The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

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  At the beginning of 1907, Apollinaire met a young Belgian named Géry Pieret; they were working as writers for a magazine that offered advice to investors. (Evidently, the advice was not entirely objective, for the police appeared one day and shut down the publication.) The year before, Apollinaire had moved into his own apartment on the rue Henner, near the base of Montmartre. Picasso had introduced him to Marie Laurencin, a young woman who aspired to be a painter, and she had moved in with him. Marie recalled that they would make love in an armchair because Apollinaire did not like to muss the bed.

  Pieret needed a place to stay, and Apollinaire unwisely let him use the couch to sleep on. Marie Laurencin recalled that he tried to make himself useful. One day, Pieret said to her, “Marie, this afternoon I am going to the Louvre: can I bring you anything you need?” 32 She assumed he meant the Magasins du Louvre, a department store. Instead he returned with the stone statuette that four years later, in his letter to the Paris-Journal, he admitted stealing from the “real” Louvre, the museum. The person he sold it to was Picasso, who purchased a second when Pieret pilfered that from the museum the following day. The theft of those two statuettes was to have a greater impact on the history of art than the disappearance of the Mona Lisa itself.

  The previous winter, Picasso had ordered a large canvas stretched and mounted. He was preparing to paint a major work with several figures, something that would rival Matisse’s Le bonheur de vivre and even Cézanne’s unfinished painting Baigneuses. Both of these works had depicted nudes in a landscape. Picasso almost never worked outdoors, so he chose a setting for his nudes that would, by itself, guarantee to shock: a brothel.

  Picasso had patronized brothels in the prostitutes’ quarter in Barcelona before he reached his fifteenth birthday, 33 and he painted this picture entirely from memory. His first sketches for the planned painting showed four prostitutes with two customers, a sailor and another man carrying a skull. Eventually Picasso dropped the crude symbolism of the skull and then eliminated the men altogether, adding a fifth prostitute. The viewers of the painting would now be the “customers.”

  Picasso continued to draw studies for the work, experimenting, trying new forms. No one is sure how long it took him, but finally he applied paint to his huge canvas, finishing the work, by some accounts, in May 1907. There are five figures in it, all apparently nude women covered only by a few scraps of white cloth. The faces of the three on the left reflect the Iberian sculpture that had already contributed to the portrait of Gertrude Stein and to Picasso’s 1906 self-portrait. The faces of the two figures on the right are more out of the ordinary — grotesque, some would call them. What they most resemble are bronze masks from the French Congo, like those then on display in the ethnological museum at the Trocadéro Palace. The Congolese masks were often covered with striations and incised lines, but Picasso had distorted even those characteristics, twisting and shaping them to his own design so that they are ultimately his own, not African.

  The faces were not the only stunningly different element of the painting. Picasso had abandoned perspective altogether, flattening the images and showing the women in contorted poses. One, squatting at the far right, lets the viewer see her back, front, and sides at the same time. These are not the soft, fleshy nudes of earlier painters; they are all jagged edges and triangles, lines and plane surfaces. The only other recognizable object in the painting is a haphazard collection of fruit at the bottom, as if Picasso were thumbing his nose at all the formal still lifes and lovingly painted bowls of fruit of previous artists. Much later, Picasso was to remark, “When the cubist painter thought, ‘I’m going to paint a fruit bowl,’ he set to work knowing that a fruit bowl in art and a fruit bowl in life had nothing in common.’” 34

  As a work by a serious artist, the painting was a departure of shattering proportions. It was as if Picasso had taken the pistol Jarry 35 had given him and fired it at all previous art. He had committed what anarchists called the “propaganda of the deed” — he had put the ideology into action. Though the figures are static, the overall impact was violent.

  No one except Fernande had seen the painting while it was in progress. Now, Picasso allowed those closest to him, those he most respected, to view it. No one understood it. Max Jacob thought that the best thing a friend could do was to remain silent. André Derain worried that “one day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.” 36 Apollinaire, Picasso’s herald and promoter, muttered, “Révolution,” but could not bring himself to express anything at all about this painting in print. Later, writing about the theft of the two statuettes, Apollinaire said that he had tried to persuade Picasso “to give the statues back to the Louvre, but he was absorbed in his esthetic studies, and indeed from them Cubism was born. He told me that he had damaged the statues in an attempt to discover certain secrets of the classic yet barbaric art to which they belonged.” 37 But it was not cubism that the statuettes inspired: it was this strange painting, which as yet had no name, so friends dubbed it The Philosophical Brothel. Not till later would it be given the title by which it is known today: Les demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon).

  Some viewers were more outspoken. Matisse interpreted it as an attack on modern art, a mockery, and vowed revenge. 38 Leo Stein laughed when he saw it, thinking the painting a joke, but came closest of anyone to understanding it when he said, “You’ve been trying to paint the fourth dimension. How amusing!” 39 It was indeed a new dimension that Picasso had discovered, blazing a trail that other painters would follow. Just as non-Euclidean geometry posited a realm unfamiliar to those who saw only with their eyes, and quantum physicists dealt with things that could not be seen, so did Picasso, who once said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.” 40

  At first, few were able to see his accomplishment clearly. The dealer Vollard, who had so recently bought up virtually every canvas Picasso had to offer, now pronounced a virtual death sentence on the young Spaniard, saying he had no future as a painter. 41 However, at the very moment Vollard was leaving Picasso’s studio, in walked Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German who had become a banker in London before deciding that his true calling in life was to own an art gallery in Paris. That day at the Bateau-Lavoir, he purchased most of the studies that Picasso had done for the startling new work — a windfall for Picasso because he usually let visitors carry such things away for nothing — and asked to purchase the painting as well. But Picasso must have realized from the reaction of others that it was not yet time for his vision to be displayed, and he refused to sell it. A year later, he removed it from its stretcher, rolled it up, and put it away. Kahnweiler, however, would remain Picasso’s dealer for the rest of his life.

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  One of those who had seen the painting and been awed by it was Georges Braque, a former housepainter from Normandy who had come to Paris and studied art in night classes. His first paintings were in the fauve style, of which Matisse was the master. Matisse, who may have been having second thoughts about Les demoiselles, brought him to Picasso’s studio to see it. Timidly, Braque pointed out that the noses were wrong. Picasso insisted, “Noses are like that.” Braque protested that Picasso was asking the viewer to accept something too difficult: “It’s as if you wanted us to… drink kerosene in order to spit fire.” 42

  However, Braque turned out to be the first to imbibe. That winter he painted a large nude that had the striated features characteristic of the two African-inspired figures in Les demoiselles. He spent the following summer, 1908, at L’Estaque, a fishing village in Provence, where Cézanne had worked in his later years. The landscapes and village scenes Braque painted took another step toward simple geometric forms. At the same time, Picasso was working at La Rue des Bois, near Paris. Les demoiselles had exhausted him, and now — having actually discovered the body of another painter in the Bateau-Lavoir hanging from a beam, the victim of drugs and despair — he fled the city, searching for inspiration as he
had once done in Gosol. He too began to turn everything he saw into geometric forms — not as spectacularly as the nudes of Avignon, but more severely and rigorously. Taking the most radical of the five nudes, the one on the far right, he further developed the ideas that had led him to paint it as if trying to see all sides at once.

  When Picasso and Braque next met, they compared their summer work and discovered that they were going in the same direction. They decided to work together, in what became a unique artistic partnership that Braque described as two mountain climbers roped together. They stripped their palettes of all but a few colors — brown, white, gray, black — for what was important now was form alone. This new style was still (often just barely) representational: if the viewer looks hard enough, he can discern the subject of the painting. But perspective and three-dimensionality were gone completely. What Picasso and Braque did was to break down their subjects into plane surfaces that reflected all angles of view and then rearranged them on the canvas, where they fought for the viewer’s attention. If they were to be put together, it was the viewer who would do it.

  Supposedly, when Braque submitted his work for an exhibition, Matisse, one of the jury members, scornfully said the canvases were full of “petits cubes.” 43 A reviewer, Louis Vauxcelles, is credited with coining the term cubism to describe the work. He didn’t expect cubism to last, but it proved to be one of the most influential artistic movements of the century.

  Later critics pronounced cubism to be another reflection of the scientific currents of the time. William R. Everdell, in his book The First Moderns, says, “In effect, Picasso had done for art in 1907 almost exactly what Einstein had done for physics in his ‘Electrodynamics’ paper of 1905.” 44 Einstein had said that it was impossible for any single observer, standing at a fixed spot, to observe reality. Now Picasso and Braque were trying to capture reality by depicting an object from many points of view at the same time.

  Though it is doubtful that Picasso or Braque ever read Einstein’s work, ideas like his were part of the intellectual atmosphere that made Paris such a stimulating place. Anybody could attend, for free, Henri Poincaré’s lectures at the University of Paris or Bergson’s at the Collège de France. Anarchists, socialists, and other groups sponsored free educational programs for their adherents. And of course, anyone dropping into a café in Montmartre might hear people like Apollinaire expounding on such topics. The cubists (there were soon more of them) sought, as scientists were doing, to find a deeper reality underneath the surface reality that anyone could see. It took an artist, like a detective, to find that hidden reality.

  Kahnweiler displayed some of the cubist paintings in his gallery, where they attracted attention among both patrons and other artists. Some, like Juan Gris, enthusiastically took up the new style, contributing their own visions to it, and showing to what degree the concepts behind cubism were a part of the intellectual atmosphere of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, who exhibited their work at the Salon des Indépendants, even claimed to have been cubists before Picasso and Braque, who responded by calling them les horribles serre-files (the awful stragglers). 45

  Kahnweiler was successful in promoting and selling cubist art, and Picasso profited accordingly. In 1909, he left the Bateau-Lavoir and took an apartment on the boulevard de Clichy. This was a real home, with a living room, dining room, bedroom, and pantry, as well as a studio. By contrast, the furniture Picasso and Fernande brought with them was so shabby that the movers thought the young couple must have won the lottery to be able to live there.

  It was certainly a more fashionable neighborhood. Paul Poiret, a dress designer who made clothes for the dancer Isadora Duncan and the actresses Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, lived nearby, as did Frank Haviland, a porcelain manufacturer who was an admirer of African sculpture. Poiret was famous for the parties he threw for his customers, and he carefully chose art that would reflect his refined sense of taste. He visited Picasso’s studio, praised the paintings, but did not purchase any.

  Picasso received numerous invitations from people like Poiret and Haviland and often accepted, but he was uneasy in their company. Fernande later explained, “Artists hate growing old. When they leave poverty behind them they are also bidding farewell to a purity and a dedication which they will try in vain to find again.” 46 Even going to the regular Saturday evening parties at the Steins’ apartment lost some of its appeal. According to Fernande, people would ask Picasso to explain his paintings, and he found it difficult to reply, partly because his French was poor, but also because he felt the work needed no explanation. He “would remain morose and dejected for the greater part of the time.” 47 To his old friends, he admitted experiencing moments of self-doubt, as if he had run up against a wall in his exploration of how far painting could take him.

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  As he had done before when his spirits ebbed, Picasso left Paris for a simpler environment. He spent the summer of 1911 in Céret, a little village in the western Pyrenees. Fernande, who evidently liked the comforts of the city more than he did, came down to join him after he rented a house. So did Braque. In the bucolic atmosphere, with Kahnweiler in Paris able to sell his paintings and provide him with an income, all seemed well.

  Then a copy of the Paris-Journal arrived, carrying the story written by the thief who had stolen two stone heads from the Louvre in 1907. Picasso knew just where those statuettes were: in his apartment on the boulevard de Clichy. He rushed back to Paris, where he found Apollinaire in a panic. The news of the Mona Lisa theft had meant more to him than it had to Picasso. Apollinaire knew that Pieret had returned to Paris — had in fact been living in Apollinaire’s apartment. “He came to see me,” Apollinaire later wrote, “… his pockets full of money which he proceeded to lose at the races. Penniless, he stole another statue. I had to help him — he was down and out — so I took him into my flat and tried to get him to return the statue; he refused, so I had to put him out, along with the statue. A few days later the Mona Lisa was stolen. I thought, as the police later thought, that he was the thief.” 48

  Things had only gotten worse when the Paris-Journal editors announced that the thief had brought them a statue he had stolen from the Louvre. André Salmon was now the art critic for the Paris-Journal. If he learned Pieret was the anonymous thief, he would certainly make the connection between him and Apollinaire. Salmon and Apollinaire were currently on bad terms, not having spoken since quarreling three months earlier, so Apollinaire could not appeal to him. When Pieret turned up again, Apollinaire took him to the railroad station, bought him a ticket to Marseilles, and gave him 160 francs. The police would later regard these actions as incriminating.

  Neither Picasso nor Apollinaire was a French citizen, and thus they could expect harsh treatment from the authorities. Fernande wrote, “I can see them both now, a pair of contrite children, terrified and thinking of fleeing abroad. It was thanks to me that they did not give in to their panic; they decided to stay in Paris and get rid of the compromising sculptures as quickly as possible. But how? Finally they decided to put the statues in a suitcase and throw it into the Seine at night.” 49

  Fernande thought that much of this was playacting. The pair ate dinner and then sat around nervously, not wanting to venture out with the statuettes until the streets were deserted. They whiled away the time by playing cards, but “neither of them knew the first thing about cards,” 50 Fernande wrote. They just thought it was something gangsters would do, so they did it to build up their courage.

  Finally, at midnight, they left, carrying the statuettes in a suitcase. But as they walked through the silent streets, their nerve began to fail. They feared that they were being followed, “and their imagination conjured up a thousand possibilities, each more fantastic than the last.” 51 If they were seen throwing the statuettes into the river, the penalty would be harsher than if they simply tried to return them. Finally they decided that turning the statuettes in would be the best course after all. And so they went
back to the apartment at two in the morning, exhausted and still carrying the suitcase.

  Apollinaire spent the night at Picasso’s apartment and in the morning took the statuettes to the Paris-Journal, which by now seemed the proper place to turn in such stolen objects. The news of this latest recovery ran under the headline

  WHILE AWAITING MONA LISA

  THE LOUVRE RECOVERS ITS TREASURES

  That was just the sort of publicity Apollinaire and Picasso did not want, but at least the newspaper did not mention their names. In fact, the “mysterious visitor” who returned these stone objects was described as “an amateur artist, fairly well-to-do, [whose] greatest pleasure is in collecting works of art.” 52 That, they felt, was surely enough to keep the police off their trail. Moreover, a curator at the Louvre had examined the statuettes, which were described as the heads of a man and a woman, and pronounced them genuine. If Picasso had damaged them in his investigations, it was not noticed. He and Apollinaire hoped the entire affair would now blow over, particularly since Pieret had left Paris — though not before sending a mocking farewell letter to the Paris-Journal, writing, “I hope with all my heart that the Mona Lisa will be returned to you. I am not counting very heavily on such an event. However, let us hope that if its present possessor allows himself to be seduced by the thought of lucre, he will confide in your newspaper, whose staff has displayed toward me such a praiseworthy degree of discretion and honor. I can only urge the person at present holding Vinci’s masterpiece to place himself entirely in your hands.” 53

  Unfortunately, Pieret’s comments only made it appear more likely than ever that he knew something about the Mona Lisa theft, and the police intensified their search for those who had purchased his previous stolen goods. No one ever learned how they identified Apollinaire, but on the evening of September 7, two detectives from the Sûreté appeared at his door. A search of his apartment turned up some letters from Géry Pieret, which apparently mentioned the theft of the statuettes. The police took Apollinaire into custody and brought him to Henri Drioux, the examining magistrate in charge of the Mona Lisa case. Drioux told him that the prosecutor’s office had received “anonymous denunciations… stating that he had been in contact with the thief of the Phoenician statuettes, and also that he was a receiver of stolen goods.” 54 He ordered Apollinaire to be imprisoned pending the results of an investigation.