassuring) her. Nevertheless, it was already clear that their relationship had again begun to unravel. At the Steins’ one Saturday evening, a full-scale row broke out when Fernande provoked Picasso by declaring that even the neighbourhood gangsters were better people than artists. Picasso replied, ‘yes apaches of course have their universities, artists do not’. Fernande shook him until a button fell off his jacket, yelling, ‘you think you are witty but you are just stupid … your only claim to distinction is that you are a precocious child’.
• • •
At the Salon des Indépendants that spring, the painting that attracted particular attention was an eye-catching, semi-abstract work entitled Et le soleil s’endormit sur l’Adriatique, painted by a clearly prodigiously gifted newcomer, named as Joachim-Raphael Boronali. The painting, however, turned out to be a hoax, carried out by Raymond Dorgelès, acting on a bet. He had produced it by tying a brush loaded with paint to Lolo the donkey’s tail and – despite protests from Frédé – placing a large canvas behind the tethered donkey’s back. No one was particularly scandalized – as someone remarked, if this prank had backfired, there would have been another. These sorts of jokes were typical of the new generation of artists and writers beginning to infiltrate Montmartre, though to Picasso and his friends, they were beginning to wear thin. All Picasso really wanted (like many artists, perhaps) was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. Fernande complained that, apart from his work, all that seemed to interest him were the mounting piles of masks and ceremonial figures, bronze, pewter and porcelain ornaments and his growing collection of bizarre objets trouvés, including a little church organ which emitted a faint scent of incense when the bellows were pumped.
Despite Picasso’s reluctance to socialize, the couple regularly entertained, waited on by their new maid in cap and apron; their table comfortably sat four or five, but there were often many more squeezed around it. Much as she enjoyed playing hostess, however, the days were gone when Fernande had been content to stay at home. Temptation lurked in the form of the Taverne de l’Hermitage, conveniently located on the boulevard Rochechouart immediately opposite their apartment, where regular performers included a San Franciscan with a repertory of Negro songs and dances and a female acrobat who was soon posing for Picasso. Incomparably livelier and flashier than the old Lapin Agile, l’Hermitage attracted a large, varied clientele, including people in sports and show business as well as the ‘pimps … clowns, acrobats, equestriennes and tightrope walkers, who rekindled [Picasso’s] delight in the circus’. The place was also frequented by celebrity boxers, in whom Picasso and his friends took a great interest; an especial favourite was Sam McVea, because they thought he looked like Braque.
At l’Hermitage, codes of behaviour were urban and savvy; there, people conducted themselves in nothing like the way they had in the Lapin Agile. Women came in unaccompanied to meet young men who stood about ‘like characters from a Carco novel’, waiting for them to make an entrance. Occasionally, during the course of an evening, a girl would ostentatiously abandon her partner for an artist, causing a scene. There were ugly debacles, between drinkers as well as lovers. Once, someone pushed past Picasso, and he punched the man on the jaw, escaping with his life only because Braque intervened, a victory for which Picasso nevertheless took the credit. Everyone had their own clique and their own established corner of the tavern. Groups of strangers eyed one another up suspiciously: ‘Strange, disturbing figures would stand watching the group of artists as they sat in their corner on the right side of the café, not too near the orchestra …’ Popular music, too, was on the brink of change; whereas everyone had found the orchestra charming up in the Moulin de la Galette, here it seemed embarrassing; people stood huddled in their cliques, as far away from it as they could. As Fernande later reflected, it might have been different had the band played Negro music, but, though in many ways, in 1909, everyone would have been ready for it, the days of black musicians and Josephine Baker were still to come.
One of the regular crowds at l’Hermitage consisted of dashing young Italian Futurists; they included Gino Severini, in Montmartre since 1906, when he had come to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. The Futurists’ article ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ had appeared on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was intermittently in Paris (he had studied for his baccalaureate at the Sorbonne. After taking a degree in law at the University of Pavia, he had decided instead to become a man of letters. A minor car accident near Milan in early 1909 had had the effect of transforming his character: he became a pioneering advocate of modernism, determined to abolish art nouveau and all it stood for). The eleven tenets of the 1909 Manifesto hailed the onset of the modern age, in which advances in technology, the speed of travel and the uninhibited expression of emotion would be applauded. The Futurists would ‘hymn the man at the wheel’. Aggression became a positive quality: ‘No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.’ Cowardice was derided. The Futurists’ vision was unashamedly iconoclastic; to make way for the future, they urged the wholesale destruction of the past: ‘We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind …’
The manifesto had attracted widespread attention, which, a year later, showed no sign of waning. In 1910, two further manifestos appeared in Italy, the ‘Technical Manifesto’, published as a leaflet by Poesia in Milan on 11 April, and the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Musicians’, published in Bologna on 11 October. The former set out the Futurists’ programme for ‘the renovation of painting’; Severini was among the signatories urging artists to be concerned no longer merely with form and colour, nor with simply reproducing a fixed moment on canvas. The aim of modern art was the expression of ‘the dynamic sensation itself’, already the concern of Picasso and others (and of Gertrude Stein, in writing), since the exhibition of Cézanne’s works in Paris in 1907. The Futurists’ other key focus was on the creation of perpetual motion; they urged artists to see human figures not as static entities but rather as ‘persistent symbols of universal vibration’. And their agendas embraced one other major change – the nature of the artist’s engagement with the audience. The Futurists’ aim (like Cézanne’s and, latterly, Picasso’s) was to ‘put the spectator in the centre of the picture’. In Paris, that revolution in the structure of seeing was already happening, begun in Montmartre, and central to the aims of both Picasso and Braque. The concerns of radical young artists in Italy seemed now to be converging with those of artists in Paris, though it would be impossible to determine the extent to which any of the Futurists’ ideas were actually inspired by Severini’s conversations with the artists (including Modigliani) he met in Montmartre.
• • •
While Diaghilev recreated the ballet as dynamic visual spectacle, while the Futurists worshipped sensation and speed, other advances were progressing, albeit at a more gradual pace. Anyone looking for Picasso and Braque in 1910 might well have found them on the outskirts of Paris, at the aerodrome at Issy les Moulineaux, watching as extraordinarily flimsy-looking contraptions made their perilous way into the air, the pilots, in helmet and goggles, seated precariously up front in their open-air cockpits. The pioneering flights of Wilbur and Orville Wright were the talk of France. In their studios, Picasso and Braque made paper sculptures and �
��flying machines’, mock bird constructions perhaps inspired by the Wright brothers’ inventions. They used paper sculptures to experiment with three-dimensional construction, exploring techniques they fed back into their paintings. Braque showed Picasso methods of gluing the paper together so that it did not buckle but, even so, Picasso’s sculptures often had to be secured with pins. (Unfortunately, none of these sculptures survived; what came next were Picasso’s and Braque’s papier collé works, and the original inspiration for those was as much Braque’s painting as the paper sculptures, since in some respects they harked back to the structural discoveries Braque had made two or three years earlier in his landscapes of L’Estaque.)
Wilbur Wright, particularly, was a popular hero in France from 1908 – the year of his public exhibition flight near Le Mans – until his untimely death from tuberculosis in 1912. The brothers had been working on aeroplanes since 1900. Their first successful flight, lasting fifty-nine seconds, was in 1903 and, during 1904 and 1905, they developed their flying machines into the first practical wing-fixed aircraft, using techniques that meant the craft could be effectively steered and its equilibrium maintained in the air. In 1906, Dumont in France made a short flight; in 1908, Wilbur Wright broke his record by flying for ninety-one minutes. Both Picasso and Braque were fired up by the idea of flight and closely followed Wilbur Wright’s career. They both wore ‘Vilbours’, the replicas of the pilot’s familiar peaked green cap on sale in all the department stores, and Braque acquired a new nickname, ‘Vilbour’. Picasso was ‘Pard’, after ‘Pardner’, Buffalo Bill’s sidekick. (The Buffalo Bill stories were now available in paperback and had begun piling up in the tin bath where Picasso kept them, with his regular instalments of books containing the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Nick Carter.) Men could fly. ‘If one plane wasn’t enough to get the thing off the ground,’ Picasso observed, ‘they added another and tied the whole thing together with bits of string and wood, very much as we were doing.’ In the modern world, he had decided, people no longer wanted painting, they wanted ‘art’, which included mass-produced objects. He and Braque would inspect a work and value it according to whether it consisted more of Dufayel (a department store) or the Louvre: ‘And we judged everything like that. That was our way of judging the paintings we looked at. We said: “Oh no, that’s the Louvre again. But there, there, is just a little Dufayel!”…’ The Futurists’ aims may well have been behind this, with their denunciation of the ‘eternal and futile worship of the past’ and advocation of the destruction of museums; though neither Picasso nor Braque would have gone along with the Futurists’ conclusion that art ‘can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice’. Perhaps, after all, the Dufayel/Louvre test was just (or at least, partly) a joke. At around this time, Vlaminck visited Derain in his studio in the rue Tourlaque. He found him flying a model aeroplane of his own invention, with a rubber propeller wound around a large bobbin, looking on with his typical air of bemusement as it collided with the furniture, crashing into glass and pots and tearing canvases.
Overtly or covertly, from early 1910 onwards, the Futurist agendas reflected or coincided with a turning point in the artistic life of Paris. New ideas, as reflected in the work of Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Bakst and others, and the desire to slough off old constraints increasingly reflected the way everyone now worked with a conscious eye to the future … everyone, that is, except Modigliani. When Severini asked him to join the Futurists, he declined, saying he wanted nothing to do with any movement that called for the destruction of museums. In any case, he had other distractions. That summer of 1910, he enjoyed a brief liaison with 25-year-old Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who had arrived in Paris with her husband. When he left to return to the family estate in Slepnyovo, she stayed behind and spent the rest of the summer wandering through the streets of Paris with Modigliani. Though she was barely at the start of her career as a poet and he was unable to read Russian, she translated her poetry for him and he recognized the power of her poetic intuition. When she left Paris, she promised to return. All winter long, they corresponded, Anna responding to Modigliani’s love letters with poems. When she came back the following summer, she made her way to his studio, her arms full of roses. When she found it empty, she threw her flowers through the open window (perhaps she had seen Columbine, the movie of 1911 in which the heroine makes the same gesture). While Anna’s husband attended seminars at the Sorbonne, she and Modigliani spent their days strolling through the Jardins du Luxembourg and exploring the Latin Quarter and the Louvre. Inspired by the art of ancient Egypt, Modigliani made drawings of Anna’s head; her face was slight, doe-eyed, serpentine, her hair styled like that of Egyptian dancers and queens. The Byzantine artists he admired reduced facial features to gestural marks, believing that life on earth is transient, while spirit endures. Modigliani began to do the same, and it may be possible to date from his meeting with Anna the closed or inward-looking eyes of his sitters, a device designed to evoke the spiritual quality of their interior lives.
Modigliani’s sceptical attitude to the Futurists’ agenda set him apart, since, for many, the Futurists were the new celebrities. By 1911, the handsome young Italians, one in particular, would succeed in exerting their influence over Fernande. For the time being, as Gertrude Stein observed, now that Fernande had a proper bonne capable of serving up soufflés, she should have been happier than ever before, but somehow she was not; and neither was Picasso. The problem was that Fernande could no longer fulfil his dreams. Yet the young Picasso was not ruthless; he knew what she had been to him – and perhaps still was.
5.
Exoticism
The reappearance of the Ballets Russes in spring 1910 sent Paris into a state of frenzy. Diaghilev and his company returned with a programme that seemed to audiences even more sensational than the one before. With The Firebird, a riot of blazing colour that again combined avant-garde choreography with traditional Russian motifs, he introduced 28-year-old Igor Stravinsky to the Parisian scene. The young Russian arrived solemnly contemplating the grey streets of Paris after the red and ochre splendour of St Petersburg. The tonal dissonance of his music was so startling that even the dancers joked that it sounded as if he hardly cared whether he hit the right notes. The season also included the orientally inspired Scheherazade, an extraordinarily sensuous production danced with fluid, flowing movements and set in a harem, with Nijinsky as the Golden Slave.
The Firebird was an awesome spectacle of colour, sound and moving image: what the French call ‘animation’. To audiences who still marvelled at the sight of coloured stills on screen, for whom the stuttering black and white animation of the motion picture was still captivatingly new, this unprecedented coloured spectacle of raw, sensual emotion was truly mesmerizing. It combined folkloric roots, symbolized by the Russian emblem of the firebird, with Stravinsky’s astonishing music and Fokine’s arresting choreography. The firebird crackled with staccato movement as she darted across the stage, arms outstretched, her fingers making exaggerated vibrato gestures like scarlet spurts of forked light.
Nevertheless, the real showstopper of 1910 was Scheherazade, with music by Rimsky-Korsakov, exotic sets and sensual dance moves such as had never before been seen on the public stage. The story was minimal (a harem of beautiful women take advantage of their master’s absence to indulge in an opulent orgy with a band of muscular Negro slaves), but the visual impact was unforgettable: ‘Bakst’s emphasis on bold, bright, sumptuous colours – vivid greens, blues and reds paired with oranges, purples and yellows – transformed colour into a dominant emotive force, enhanced by complex, swirling patterns and the revealing oriental costumes of the dancers. Colour attained a rhythm of its own …’ – opulent, exotic, dramatic – in a spectacle that later commentators would readily identify as the epitome of Diaghilev’s modern aesthetic. Léon Bakst’s main inspiration in designing the set and costumes had been the (then recently deceased) modern Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, whose work had been prominen
tly displayed in the Russian exhibition at the 1906 Salon d’Automne. Vrubel painted with a vision all his own, applying brilliant colour in lozenge forms and jagged planes which earned him comparisons with Cézanne, as well as with the early cubists. The audiences at Scheherazade went wild.
In the wake of the 1910 Ballets Russes season, the celebrity everyone was talking about was not, as might have been predicted, Nijinsky (who was under contractual obligation to return to Russia) but set designer Léon Bakst, who was feted throughout Paris and interviewed in fashionable magazines. His art was shown in galleries and his designs for ballets purchased by the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. French and American actresses asked him to design dresses for them; artists and fashion designers clamoured to meet and to be seen with him; chic Parisian boutiques sold étoffes Scheherazades. Bakst was quick to acknowledge that his reputation as a designer had been preceded by Poiret’s; he hailed Poiret – who commissioned twelve fashion drawings from him, for twelve thousand francs – as le dernier cri. Long after the end of the Ballets Russes season, the impact of Scheherazade went on reverberating, not least throughout the world of fashion. Women appeared at parties dressed in Poiret’s vivid colours and oriental patterns, inspired by Bakst, wearing turbans, jewelled tunics and even harem pants, as if stylishly rushing into the modern age. Deciding to remain in Paris for another six months, on 25 June Bakst put down a deposit on the studio in the Hôtel Biron just vacated by Matisse, who that month finally closed his school to settle definitively in Issy. This was Matisse’s first encounter with the world of the Ballets Russes.
Over the next few years, Diaghilev took the company to Monte Carlo, London and Rome, delighting new audiences – with one notable exception: the first audience of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which in 1913 scandalized even the French. With ever more avant-garde productions and sets, by the end of the First World War, Diaghilev had succeeded in appointing Derain, Picasso and Matisse as costume and set designers, continuing to develop what amounted to a radical modern aesthetics of the stage. Picasso’s cu-bist ‘sculpture-costumes’ and decor appeared in the 1917 production of Parade; in 1919, Derain designed sets for Rossini’s La Boutique fantasque. Derain loved the theatre; it was the medium in which he felt art made its most direct appeal to the emotions of the audience. ‘Painting should inspire like this,’ he remarked, ‘par monstration et non point par démonstration’ (‘by presentation, not representation’).