The Art of Rivalry

by Sebastian Smee

  When it was hung in the Salon, an uproar ensued—for the third year in a row. Many critics could barely bring themselves to credit it as a work of art, failed or otherwise. The public thought it another hoax by a man intent on proving to the world that he was mad. Even fellow artists were dismayed: Derain, in particular, seems to have thrown up his hands and resolved no longer to try to follow Matisse.

  But the Steins bought Blue Nude and promptly installed it on the walls at the rue de Fleurus. At one of the Saturday-night salons, Picasso was seen staring at it—caught in yet another agony of avid eyeballing and willed-resistance-to-seeing—by Walter Pach, a young American, recently graduated from art school in New York. Picasso turned to him and asked, “Does that interest you?”

  “In a way, yes,” replied Pach. Sensing, however, the Spaniard’s agitation, and suspecting that he had set off on the wrong kind of answer, he quickly changed tack: “It interests me like a blow between the eyes. I don’t understand what he is thinking.”

  “Neither do I,” replied Picasso. “If he wants to make a woman, let him make a woman. If he wants to make a design, let him make a design. This is between the two.”

  —

  IT WAS PROBABLY IN GÓSOL, or during the immediate, love-flushed aftermath, that Picasso and Fernande got the idea of adopting a child. The adoption finally took place on April 6, 1907, at an orphanage that was only a five-minute walk from the Bateau-Lavoir. “You want an orphan,” said the mother superior, “take your pick.”

  They chose a girl called Raymonde. She was the twelve- or thirteen-year-old daughter of a French prostitute who worked in a Tunisian brothel. Raymonde had been rescued and brought to France by a Dutch journalist and his wife, but they had subsequently abandoned her, and she had wound up at the orphanage in Montmartre.

  If the decision was Olivier’s idea, it could not possibly have been made without Picasso’s consent. And given the balance of power in their relationship, one cannot imagine him agreeing to such a momentous plan without at least some measure of enthusiasm. If, what’s more, the main goal of the exercise was to offer Olivier the experience of parenting, it also seems odd that, instead of adopting an infant or young child, they chose an older girl, the same age as Marguerite. Perhaps Picasso thought a child would satisfy Olivier’s need for intimacy and affection. Perhaps he thought it would prevent her from straying, freeing him to pursue his creative obsession unimpeded by her. Or perhaps he had other reasons to like the idea. But it seems plausible that Picasso was still thinking about the sickly but spirited Marguerite. Marguerite was also thirteen. Since meeting her early in 1906, Picasso had seen her regularly on his visits to Matisse’s studio. He must have watched her intently, and envied, perhaps, the role she played in Matisse’s studio life. Would he not benefit, just as Matisse did, from such a presence around the Bateau-Lavoir: a helpmeet, a companion, a muse?

  —

  HAVING BEEN PICKED OUT and brought back to the Bateau-Lavoir, Raymonde seems to have had a galvanizing effect on the place. Spring was beginning to break out (it was now a year since Matisse and Marguerite’s first visit), but Picasso was withdrawing further and further into himself, to the dismay of his tight-knit group of friends. Raymonde’s arrival buoyed them all. Olivier indulged her, the more so because she was herself illegitimate and had suffered at the hands of a cruel foster mother She dressed the girl in pretty clothes, brushed her hair endlessly, beribboned it for school. The other residents also delighted in her company. Max Jacob and André Salmon brought her presents and sweets. Picasso himself did sketches to amuse her. But on some level, it seems, he was made uneasy by her. “Young girls,” according to Richardson, “excited Picasso. They also disturbed him. They put him in mind of his dead sister, Conchita.”

  —

  BEFORE THE SALON HAD closed at the end of April, Matisse returned once more to Collioure. Picasso, meanwhile, was busy rethinking and revising his big picture. A month later, he felt he had made good progress, and began to show the painting to certain invited guests. The response, after so much secret labor, was deflating. Bewilderment reigned. What sort of painting was it? It fit into no preexisting category. Why the cartoon faces with the staring, asymmetrical eyes? Why the preoccupation with triangles? Why the gauche drawing and the dissonant registers, the lack of finish? It was ugly and, at the same time, ludicrous.

  Everyone saw, what’s more, what a fragile state Picasso was in. Anxious, demoralized, obsessed, he didn’t seem to know what he had done. Even by his own invented criteria, he couldn’t tell if he had succeeded. If he was almost but not quite there (as he hoped and suspected), he didn’t know how to conclude it. There was no one who could tell him.

  There was, however, one person who, the previous fall, had unwittingly provided him with the key to a possible solution.

  —

  SIX MONTHS EARLIER, Picasso had come to the rue de Fleurus one Saturday night. Matisse was already there. He was showing Gertrude Stein an object that he had recently bought from a small curio shop called Le Père Sauvage on the rue de Rennes. Matisse often stopped by the shop, which was just a few minutes’ walk from the Steins’ apartment. It had, he later recalled, “a whole corner of little wooden statues of Negro origin.” Matisse became fascinated by these sculptures. They seemed to have been released from conventional ideas of human anatomy. They were made instead, he later said, “in terms of their material, according to invented planes and proportions.”

  One day, he went into the store. He paid fifty francs and came away with the object he was now showing to Gertrude, having taken it straight to the rue de Fleurus. It was a wooden statuette made by the Vili people of the Congo, a seated figure with a disproportionately large, masklike head. The figure had a hollow mouth and eyes. Mysteriously, it held two hands up at its chin.

  In his own art, Matisse was struggling at this point to close the gap between the description of objects and their emotional impact. He was on the lookout for forms that would make his emotions, his sensations, endure. To him, these African objects suggested a new freedom: They weren’t beholden to inherited notions of what sculptural figures should look like. His response to them chimed with his recent attempts to intensify his paintings’ expressiveness through distortion. And it even related to his interest in the art of his own children—not because he saw the African objects as unsophisticated, but precisely because he admired their inventiveness, the way they suggested a potent and uninhibited alternative to Western cliché.

  As Matisse was showing the Vili statuette to Gertrude—and no doubt trying earnestly, in the face of flickering interest, to explain what he meant by “invented planes and proportions”—Picasso walked in. Turning from Gertrude, Matisse showed him the statuette. They “chatted,” according to Matisse. One imagines Picasso turning the sculpture over in his hands, both listening to and at the same time trying not to hear what Matisse was saying about it.

  —

  MATISSE’S WIDER INFLUENCE AT this point was such that his discovery set off a run on tribal objects among the avant-garde painters of Paris. His fellow Fauves and many younger artists on the lookout for new stimuli began sifting through Parisian shops for whatever African masks and wooden figurines they could find. If Matisse saw something in these objects, they thought, then there must be something worth paying attention to.

  If Picasso was initially resistant, it’s easy to imagine why. Something about these objects must have called out to him; but the very fact that they had struck a chord deep within Matisse first deterred him. Under no circumstances did he want to be cast as Matisse’s follower. And besides, he was in the grip of his own discovery—the strangely haunting Iberian carvings whose stylizations he had been incorporating into his work since returning from Gósol.

  Still, Picasso could not ignore the African carvings. He could see the liberating impact they were having on Matisse’s work—especially the Blue Nude. And he could see the excitement of other colleagues as they talked about these previously
unheralded objects. So it could not have been by accident that, six months after Matisse had shown him the Vili figure, as his struggles with the Demoiselles dragged on, Picasso found himself inside the Ethnographic Museum of the Trocadéro.

  In those days, the Trocadéro was a neglected, dingy place, cluttered with objects. It was “disgusting,” recalled Picasso in an interview with André Malraux, three decades later. “The smell,” he continued. “I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn’t leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me…”

  Picasso had intuited something about the objects he saw at the Trocadéro, and specifically about the masks. They weren’t, he said (revealing his lifelong flair for dramatization),

  just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things…[They] were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything—against unknown, threatening spirits…I understood, I too, am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything! I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for…The fetishes were…weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent.

  “ ‘Les Demoiselles’ must have come to me that day,” Picasso concluded, “but not at all because of the forms but because it was my first canvas of exorcism. Yes, absolutely.”

  The visit to the Trocadéro, and Picasso’s long-delayed account of it, is given enormous importance in the literature on his oeuvre, and it’s easy to see why. If we are to believe him, it was here, at the Trocadéro, that his whole creative philosophy crystallized in an apprehension that linked the anxiety of seeing—the sexual and mortal anxiety of confronting others, and particularly women—with the magical, transformative powers that he believed inhered in art. From this central apprehension—dramatized, intensified, endlessly reiterated—Picasso would go on to forge a career of unprecedented variety and pyrotechnic brilliance.

  But of course, the visit was just as important in the immediate context of his rivalry with Matisse. For someone so caught up in the struggle to become independent, to get out from under the influence of a rival and make good on his early promise, Picasso’s intuition about tribal masks could hardly have been more significant. They were weapons, he said, to help you “become independent.”

  —

  WHEN PICASSO DID FINALLY adopt African art, it was with a precipitous intensity that was utterly characteristic of him. Throughout the spring and summer of 1907, he turned out a series of violently “Africanized” nudes. Like his Iberian-style heads, they were radically simplified, but now they had angular bodies, curving, scythe-like noses, and cheeks marked by parallel striations and cross-hatching—drawn directly from the scarification lines he had seen on African masks.

  At the same time, he returned to the Demoiselles with renewed purpose. In a series of studies he made in ink on paper, striations and hatchings begin to appear in the backgrounds and around the borders of his pictures, recalling the decorative palm fronds in Matisse’s Blue Nude. Like Matisse, and even more like Cézanne (whom Picasso was now beginning to revere as much as Matisse did), Picasso was striving to establish visual rhymes that would strengthen his picture’s unity, knitting together background and foreground. But rather than the fluid, serpentine line so beloved by Matisse, Picasso’s rhymes were established with sharp angles, and with an idiom of fragmentation and splintering that may well have reflected the state of his mind.

  —

  PICASSO SURELY TOLD HIMSELF that what he got from African art was very different from what Matisse saw in it. It was more extreme, more potent. The discovery, by his account, was not only more dramatic than Matisse’s curio shop pottering; it was fired by superstition, by magic.

  Matisse, for his part, would never have dramatized his conception of art in this way. It was not in his interest to do so: People thought he was crazy enough as it was. Better to emphasize “planes and proportions” rather than magic and exorcism.

  In any case, an idea of harmony, achieved through sublimation, mattered profoundly to Matisse in a way that it did not to Picasso. Matisse was always shoring himself up against chaos. Picasso meanwhile thrived on dissonance. He welcomed collision and strife.

  In the immediate term what was at stake for Picasso was his ability to bring off his great canvas—to endow it with the kind of force and shock value that would outdo the dissonance of Matisse’s Bonheur de Vivre and the deformations of his Blue Nude. He wanted to up the ante in terms of both, and to jettison what he perceived as Matisse’s fatal ambivalence (a “design” or a “woman”?). The faces of his five prostitutes were all initially painted in the blockish, wide-eyed Iberian style that Picasso had made his own after the portrait of Gertrude. But in June or July, the Iberian heads no longer seemed satisfactory. And so, in the high summer of 1907, with Matisse still away in the south, Picasso made a momentous decision. Over the faces of the two prostitutes on the right of the picture—one squatting, the other standing behind her—he painted African-style masks. He gave both faces long, curving noses, crude, elongated features, and small open mouths. The background figure has one eye that is entirely black, like an empty socket, while the squatting figure has blue, asymmetrical eyes with small pupils. Picasso left the Iberian-style faces of the other three women the same. Their stares are more piercing but also more familiar. The “Africanized” faces on the right, on the other hand, are like fright-masks. They do not seem to see us at all. They represent something profoundly unfamiliar, foreign, and in no way sexually seductive. They seem to ward us off.

  —

  TODAY, WE’VE BECOME ACCUSTOMED to the dissonant registers of the Demoiselles—Picasso’s most acclaimed painting. Pictorial dissonance does not surprise us anymore, in large part because Picasso went on to make it a hallmark of his oeuvre, inspiring no end of modern artists to follow suit. But at the time, he seems to have been as unsure about what he had done as anyone. Was it too much? Had he wrecked the picture? Was it finished? All he could be sure of was that he had made something the likes of which had not been seen before. Whether it worked, or whether the whole concoction—the discordant faces, the borrowings from African and ancient Iberian sculpture, the squatting figure stolen from Matisse’s cherished little Cézanne, the Three Bathers—was rather a sign of toxic confusion, he could not know.

  In the meantime, Picasso’s domestic life had been infected by another kind of confusion—equally toxic. For Raymonde, the adopted orphan, the consequences were tragic. Picasso, it seems, had begun to show a disturbing new interest in the girl. At some point in the four months Raymonde spent at the Bateau-Lavoir, Olivier became aware of his unhealthy fascination. Consequently, she no longer trusted Picasso to be in the same room with Raymonde if the girl was bathing, dressing, or trying on new clothes.

  Her concerns may have been triggered, or perhaps simply confirmed, by a drawing he made of her, seated on a chair, examining her foot. A washbasin can be seen on the floor in front of Raymonde. The pose in itself is innocuous, its art historical pedigree impeccable: Derived from the Spinario, a famous Roman sculpture of a boy removing a thorn from his foot, it also echoed Thorn Extractor, an impressionistic sculpture Matisse had made the previous year (probably with Marguerite as his model). The same pose would reappear in the summer as an “Africanized” woman, and—combined in Picasso’s imagination with the right-hand figure in Cézanne’s Three Bathers—it would finally be transposed into the squatting prostitute in the Demoiselles. In itself, however, there is something disturbingly voyeuristic about Picasso’s rendering of Raymonde. No more than a rudimentary sketch, it nonetheless makes a conspicuous point of showing the girl’s exposed genitals.

  It wasn’t long before Olivier felt she had no choice but to return Raymonde to the orphanage. The Bateau-Lavoir residents threw a party to say goodbye at Apollinaire’s apartment. Raymonde, not surprisingly, was wi
thdrawn and confused. Jacob put her dolls and a ball in a box, which he tied up, before taking her by the hand and, “with a profoundly sad smile,” leading her away.

  —

  BY THE TIME MATISSE arrived back in Paris at the beginning of September after his long summer in the south, Picasso was exhausted and demoralized. Some time after Raymonde’s departure, Olivier herself had moved out. Their long love affair appeared to be over. Picasso’s work had lurched ahead during this period, but his creative advances had come at a cost. His obsession with the Demoiselles—a painting that confounded and even humiliated Olivier, since it seemed to enact his feelings toward her—had cast her into its shadow. And now she was gone.

  The fate of the painting itself was entirely uncertain. The negative responses of friends, collectors, and dealers who had seen it in its pre-“African” state may have done as much to inspire Picasso’s revisions as the visit to the Trocadéro. But the two Africanized masks had made the painting even more difficult to swallow, and Picasso seems to have remained in an agony of indecision about it. The picture remained in his studio for almost ten years. And for most of that period, he seemed unable to decide whether it was finished.

  Matisse could have related to his doubts. He may in fact have been one of the only people Picasso knew who had it in his power to allay them, just by sympathizing. His own inability to see, to measure what he had achieved with any kind of objectivity, had haunted him since the Fauve breakthrough two years earlier. It was the source of all his anxiety.

  Matisse had already heard talk about Picasso’s state of mind and about his bizarre new painting before he arrived back in Paris. He had taken a break from Collioure in late July and early August to travel to Italy. There, especially in Florence, where he met up with Gertrude and Leo Stein, he had fallen under the spell of the Italian primitives, the late Gothic and early Renaissance artists such as Giotto and Duccio. These frescoes, their forms rounded, stable, essential, gave him a model that would complement and rein in the wilder impulses unleashed by African art. They chimed, too, with his own interest in the clean, flat colors and simplified contours of children’s art. Best of all, they seemed to brim over with a kind of spiritual fullness, a purity and silence that made the richly colored oil paintings he went on to see in Venice seem decadent and corrupt by comparison.