The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  From this point of view, Degas’s collection of pictures by Manet told an unusually personal story. Many of the pictures portray people who had played central roles in Manet’s brief and scintillating life—and not entirely incidental roles in Degas’s. A painting and a print, for instance, both depict Berthe Morisot. Several more prints depict Léon. There is also a fine etching of the head of Manet’s father, and two etchings depicting Baudelaire. All in all, quite a cast. Degas lived amid these pictures and they reminded him that, for a time, he had had special access to Manet’s seductive yet subtle, secretive world.

  But it was a world from which he always felt slightly excluded. His collection, in this sense, had something compensatory about it: It was a way for Degas, as the years went by, to remain connected to people who, in reality, had somehow eluded him, slipped through his grasp. The most important of these was Manet himself.

  —

  WHEN IT CAME TO damaged pictures—and perhaps, too, in the singular matter of his friendship with Manet—Degas had a healing instinct. He could not forever hold Manet’s attack on his painting against him. “How could you expect anyone to stay on bad terms with Manet?” he said to Vollard.

  Regretting his piqued return of Manet’s still life (“What a beautiful little canvas it was!” he remembered), he later tried to get it back. Alas, Manet had already sold it.

  Meanwhile, he did what he could to repair his painting of Manet and Suzanne. He prepared it for a restoration and, as he told Vollard, planned to repaint Suzanne and return the whole picture to Manet. But this never happened: “By putting it off from one day to the next, it’s stayed like that ever since.”

  Nonetheless, years later, he did go to great lengths to repair another damaged canvas—a creation not of his, but of Manet’s. It was one of four paintings Manet made in the late 1860s—around the same time as Degas’s portrait of Manet and Suzanne. All of them depicted the execution of the Mexican leader Maximilian [see Plate 9]. These paintings were Manet’s political statement, his protest against the botched and dishonorable foreign policies of Napoleon III, and his attempt to bring his own, insouciant style to the by-then-moribund genre of history painting.

  Since Manet was Manet—and since in many ways his best instincts were journalistic, attracted to the fluttery irresolution of the present rather than the settled dust of the past—the subject of this “history” painting was actually a contemporary event. A Habsburg aristocrat, Maximilian had recently been installed as emperor of Mexico by the French government of Napoleon III. It was a puppet government, entirely dependent on European, and specifically French, support for its survival. But the French abandoned Maximilian when Mexican rebels began to get the upper hand. He was captured in 1867 and executed. French newspapers suppressed the news. But it was reported elsewhere, and soon enough the public learned the unsavory truth. All across Europe, people were appalled.

  Manet’s efforts to take on the subject purled out over three years (the same three years during which he and Degas were closest: 1867–69). Details of what had actually happened in Mexico kept changing as new information, previously suppressed, came to light. But his ideas about how to paint it were shifting too. In many ways, the questions he faced were similar to the questions Degas faced when painting Interior and the portrait of Manet and Suzanne: How does one tell a story in a painting—or, conversely, how does one avoid doing so? How explicit should one be? And what exact moment should one depict? Was it the raw, split second of the assassination one was trying to capture, or something more flexible and expansive, a kind of envelope of time that somehow encompassed context and hinted at judgment?

  There was also, of course, the question of facial expression: How much expression should be put into the faces of the executioners? And how much emotion should there be in the faces of Maximilian and his two generals as they faced the firing squad?

  In the end Manet created four large versions of the subject. Today, they are considered masterpieces: remarkably cool, almost disinterested treatments of a very hot subject. But at the time, the whole enormous effort ended, like so much Manet attempted, in disappointment. The events in Mexico were still too raw, too shaming, and the French government censored the painting, forbidding him from exhibiting it.

  “What a misfortune that Édouard worked so stubbornly on that!” Suzanne later lamented. “How many beautiful things he might have painted during all that time!”

  —

  AT SOME POINT BEFORE his death, Manet took a knife—and here again, we don’t know why—to one section of the version of The Execution of Emperor Maximilian that he kept in his studio. He removed most of the figure of Maximilian and the entire figure of his fellow victim, General Mejia. After his death, his heir, Léon, having let the painting deteriorate in storage, sliced it into several more pieces. “I thought that the sergeant looked better without those legs that dangled like a rag,” said Léon. He then sold the central part of the canvas, the massed firing squad, to Vollard.

  Degas, by this time, had already acquired from Léon another fragment from the same painting. It was the section of canvas that showed a soldier loading his rifle and preparing to deliver the coup de grâce. By happenstance, Vollard and Degas both sent their separate pieces to the same restorer, who showed Vollard the Degas-owned fragment. When Vollard then told Degas that their separate purchases had been cut from the same painting, Degas was incensed. He sent Vollard back to Léon to retrieve the remaining pieces, and did his best to reunite them all on a single canvas.

  The result is the partially rehabilitated canvas that now hangs in London, having been bought for the National Gallery by Keynes at the Degas sale in 1918.

  Whenever others saw the patched-together painting in his home, Degas used to mutter: “Again the family! Beware of the family!”

  —

  MANET HAD BEEN DEAD only eighteen months when Degas wrote to a friend: “Fundamentally, I don’t have much affection. And what I once had hasn’t been increased by family and other troubles; I’ve been left only with what couldn’t be taken from me—not much…Thus speaks a man who wants to finish his life and die all alone, with no happiness whatever.”

  He was to live another thirty-three years.

  MATISSE AND PICASSO

  A little boldness discovered in a friend’s work was shared by all.

  —HENRI MATISSE

  Early in 1906, telling himself he had nothing to lose, Henri Matisse paid his first visit to the studio of Pablo Picasso. He went there in the company of his daughter, Marguerite, and Gertrude and Leo Stein, the Jewish American sibling collectors who had recently made Paris their home.

  Picasso’s studio was across the Seine and up the hill in Montmartre. It was spring. The party of four set off on foot. Leo was tall and wiry and wore a wispy beard. He and his sister had an odd way of dressing. They both wore leather-strap sandals, and Gertrude liked to wear shapeless robes of brown corduroy. Marguerite, a self-conscious girl of twelve, was embarrassed to be seen strolling down the fashionable avenue de l’Opéra in their company. But the Steins were oblivious to what others thought.

  Picasso was twenty-four, Matisse thirty-six. It was a crucial period—in many ways the crucial period—in both artists’ careers. Their situations were precarious, but for the first time, after years of struggle and doubt, both were beginning to enjoy some provisional success. Among outsiders, no one was more responsible for these lately improved prospects than Leo Stein. He and Gertrude had forged relations with both artists independently over the previous few months, so it seemed natural that they should now want Picasso and Matisse to meet. The Steins wanted to bear witness to the first stages of a relationship they felt certain would bear fruit.

  —

  IN HIS STUDIO PICASSO awaited their arrival. He was surely anxious. To show a rival artist one’s work is to risk everything. The sixteenth-century Flemish sculptor Giambologna used to tell a story (it was brilliantly related in 1995 by the poet James Fenton) that late
r became famous: In his youth, newly arrived in Rome (just as Picasso was new in Paris), he had taken to the great Michelangelo a small sculpture. It was modeled in wax and exactingly finished. Its surfaces were so smooth that the piece seemed to tremble with incipient life. Michelangelo, by then in his prime, took the model in his hands and inspected it. He put it down on the table in front of him, lifted his fist, and smashed it down onto Giambologna’s little wax figure. He repeated the action several times until he had a formless lump in front of him. Giambologna watched all this. Michelangelo then set about remodeling the wax himself, with Giambologna still looking on. Once he had finished, he handed it back, saying, Now go and learn the art of modeling before you learn the art of finishing.

  It was not in Matisse’s nature to behave this way. To begin with, although he was older than Picasso, his own standing as an artist was in no way comparable to Michelangelo’s during the High Renaissance. More to the point (because after all, wasn’t Michelangelo’s behavior the reaction of a man who sensed a serious threat?), Matisse took pride in the idea that he could not only tolerate rivals but thrive in their presence. “I believe that the artist’s personality affirms itself by the struggle he has survived,” he once said. “I have accepted influences, but I have always known how to dominate them.”

  —

  SHORT BUT SOLIDLY BUILT, Picasso had moved to Paris from Barcelona less than two years earlier. He was not yet fluent in French. But he had the kind of charisma that can dislodge even strong personalities from their earlier selves. He lived with his mistress, Fernande Olivier, and a large dog—a cross between an Alsatian and a Breton spaniel—called Frika. Their home was a barely furnished room in a dilapidated block of tenements known as the Bateau-Lavoir. Doubling as a studio, it was cluttered with brushes, canvases, paints, and easels. It was stifling in summer and warmed in winter by a massive coal-fired stove.

  Matisse, who had cropped hair, a thick beard, eyeglasses, and a vertical crease that permanently bisected his brow, lived on the other side of Paris. His circumstances, on the face of it, were very different. He was married, for one thing. Nonetheless, he and his wife, Amélie, had not had an easy time of it. For years, they had lived in straitened circumstances, as Matisse, a late developer with a stubborn streak, had tried to carve out a viable career as a painter. Their situation had been so dire, at times, that Matisse couldn’t afford new canvases; he’d had to scrape the paint off old ones and use them again.

  —

  JUST THREE YEARS EARLIER, in 1903, the Matisses had endured an extraordinary social ordeal: Amélie’s parents, Catherine and Armand Parayre, had been embroiled, unwittingly, in a massive financial fraud that ruined countless creditors and investors across France. It rocked the French government, put banks in jeopardy, and led to suicides all over the country. The elaborate deception, as Hilary Spurling explained in La Grande Thérèse: The Greatest Scandal of the Century, was perpetrated by Thérèse Humbert, the wife of a deputy for whom the Parayres not only worked but were confidants and supporters. Because of their association, the Parayres fell under suspicion. Amélie’s father was arrested, Matisse’s own studio was searched, and Amélie’s entire family was menaced by some of the many who had been defrauded. Her parents were reduced to the level of penniless outcasts.

  This social nightmare compounded the problems Matisse was already facing as a failed painter. His clumsy-looking efforts had made him an object of derision in his hometown in the north of France, where just the idea of a young man choosing to become an artist was an invitation to ridicule. The pressure on Matisse became so excruciating that he suffered a nervous breakdown and, for two years, virtually stopped painting.

  He recovered. But one of the outcomes of the Humbert scandal was that, in its aftermath, it became important to the Matisses—as it was not to the younger, more carefree Picasso and his girlfriend Olivier—that they maintain an orderly and respectable home. They also had three children, which made it all the more important that they live with prudence and propriety. The youngest, Pierre, was about to turn six. His brother, Jean, was seven. Marguerite was the eldest. She had a small dimple in her chin and frizzy hair that she kept loose or else tied in a casual ponytail or bun. She wore a black ribbon around her neck, which reinforced the luster of her big, dark eyes. But the ribbon was more than just an ornament. It covered a disfiguring scar.

  —

  PICASSO HAD HEARD A good deal about Matisse well before they met. He could hardly have failed to notice that the dealer Ambroise Vollard, after several years of circling, had given Matisse his first solo show in 1903, because the very same Vollard had given him his first show even earlier, in 1901. When that had happened, Picasso, who was nineteen, hadn’t even settled in Paris yet. His hopes of doing so in some style were given a boost by Vollard’s invitation to show. The reviews of the exhibition when it opened had been encouraging: One critic, Félicien Fagus, hailed the young Spaniard’s “prodigious skill.”

  Picasso was used to this kind of attention. Raised in Spain in a middle-class family, he had been celebrated as an artistic wunderkind for as long as he could remember. But the show with Vollard had led nowhere. The immediate success it seemed to promise was derailed by a tragedy that poisoned the next three years of Picasso’s life.

  He had come to Paris for the first time in October 1900. One of his paintings, Last Moments, a dramatic, large-scale canvas that advertised his allegiance to the modernista movement in Barcelona, had been selected for display in the Spanish section of the Universal Exposition—in itself, an extraordinary feat, since Picasso was only eighteen at the time. Intending to bask in the moment, he had come to Paris with his Spanish friend and close confidant Carles Casagemas. The son of a diplomat, Casagemas was a year older than Picasso. He was better educated but psychologically in every way the opposite of Picasso: He was a vulnerable soul, hobbled by doubt. He was addicted to morphine—and addicted, too, to Picasso, whose energy and bravado he depended on to lift him out of his mental quagmire. Both artists had rejected their formal training, embracing, instead, the rebellious bohemianism of the modernistas. Having shared a studio in Barcelona, the two came to Paris together and were taken in by a circle of Spanish expatriates living in Montmartre. They went to exhibitions together and got a taste for the dance halls and cafés of their hilly quartier. They shared living quarters, models, and lovers.

  One of these lovers was a twenty-year-old laundress and model named Laure Florentin. She called herself Germaine. Casagemas was infatuated with her, but she eventually rejected him, and the rumor spread that it was because he was impotent. Picasso’s friendship with Casagemas had always been characterized by ribbing and teasing, most of which went in one direction only: Picasso liked, for instance, to make caricatures of Casagemas, exaggerating his morose appearance, his long nose and heavy-lidded eyes. Now, in response to the rumors about his friend’s impotence, he made a drawing of a naked Casagemas covering his genitals with his hands.

  The two men returned to Spain in December 1900 and celebrated the New Year together in Málaga. Picasso then moved temporarily to Madrid while Casagemas returned to Paris, hoping to win back Germaine.

  On February 17, 1901, in a state of despair, Casagemas organized a dinner party at a café in Montmartre. At 9 P.M., he stood up, handed Germaine a pile of letters, and then launched into a frantic, incoherent speech. The first letter on the pile was addressed to the chief of police. As soon as Germaine noticed this, she suspected something was wrong. She had just enough time to slide under the table as Casagemas pulled a pistol from his pocket and fired at her. Not realizing he had missed, he turned the gun to his temple, shouted “Et voilà pour moi!” and shot himself. He died in the hospital before midnight.

  The whole, shocking incident threw Picasso into a tailspin. He was haunted by what had happened—the more so because he and Germaine soon became lovers. He returned to Paris, slept with Germaine in Casagemas’s bed, and painted in Casagemas’s vacated studio.

>   What ensued was Picasso’s so-called Blue Period. Mired in poverty and a prolonged depression, he painted in a deliberately gauche and melancholic manner that found few supporters. His palette, reflecting his mood, was blue, and his subjects included beggars and blind men, circus performers and itinerant musicians, all with emaciated bodies and shadowed eyes.

  People around him felt that he was squandering his talent. He had forfeited whatever advantage he had gained by the show at Vollard’s.

  —

  NOW, FIVE IMPOVERISHED and disappointing years later, it was Matisse’s name—not his—that was everywhere. The previous fall, after a breakthrough summer painting with André Derain in Collioure on the Mediterranean coast, Matisse had exhibited a series of small, frenzied-looking landscapes and portraits in bright, splashy, nonnaturalistic colors at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. Established in 1903 by a group of artists headed by Auguste Rodin and Pierre Renoir, the Salon d’Automne was a lively, more youthful alternative to several annual public exhibitions of recent art. The public response to Matisse’s paintings had been vicious, and most of the notices unforgiving. Matisse was accused of exhibiting graffiti, not painting. According to Marcel Sembat, the socialist politician, “The good public saw in him the incarnation of Disorder, of a savage wholesale rupture with tradition…a sort of conman in a silly hat.” The uproar was so bad that Matisse attended the show only once, and he forbade his wife, Amélie, from visiting at all, lest she be recognized and publicly harangued.

  All this only compounded the tension that already existed in Matisse’s wider family. His own parents were deeply unimpressed by his efforts. When he brought one work home to Bohain to show his mother, Anna, she was bewildered: “That’s not painting!” she said. Matisse took a knife to the work and destroyed it. He and Amélie had already been through the Humbert affair. More scandal was the last thing they wanted.