by Sue Roe
When he first arrived in Paris to serve his apprenticeship, his inspirations, like Picasso’s, had been mainly Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec. He, too, loved poster art; he hung about in the streets sometimes after dark, peeling posters from the walls when no one was looking; he had one by Toulouse-Lautrec on the wall of his lodgings. As an apprentice, he had learned how to prepare colours, grind pigments and mix tones, and discovered that paint could be mixed with other materials: soil, sand, sawdust, ash, iron filings, pipe tobacco or coffee grounds. At the Académie Humbert he shared his knowledge with Lepape, explaining that ‘the oil to use as an additive is linseed or sacatif de Courtrai, brown or clear, exposed first to the light in order to fade; that there must be over forty shades of blue, and that he could make at least one of them appear like a puff of smoke … that black, too, is a spectrum, a case study in “the behaviour of colour” … that the grinding and mixing of colours is an art in itself, a question of temperament and “feel” as much as pigment and properties.’
All this was unusual. Braque seemed quite uninterested in aesthetics, Lepape noted, maintaining a healthy nonchalance whenever the discussions turned to theoretical matters. He would draw studiously for the designated three quarters of an hour, then relax and chat for fifteen minutes about nothing in particular, with an instinctive, easy modesty. Though Lepape’s talent for drawing was evident, he had no real knowledge of oil painting. He was fascinated to know how Braque had learned all he knew. Braque explained that he had been painting since childhood. Then he must have acquired plenty of experience already? Yes, said Braque, he had a lot of experience. What was his preferred medium? ‘I’m quite good at marbling, wood-grain, ornamental mouldings,’ Braque replied. Was he joking? ‘It’s quite tricky, you know. There are all colours of marble, and the veins and little threads are all different shapes; it’s the same with wood. It’s very difficult, but you can learn. It’s actually quite fascinating.’ The interrogation continued, until Lepape asked him when he intended to begin painting at the academy. ‘Here? Never. I’m just here to draw, do composition; exercises. Painting – that’s another story. For that you need to be alone at home in peace and quiet, or out in the countryside. You need solitude to paint. Here, believe me, it’s just exercises, exercises … then more exercises.’
At the Académie Humbert, there were two sessions a day. Braque attended only in the mornings, but Lepape went back for the evening sessions, when the students included women. The semi-clad model would be lit by large, shaded lamps, leaving the rest of the room in partial darkness, which must have made drawing a challenge. In the gloom one evening Lepape noticed a student who had not been there before, a girl with frizzy hair plaited into a bun at the nape of her neck, simple clothes and no make-up. When she drew she wore a pince-nez suspended from a cord behind her ear. She worked with intense concentration, standing quite still even when the model changed her pose, drawing skilfully and apparently effortlessly, with a boldness and assurance Lepape had never seen before. He persuaded Braque to go along with him one evening to see the girl’s work. They discovered her name was Marie Laurencin, though she told them everyone called her Coco. She had a Creole appearance – as, coincidentally, did Braque – though her ancestry was a mystery. She claimed her grandmother was Creole, but that was invention; in fact, her Creole blood probably dated back centuries, to when her mother’s family lived in Cherbourg, from where the fishermen regularly made sea voyages to Africa and the Antilles. She was quirky and offbeat and something about her appealed to the poetic side of Braque. His appreciation of her indirectly earned her a place in Picasso’s circle, the patronage of Gertrude Stein and later commissions to design sets and costumes for Diaghilev. Over the following two decades she became established as one of the few prominent women painters of her time.
Marie had progressed to the Académie Humbert from the École des Dessins de la Ville de Paris, where she had trained in porcelain painting, studying Persian miniatures and rococo art. Her career as a painter had been decided on the top deck of a horse-drawn omnibus one Sunday afternoon on the way home from a visit to the Louvre with her mother. ‘I’ll never be a painter,’ she complained, whereupon her mother, Pauline, replied that it was indeed unlikely; she had never been able to draw. That was not true, but Pauline’s idea had been that Marie would become a teacher. They compromised when Marie agreed to study porcelain painting, since in those days it was still (as in Renoir’s day) a fashionable and reasonably lucrative skill. At the École des Dessins she was taught by Guignolot, who, according to Marie, had also at some stage taught Braque. When she started at the academy she was already a proficient and expressive artist, but she painted only in black and white – ‘colours terrified me. Red terrified me.’ She made merciless self-portraits in brown, grey and black. At twenty, still living at home with her mother and their cat, Pousiquette, she felt ugly, sad and hopeless.
Marie and Pauline Laurencin lived the reclusive lifestyle then typical for a woman with a child born out of wedlock, at 51, boulevard de la Chapelle, an extension of the boulevard Rochechouart, at the foot of the hillside of Montmartre. Mother and daughter enthralled and exasperated each other, Marie idolizing Pauline’s beauty but convinced that her mother did not love her enough. She loved to hear Pauline sing, which she did often. In her notebooks, Marie recorded that ‘Our lonely Sundays resonated with the Dies Irae sung by my mother.’ She sang popular songs, too, and sailors’ songs. Many years later, Marie reflected that ‘without the music and the airs my mother used to sing to me, I would never have touched a paintbrush’. When she was not singing, Pauline liked everything to be quiet. The two of them passed their cloistered evenings, Pauline silently reading Latin texts while Marie patiently read her way through Lewis Carroll and her large collection of illustrated journals.
Pauline’s instruction was severe. She taught her daughter that sadness was a mortal sin, as was envy; Marie should strive for self-improvement, but she must never be jealous. When she once complained of boredom, she was severely punished. They held each other in complex thrall, driven by a mixture of religious instruction and fantasy, their days punctuated by the regular arrival of a monsieur in smart jacket and top hat whom Pauline told Marie was her father. This was true, but Marie did not believe her. (The facts came to light only some two decades later.) She never, then or later, mentioned him to any of her friends. She later said that, between the ages of thirteen and twenty, with the exception of one schoolteacher who taught her elocution, needlework and deportment, she got to know nobody and experienced ‘nothing else at all; a complete vacuum’ until she entered first the École des Dessins, then the Académie Humbert.
Though for the time being she kept her mother’s secrets, Lepape and Braque brought her out of herself; despite her apparently inhibited manner she was actually a quirky and entertaining character, poetic and imaginative. When they asked to see more of her work she brought them portfolios and notebooks full of drawings, watercolours, notes and drafts; and imaginary compositions of strange, mythological animals. Braque, particularly, was very fond of her; he found her diverting and admired her work. She was also discerning; keen to take their advice on her work, she also gave them good advice on theirs. She and Braque developed a casual, teasing intimacy that never became a romantic or sexual attachment; they hung around happily together, not doing very much. ‘Yesterday Braque and I were being lazy together – too lazy to do anything but fight. We didn’t though. Very silly, just sitting there, each in his armchair. To amuse me he put on blue glasses …’ In the summer evenings of autumn 1903, when they left the academy at the end of the day, the three of them – Braque, Marie and Lepape – made their way past the Moulin Rouge, along the boulevard Rochechouart and all the way up the hillside, where Braque introduced them to the Moulin de la Galette.
The old windmill-turned-dance hall was nowhere near as decadent as the Moulin Rouge. In fact, by the standards of Montmartre, the Moulin de la Galette was really quite proper. Since its
refurbishment in the 1890s, the pink and green outer door of the building at the foot of the old windmill was surmounted in a circle of white globes by the words ‘Bal Dubray’. At night, the place was festooned with coloured lights, rivalling the cabarets at the bottom of the hillside which flashed their neon strips and flashy new electric lighting. The walls of the immense salle of the Moulin de la Galette reflected the room like mirrors as gas-powered projectors trained a torrent of darts of light on to the surging crowd of dancers. There was a palm tree at each corner and a raised platform for the orchestra, and the evening was still presided over by a Dubray – Monsieur Auguste Dubray, who cut a formal figure in tail coat and top hat. He kept a table for his artist friends, who, to avoid resentment among the other clients, entered through a secret door at the rear. Entry for everyone else was through a corridor which ascended into a vast lit room scattered with tables and benches, the dance floor surrounded by a balustrade in red wood. At the centre of the hall stood the bouncer, Monsieur Henri, over six feet tall, with ‘the shoulders of a gorilla and the neck of a bull’, as Georges Lepape once remarked. Monsieur Henri was arresting in every way, his broad face accentuated by his crew cut, thick black eyebrows and little moustache waxed with kiss-curls. For maintaining orderly standards in the dance hall, he dressed the part in frock coat and smart black trousers, shiny white starched collar and cuffs; a cravat in white piqué secured with a tiger’s-tooth tiepin a pale waistcoat embroidered with flowers. Neither the java nor the cancan was allowed in his establishment, both dances considered too rowdy. ‘If a couple indulged in wayward behaviour, or dared move the wrong way, with a single rapid butt of his copious stomach [he] would propel the offenders to the exact spot where they went wrong.’ One of the most popular dances was the farandole, danced in an open chain. It was this ring of dancers that had first caught the attention of Matisse when he sat sketching there in the early days; it was to reappear, transformed into a circle of pared-down nude figures, in two of his major works of the end of the decade, La Danse and La Musique.
The orchestra, conducted by Mabille (descended from the owner of the famous Bal Mabille) and formed mainly of brass, created an infernal din, especially on Sundays, when the dancing went on from three until eleven, the dancers kicking up acrid dust from the wooden floorboards as they danced on for hours without interruption. Since its refurbishment, the place attracted a better class of clientele than in Renoir’s day, when its customers had been the jobless poor. Now, seamstresses, factory workers and their cavaliers regularly came up from the bottom of the hillside to the place where the drinks, at fifteen centimes a demi de bière, were still the cheapest anywhere and they could dance quadrilles, polkas and waltzes all afternoon for just four sous. The girls of Montmartre would peel off from the crowd when they found someone handsome enough to lose their virtue with; young men hung around looking for a girl to dance with before moving her on to the next bar, at the foot of the rue Ravignan. Marie Laurencin adored it all, especially when Braque expertly led her round the dance hall in a waltz – yet another of his accomplishments. Lepape sat in a corner making stylish sketches of them, Braque in his bowler hat and checked ‘English’ suit, Marie in leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouse and tiny-waisted skirt – early precursors of the illustrations for fashion plates he would later supply for Poiret and contribute to La Gazette du bon ton and Vogue.
10.
The First Salon d’Automne
On the bitterly cold night of 31 October 1903, artists and viewers gathered for the inaugural exhibition of the Salon d’Automne, which took place in the freezing, unheated basement of the Petit Palais. The crowd of carriages lined up outside indicated that not only artists but fashionable socialites had been attracted by the prospect of a daring new Salon; they attended the opening in full evening dress. The works represented included paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse, though the two the latter had submitted were hardly groundbreaking: one was a flower painting, Tulipes, the other an old-fashioned interior in the Flemish style, Dévideuse picarde (intérieur) – hardly the likely precursors of La Danse and La Musique. It would be another two years before the introduction of the wild, fiery landscapes by Derain and Vlaminck that earned them the label ‘Fauves’; a further five before the first appearance of cubism, which by 1910 signalled the beginning of abstraction and the end – as Braque was to put it – of art as imitation. (It was first identified when Braque produced landscapes some said looked like ‘little cubes’.) In autumn 1903, the discoveries that by the end of the decade would form the basis of modern art were still in the future. Matisse was still willing to please his unambitious public. Picasso, still in Barcelona, was probably unaware that the first exhibition of the Salon d’Automne was even taking place.
Though the hundreds of artists showing their work were all practically unknown, the exhibition was huge in scale. The catalogue, a modest-looking small-format publication (printed on cheap paper illustrated with a simple cover sketch and priced at one franc), listed 990 works. Among them were three avant-garde works by a Spanish artist, Joaquim Sunyer, who lived in the rue de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and had studied with Nonell. Fernande Olivier, an artist’s model living with her lover Laurent Dubienne, an aspiring sculptor, in the place Ravignan, had already noticed Sunyer coming and going in the lanes around the place du Tertre. He was small and wiry, she noted, ‘like a Spanish guitarist’. She and Dubienne were living in a beaten-up old building with no running water which resembled one of the laundry boats that were familiar sights along the Seine. During the next year or so it would acquire the nickname ‘the Bateau-Lavoir’; at the time, it was still familiarly known as the Maison du Trappeur. In 1900, Picasso’s friend Paco Durrio had left his shack in the Maquis and moved into a studio there; it was fast becoming a cheap place for artists renting makeshift studios that doubled up as living spaces.
Fernande had also been there since 1900, when she came up from the country one April day on the early-morning train looking for work. She had made her way straight to the employment bureau. When they asked her to come back at four she had wandered about looking longingly in pastry-shop windows – in Paris, the patisserie was so pretty – while she waited to see if they could find her a position (in an office, perhaps, since she was educated) that would enable her to buy food and rent a room. She was spotted by Dubienne, who took her to a café and asked her what kind of life she hoped to live in Paris. He pointed out that any employer would expect her to work for a month before she earned a penny and she would have no life of her own (though the working day for women had been reduced to ten hours, the weekly day’s holiday for workers was not introduced until 1906). She would surely do better to go up to the heights of Montmartre with him. In exchange for a few modelling sessions he could offer her a roof over her head and her freedom, with no strings attached. She accepted his offer and thereafter spent her days modelling for him and other local artists.
She had been happy with Dubienne but had begun to notice he had his limitations. Though he was kind and understanding, he had started to seem to her somehow lacking in ambition. He did everything slowly. It took him weeks to put up shelves, and he was no quicker at producing his sculptures. She was keeping a weather eye out, since clearly there were other artists in Montmartre who, unlike Dubienne, had drive and initiative, more notable talent, and perhaps even prospects.
PART II
The Rose Period
1.
The Bateau-Lavoir
April 1904. News had spread that Picasso was back in Paris. One of his Catalan friends, painter Manuel Martinez Hughé, known as Manolo, who lived in the Maquis, knew he was borrowing Paco Durrio’s studio in the ramshackle building they called the Bateau-Lavoir. (It was burned down in the 1970s but a replica, in notably better condition than the original, now stands on the site.) One evening at dusk, Manolo took two friends, writer André Salmon and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, up the hillside with him to see for themselves.
Manolo was a great character
around Montmartre: he said he was a sculptor, but he never sculpted, as he could never afford the materials. He had somehow acquired some pastels he said nobody wanted but he did not seem to be drawing or painting either; mainly he was writing – or at least, reciting – poetry, inspired by Symbolist poet Jean Moréas. So far, his greatest achievement, delivered in his rolling Catalan accent, was the line ‘Et couché, el soir, yo souis comme oune baiyolone dedans sa vouatre.’ (‘Asleep at night, I’m like a violin in its case.’) His main occupation, however, consisted in selling the expectation of a major lottery win. He sold rolls of cardboard marked with numbers door to door, each roll containing an attractive drawing – a novel package. Nobody ever won. When his friends asked him how he explained this to his customers, he said, ‘I just tell them, you didn’t win.’
Manolo, Salmon and Apollinaire made their way up the steps of the hillside to meet Picasso. At the corner of the rue des Trois Frères and the rue Ravignan, the Hôtel Poirier, where more obscure poets and painters lodged, came into view like a set in a melodrama, garish in the gaslight as if painted by Vlaminck (whom they would all soon get to know). In the twilight, the pear trees seemed to hang suspended, yellowed by the light of the gas lamps. The three friends turned into the place Ravignan, where the low, dilapidated building that looked like a laundry boat flanked one side of the square.
‘C’est ici,’ said Manolo.
Inside the building, they trod carefully across creaking floorboards beaten by winter storms and splintered by summer heat until they found the interior door to Picasso’s small, uncurtained studio. The front door of the Bateau-Lavoir had been open: it was never closed before midnight, as the comings and goings of the inhabitants were frequent – so Picasso had heard them enter the building. He responded as soon as he heard Manolo’s voice and came to open his door. They found him alone, his studio poorly lit by a single lamp. Propped against the dusty walls were paintings he had brought back with him from Spain. He showed them to his visitors one by one, holding a candle at arm’s length to each. They saw melancholy pictures painted in monochrome blue, of down-and-out men and frail-looking women. An emaciated, blind beggar strummed at a guitar. Vagrants stood huddled at the roadside, men in rags and sad-looking women with bony shoulders and wornout faces. And there were desolate family groups, one gathered barefoot on the beach, the woman bent over a ragged bundle, perhaps an ailing newborn. Salmon thought they looked like the work of a cross between an adolescent inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen and a man revealed to himself by El Greco. All the paintings told stories of destitution, sadness and loss. Picasso also showed them some of his earlier works; these were signed Pablo Ruiz (Ruiz was his mother’s maiden name).
