Matisse was convinced he could see through the conceit of Braque’s new manner. He described Braque’s paintings to the critic Louis Vauxcelles—the same critic who had coined the term Fauvism—as pictures constructed of “little cubes.” To show Vauxcelles what he meant, he even did a quick sketch, like a schoolteacher demonstrating a student’s erroneous thinking on the blackboard.
Braque’s paintings were rejected, and Matisse—rightly or wrongly—was blamed. But the new style now had a name: Cubism.
—
CUBISM WOULD REVOLUTIONIZE THE construction of pictorial space and, in the process, change the course of modern painting. In cahoots with Picasso, whose energies he quickly enlisted, Braque advanced and honed this new style over the course of the following year. Impersonal and pointedly devoid of Matissean color (they were made in shades of brown and gray), Cubist paintings were brilliantly inventive and freshly poetic. A picture no longer had to be like a window onto a coherent, static, infinitely receding world that obeyed unbending physical laws; it could be more like a moving scrim, with faceted parts projecting forward or folding back into shallow space. In this sense, Cubist paintings seemed more like consciousness itself, and they were more in tune, claimed some, with the way modern science was beginning to describe the world. But the Cubist pictures of Picasso and Braque are also, of course, tremendously witty. They are redolent of whispered secrets at the back of the classroom. They turned representation into a beguiling game of “now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t.”
The new movement caught on quickly. Matisse, stuck out in front of the classroom, did his best to ignore the rising, insubordinate chatter at the back. He preferred to keep on advancing his own agenda, delving deeper and deeper into the enchantments of saturated color, expressive decoration, and a new kind of monumental simplicity. In the process, he produced some of the greatest works of his career—and indeed of the entire century. But by around 1913, he could no longer ignore the hubbub. Gushing invention, Picasso and Braque had established themselves with astonishing speed as the new leaders of a pan-European avant-garde.
They did not do so alone. Picasso, in particular, was championed by Kahnweiler, who brilliantly finessed the Spaniard’s career behind the scenes; by Gertrude Stein, who did so much to fuel the beginnings of the Picasso myth (especially outside of France); and by Apollinaire, whose idea it had been to scrawl anti-Matisse graffiti on government health warnings. Over the next decade, Apollinaire would carve out a reputation as the most influential art critic of his generation. When he later described Matisse as “an instinctive Cubist,” the irony must have been galling to Matisse, given his own unintentional role in coining the term.
Cubism dominated discussion of avant-garde art all over Europe, from Italy (where the Futurists had taken it up) to the UK (where Vorticists fell under its spell). Increasingly, Matisse was pushed to the periphery. But by 1913, as if grimly determined to follow through on his commitment never to avoid the influence of others, Matisse actually began—albeit tentatively—to embrace Cubist methods. In the face of deliberate provocations (“He’s captured! He’s ours!” cried the Cubists), he cut back on his use of bright colors, favoring instead agitated grays, matte blacks, and drenching blues. For the next three or four years he also emphasized angular geometry, extreme simplifications of form, and ambiguous relationships between figure and ground—all indications of his fascination with the new style. He even repainted a favorite Dutch still life—a work he had copied earlier in his career—in an overtly Cubist idiom. And in this way he turned potential defeat into a combination of initial yielding and fresh, unforeseen potency.
—
AFTER THEIR FIRST BREAK, in 1907, Picasso and Fernande Olivier had reconciled. But Olivier later had an affair with the Italian Futurist Ubaldo Oppi, and in the wake of this, the couple had split for good. As if to exact his revenge, Picasso had taken up with Fernande’s close friend and confidante Eva Gouel.
By 1913, Picasso had moved out of the Bateau-Lavoir and was, for the first time in his adult life, financially well off. Kahnweiler had become his dealer, and the two were thriving. But 1913 was also the year that Picasso’s father died, and soon after, Picasso himself fell ill with a persistent, undiagnosed fever. He recovered slowly.
During his convalescence, Matisse came to visit him, bringing flowers and oranges. By now, these two formidable artists were ready to reconcile. The gush of invention had continued from both their studios. If the pack of followers trying to keep pace with Picasso now seemed bigger than those following Matisse, it was not, finally, a reflection of Matisse’s inferiority. And yet, unquestionably, the power dynamic had shifted, and the two men—civil and mutually admiring now that their reputations seemed more securely established—maintained a wary distance.
Not long afterward, however, they went horse riding together in the company of Eva Gouel. The rapprochement surprised many. “Picasso is a horseman,” Matisse wrote Gertrude Stein. “We go out riding together, which amazes everyone.” But if people were amazed, it may have been because they wanted these two painters to be sworn enemies more than, in reality, they ever were.
—
THERE IS NO DOUBT that Matisse was rattled by Cubism. Things had not panned out as he had expected. The uncontainable Spaniard had never been his protégé. He was far more formidable, more inventive, and more ferociously ambitious than Matisse had ever quite realized during those early encounters at the Steins, or as they talked and looked and made mental notes in each other’s studios, or during their walks in the Luxembourg Gardens.
But what’s striking is how willing—how almost eager—he was to avoid the obvious reaction. He refused to lash out at Picasso. He refused to hunker down or to block out the possibility of influence. In fact, he went the other way, actively seeking out lessons he might learn from the Cubists, just as Picasso had been willing to learn from him.
Famously, this pattern—of yielding, twisting, overcoming, and yielding once more, as if both artists were engaged in a series of subtle martial arts maneuvers transposed to the aesthetic realm—was to be repeated at regular intervals, right up until Matisse’s death in 1954. Major exhibitions and countless books have addressed the relationship. Scholars have traced the pattern—of influence and challenge, homage and resistance—painting by painting, drawing by drawing, sculpture by sculpture. At times, Picasso was looking more intently at Matisse; at other times, it was the other way around. Never, however, was the one far from the other’s mind.
—
ONE OF THE STRANGEST of Matisse’s productions from the 1913–17 period was yet another portrait of Maguerite. It was the culmination of a series of paintings he made of her in 1914 and ’15, by which time Marguerite was twenty. She was becoming more confident, more womanly, and she evidently enjoyed dressing up. In each picture in the series, although the poses are the same, she wears a different hat (each one with flowers attached) and a different blouse or dress. She had even begun to innovate with the black ribbon around her neck—the accessory that had always been a poignant sign of her illness. In three of the five portraits, there is a gold pendant hanging from the ribbon.
The first four portraits in the series are fairly straightforward: Matisse applied thinly painted but vividly colored oils in a simplified formal vocabulary reminiscent of his early, childlike portraits of Marguerite. At a certain point, however, he seems to have grown restless. He turned to Marguerite and said, “This painting wants to take me somewhere else. Do you feel up to it?”
Marguerite gave her consent.
What Matisse proceeded to paint was one of the oddest portraits of his career. White and Pink Head, as the painting is called, is intensely colored and emotionally distilled in a way that only Matisse could have carried off. But it’s also a painting that has manifestly been filtered through the prism of Cubism. Angular shapes escape their contours, confusing background and foreground; lines intersect and rhyme with other lines; and lips and eyes are reduced to distilled sy
mbols that could easily, you feel, have been rearranged. All this makes the picture feel like a tribute, of sorts, to Picasso, funneled through the very emphatic presence of Marguerite.
White and Pink Head was so odd that Matisse’s dealers didn’t know what to do with it, and after a while they politely asked Matisse to take it off their hands. He did, and he kept it in the family for the rest of his life—just as Picasso held on to Matisse’s earlier portrait of Marguerite.
POLLOCK AND DE KOONING
Betrayal is an uncanny form of intimacy.
—ADAM PHILLIPS
Outside the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village one night in the early 1950s, someone observed two painters sitting on the curb, passing a bottle back and forth. One of them, Willem de Kooning, was in his early fifties. He had a mind made for mischief. A sense of irony gurgled beneath his habitually open and generous manner. “Self-protection bored him,” said his friend Edwin Denby. And he did not like to be bored. De Kooning was fiercely intelligent. He had seen it all—and yet the world continued to astonish him. “Jackson,” he was saying, as he slapped the back of Jackson Pollock, his fellow painter and friend, “you’re the greatest painter in America!”
Pollock had a volatile temper. It got the better of him when he was drunk; and these days he generally was—certainly at the Cedar Tavern, a gathering place for painters and their retinue and a boozy stage for displays of strutting machismo. Pollock was also intelligent in his peculiar, inarticulate, combustible way. He yearned to make connections with people, but he habitually sabotaged those connections. He liked and admired de Kooning. And although they were far from best friends, for most of the ten years they had known each other the feeling had been more or less mutual. Still, it was complicated.
The two men had been cast as rivals. And in a way they were. But it hadn’t started out that way, and the role didn’t entirely suit them. In fact, for both men the pressure to perform as rivals before an audience that seemed to be ballooning by the month had become wearying and absurd.
And so now, in their drunkenness, they hammed it up: “No, Bill,” replied Pollock, as he passed the bottle back to de Kooning, “you’re the greatest painter in America.” De Kooning demurred. Pollock insisted. The performance went on, the bottle going back and forth, until Pollock finally passed out.
—
IN 1938, WILLEM DE KOONING made a beautiful portrait of two standing boys [see Fig. 4]. The drawing is so finely rendered you feel you might deplete the graphite marks just by breathing too close. When you look at the work two things are immediately self-evident. The first is that de Kooning—whose name means “the king” in Dutch—could draw. He was a marvelous draftsman, virtuosic in conventional ways, but with his own particular feeling for spellbinding idiosyncrasies—an odd pair of boots; a pair of tucked-in-trousers; an unfocused gaze.
© 2016 THE WILLEM DE KOONING FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK.
FIG. 4 Willem de Kooning, Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother, c. 1938, pencil on paper, 13 1/8 x 10 1⁄4 inches (33.3 x 26 cm), Kravis Collection.
The second thing you notice is a weird sensation of doubling. Although the two boys in the portrait wear different clothes, are different heights, and convey different degrees of self-possession, they are also uncannily alike. Are they both, in fact, the same person? De Kooning later said yes—he had simply drawn himself twice. But his friend, the artist and cartoonist Saul Steinberg, had a different idea. Steinberg bought the drawing and later gave it the title—Self-Portrait with Imaginary Brother—that is still in use today.
What Steinberg didn’t know, at least not at the time, was that de Kooning actually had a half brother, Koos, and that he was, for all intents and purposes, imaginary: De Kooning had cut him off more than a decade earlier, acting as if the half brother and the rest of his family simply didn’t exist. In 1926, at the age of twenty-two, he had fled his native Holland as a stowaway on a British freighter, the SS Shelley. He told no one—not his parents; not his beloved sister Marie (who had just had a baby); and not Koos, the young half brother who had always looked up to him.
In a life marked by a genius for evasion (both in his personal relationships and in his refusal to be pinned down to any particular style or aesthetic program), this original, shattering evasion always haunted de Kooning. For him, the severing had opened up a whole world of opportunity: De Kooning went on to become one of the two leading figures in an American movement, Abstract Expressionism, that changed the course of art history. But what had been the cost?
—
WILLEM, MARIE, AND KOOS had endured a blighted childhood in Rotterdam. The city at that time was a rapidly expanding port near the mouth of the Nieuwe Maas, an artificial channel in a delta formed by the Rhine and the Meuse rivers as they spill into the frigid North Sea. De Kooning’s father, Leendert, had been a flower seller. He later established a small business that bottled and distributed beer for the nearby Heineken brewery, among others. He met Cornelia Nobel, a working-class girl with an explosive temper, in 1898. By September of that year, Cornelia had become pregnant with Marie. She was born in 1899, six months after her parents’ hasty marriage. Twin girls followed, but they died very soon after being born. Cornelia’s fourth baby died at eight months.
And then came Willem. Born in 1904, he grew up in desperate poverty. In the six years since their marriage, Cornelia and Leendert had lived in seven different apartments, and the moves continued after Willem’s birth. In 1906, de Kooning’s parents’ marriage unraveled. Leendert, a distant, emotionally thwarted man who later described his wife as “hysterical,” initiated divorce proceedings. De Kooning’s biographers, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, suggest that Cornelia was likely violent at home, lashing out physically not only at her children but with Leendert, too. Nevertheless, she won custody of both Willem and Marie. In the spring of 1908, she was about to remarry, but her little boy Willem was in the way—an impediment to the budding relationship—so she sent him back to his father. Later, perhaps out of guilt, she tried to make others (including de Kooning) believe that Leendert had kidnapped him, forcing her to fight a long custody battle to win him back. But Stevens and Swan find no evidence for this.
Soon after, Leendert also remarried. He had found a second, much younger wife, and when she became pregnant at the end of 1908, the four-year-old de Kooning was once again in the way, so he was dispatched back to his mother’s house. Cornelia’s anger was unpredictable. As de Kooning grew, she drew him into spectacular arguments, full of spit and sarcasm, characterized on both sides by verbal flair and a stubborn refusal to give ground. She was domineering, garish, and theatrical, and it’s easy to imagine that a refracted memory of her fed into de Kooning’s notorious Woman series—the hectoring, histrionic paintings of cartoonish figures with big shoulders and busts, leering grins, and comically demented eyes that shot de Kooning to fame forty years later.
De Kooning was eight when Cornelia had another child, this time with her mild-mannered second husband, Jacobus Lassooy, then a coffeehouse keeper. The boy, known as Koos, grew up in the shadow of his stepbrother, whom he revered. Willem had developed into a good, competitive student, even as his family descended further into financial insecurity and was reduced to living on potatoes and turnips.
Privately, he had cultivated an interest in drawing, and at age twelve he was hired as an apprentice at a prestigious decorating firm, Gidding and Sons. His gifts were quickly recognized by the firm’s co-owner, Jay Gidding, who urged him to enroll in a course at the nearby Academy of Fine Arts and Applied Sciences. The academy had real prestige. Along with traditional fine arts training, it offered technical training aimed at preparing students for modern industry. De Kooning took evening classes there for four years, from 1917 to 1921. The instruction was exacting and strict, the atmosphere competitive. De Kooning spent six hundred hours and—working two days a week—the best part of a year on a single drawing: a still life of a shallow ceramic bowl, a pitcher, and a j
ug on a table.
The whole point of the academy’s fastidious approach, de Kooning later explained, was “to clear the students’ eyes of conventional seeing and to urge them to record nothing but their first-hand experience.” Put that way, it sounds liberating and almost modern—but it was not. It was intensely laborious. Students had to train themselves to keep their eyes at fixed levels and to maintain the same distances between themselves, the still life arrangement, and the paper. They had to resume this same position week after week, month after month. The eventual effect, said de Kooning, was “like a photograph, except more romantic.”
Not everything de Kooning did was as refined as the exercises that absorbed him at the academy. He had also had a taste for cartoons and caricatures and a knack for reproducing their confident, expressive, often exaggerated lines. It was a knack that stayed with him, and inflected his mature art at least as much as his classical training.
In 1920, midway through his adolescence, de Kooning found work with a designer interested in modernism, Bernard Romein, whose main client was a fancy Rotterdam department store. Romein introduced de Kooning to the art of Piet Mondrian (who, decades later, would play a brief but crucial role in the career of Jackson Pollock). He was also introduced to De Stijl, the Dutch design movement founded in Amsterdam in 1917, with which Mondrian was closely associated. De Stijl (the name means simply “the style”) sought to blur the lines dividing art, craft, and design. Its success had removed some of the stigma attached to commercial art—which was essentially what de Kooning had been practicing until then. But de Kooning’s imagination was already beginning to wander away from functionalism, away from commerce, and away from his disciplined training. He began to travel, spending time in both Antwerp and Brussels. He had an uncle who worked as a seaman on the Holland America Line. From him, he heard stories about America. De Kooning, who loved dancing to American jazz and looking at American pinup girls in magazines, also loved the movies. “There were cowboys and Indians, you know,” he said later; “it was romantic.”
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