by Sue Roe
In Barcelona, El Liberal had reported two days running (on 11 and 12 April) that ‘The artists Messrs Sebastian Junyer Vidal and Pablo Ruiz Picasso are leaving Barcelona on today’s express for Paris, in which city they propose to hold an exhibition of their latest works.’ Picasso had (again) arranged the announcement himself. In recent months, his career as an artist seemed to have dwindled to a standstill. Even Els Quatre Gats was no longer functioning, closed since the previous July. There seemed to be nothing doing in Barcelona. After three false starts in Paris and several seasons of disappointment and tragedy, Picasso was ready to try again. By now, he had more or less recovered from the shock of Casagemas’s death and he was better prepared for the challenges of life in Montmartre. His opportunity came when another of the Catalan artists, Paco Durrio, left Paris, vacating his studio in the Bateau-Lavoir.
The place Ravignan (since renamed place Émile Goudeau) was a small, roughly shaped square towards the top of the Butte shaded by chestnut trees, just below the place du Tertre. Some said the Bateau-Lavoir (as mentioned, then known as the Maison du Trappeur) had once been a piano factory. In 1867, it had belonged to a blacksmith, whose initials, MFS, were still nailed in wrought iron above the doorway. By 1904, it was little more than a stack of shacks, built up the sloping hillside. The main door on to the place Ravignan gave it the appearance from that side of a one-storey building. By a quirk of the terrain, on the courtyard side, the ground floor was three floors below, so one entered apparently at ground level and immediately ascended a broken-down staircase, reaching the top only to descend again. It was labyrinthine, with corridors and precarious makeshift staircases, and deceptively large. In 1899, it had been divided up; it contained twelve artists’ studios and as many as thirty rooms in all. The place would probably have made more architectural sense as a piano factory, when it may have been constructed around a spiralled ramp, the better to roll the pianos out (though how they would have descended the Butte is anyone’s guess). It looked like a factory, too, with lines of rectangular windows with small, square panes. In fact, it was a slum. There were planks of wood piled up outside, the windowpanes were cracked, the woodwork battered and broken. The walls seeped; the place smelled of mildew and cats. Everything about it was precarious, even the ventilation shafts, which lethally crossed the building at roof height. One winter a tenant had leaned out of his window, trying to sweep away the banked-up snow, and fallen to his death down one of the shafts.
Picasso’s studio was at the top of the building, with a grimy view across the rooftops. The household consisted of artists, models, a farmer whose cellar room was stacked in summer with asparagus, carrots and onions and in winter with sacks of mussels, and a puppeteer who practised in his room to the sound of drum rolls. The whole building was unbearably hot in summer and freezing in winter. There was no heating, no lighting, no running water other than a scaly indoor fountain on the ground floor, and sanitation consisted of a reeking hole in the ground, in a cubbyhole with a broken door, shared by everyone. There was a concierge, who always had a bowl of soup ready for anyone who had reached starvation point; she lived around the corner at the back of the building. But nobody thought much about what her life must be like, except Fernande Olivier, the sculptor’s model. As she passed by the concierge’s lodge on her way to and from her modelling work, she noticed the woman sitting there, all day long in her shadowy world, perched cross-legged on a table behind the window.
Life in some parts of haute Montmartre had begun to change during the past couple of years, especially since the arrival of the funiculaire, which since its installation in 1901 brought tourists up the hillside to enjoy the views and cheap restaurants, perhaps even to catch sight of an artist at work. In 1904, you might have seen the occasional young man striding through the lanes with his smart cane, in suit and panama, watched by a gang of roughshod urchins. The local children hung around on summer evenings playing in the shade, the boys in torn short trousers, the girls in grubby pinafores. Posters, defaced and peeling at the edges, plastered the walls of most of the buildings, but Spielman’s restaurant in the place du Tertre had smartened up and polished its windows, the better to advertise the plat du jour. The Hôtel du Tertre and the few cafés for tourists also now had smart façades. You might even see the occasional horse-drawn carriage crossing the square. But the scrubland of the Maquis still stretched the length of the north flank of the hillside; that whole district, from behind the Moulin de la Galette down to the rue Caulaincourt, was still a shanty town.
In those early days, Picasso’s gang still consisted mainly of his Catalan friends, joined, from now on, by André Salmon (who crossed the river from the Left Bank) and Max Jacob – the first to create an aura around Picasso – who moved from 7, rue Ravignan to the dreariest, most uncomfortable studio in the basement of the Bateau-Lavoir. They gathered in the more run-down cafés or sat beneath the plane trees in the place Ravignan, where they could look down across the roofs and spires of Paris as they discussed the affairs of the day. Picasso was still most comfortable speaking in Spanish; though his French had improved since his first arrival, it could hardly be called fluent. The bande of Spanish artists would draw up their chairs outside the front door of the Bateau-Lavoir and sit conversing loudly in Catalan on the pavement. At midday and in the evenings, they went to Azon’s in the rue Ravignan, or Vernin’s in the rue Cavalotti near the pawn shop (neither as smart as Spielman’s, both more like local tabacs), where they could eat indefinitely on credit. The gang was constantly swelled by the addition of somebody’s new friend, making a curious, random assemblage, all crowded together in a hot, cramped room where the smell of cooking mingled with the strong scent of rough red wine.
Settled back into the neighbourhood life of Montmartre, Picasso continued to paint the scenes of the street in works inspired by Goya and embellished in part by his imagination. In 1904 and 1905, he painted incessantly, sometimes producing as many as three canvases a day. His subjects were changing, however. On the whole, he had stopped painting the women with rouged lips and faces and tinted hair who strolled the streets and frequented the bars of Montmartre. That fascination with the seductions of decadent pleasure had deserted him with the shock of Casagemas’s death. Now, the itinerants who wandered the streets of both haute and bas Montmartre began to find their way into his work. He had begun to paint the families of travelling circus performers he saw resting in groups between performances: acrobats and their exhausted-looking wives sitting about on the waste ground of the Maquis, still in their costumes; a hurdy-gurdy man with his instrument; children balancing on balls, agile and thin as blades.
Norman Mailer has described the itinerant people who from about 1904 began to appear in Picasso’s work, ‘travelling jugglers and acrobats, performers living on the last line between society and the nomadic life’ who reminded Picasso of his native Spain. In childhood, he had seen troupes of tumblers, sometimes leading apes or bears, and now his ‘saltimbanques’ pictures depicted ‘not so much the circus proper as dusty vagrants, wandering through bare, indeterminate landscapes in the clothes they wore for their performance’. The expanses of waste ground were real, though – they belonged to the Maquis – and itinerant performers could still be seen in the streets of Paris with their children and sometimes their animals, trailing a monkey or a bear on a lead. These nomads represented freedom and skill, but also rootlessness and penury. As a struggling artist himself, at some level Picasso empathized with them. Nevertheless, he was still determined to find a way of becoming successful; at present, he seemed to be watching as others achieved recognition before him. In another of his coloured pencil and ink sketches, he and Vidal, the friend he arrived in Paris with, are shown meeting Paul Durand-Ruel, who is handing over a bag of gold – to Vidal.
Picasso knew that to achieve success he would need to have a substantial, large-scale work to show. In 1904, he produced a life-size painting in subtle rose colours of a beautiful naked boy approaching the viewer, lead
ing a white horse. The work has an atmosphere of extraordinary poise; in a sense it epitomizes what came to be known as Picasso’s Rose Period, combining delicate colour, virtuoso drawing and a mood of awe-inspiring calm. This painting, given its scale, was obviously intended to attract the attention of the dealers, and it had the power and gravitas of an exemplary work. The time was ripe, since Vollard had finally promised Picasso a solo show. It must have taken at least two men to transport Boy Leading a Horse down the steps of the Montmartre hillside to the rue Laffitte, where Picasso showed it to Vollard, along with other new works. The account of the exchange between them was hearsay:
‘How much?’ asked Vollard.
‘I want twenty francs.’
‘You must be mad!’
‘All right then, fifteen francs.’
‘Not fifteen, not anything, now scarper.’
Perhaps actors on stage, then, would prove more appealing subjects. Though Picasso did not especially enjoy the theatre, he did sometimes go to the local Théâtre Montmartre. (He and Max Jacob were once thrown out for eating sausages.) Built for the people of Montmartre on the scale of a theatre in a small town, the Théâtre Montmartre was hugely popular. The entertainment was raucous and, from the cheapest seats in the top balcony, the audience joined in the action by yelling insults at the villain and applauding the heroine. The walls of the balcony were scrawled over with graffiti, rough drawings of tough-looking men and scantily clad girls. Although Picasso was not particularly interested in the plays themselves, the actors fascinated him, with their tawdry costumes and melodramatic gestures. Picasso’s second large-scale work of 1904, The Actor, which today hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is his tribute to them. The painting depicts a tall, ungainly character dressed all in red, making his exaggerated gestures onstage in a hapless appeal to the audience. At the foot of the canvas the prompter’s hands and script are clearly visible, adding to the general impression of ham acting, the awkwardness of the lanky figure and the gaucheness of the performance. In the theatre, the players were generally no more talented – in fact, usually rather less so – than the wandering acrobats and circus performers. But Picasso’s strong, bold colours and the actor’s elongated form make him vivid, arresting and poignant.
Georges Braque loved the theatre, especially the popular melodramas of the day; he may even have attended some of the same performances as Picasso, though it would be another two years before their paths eventually crossed. In summer 1904, Braque was in Kergroes, near Pont-Aven, with a crowd very different from his Académie Humbert friends. They included his mistress, Paulette, who ran a low-level salon in Montmartre, a kind of maison clos for the literati, as well as a private opium den in the rue de Douai, behind the Moulin Rouge. In Kergroes, the group of friends that revolved around Paulette called themselves the Vincent Colony (modelled, presumably, on both Gauguin and van Gogh). When he returned to Paris, Braque abandoned his studies at the Académie Humbert and moved out of his lodgings into a rented studio in the rue d’Orsel, near the offices of Le Libertaire, barely a couple of hundred yards from the place Ravignan and the Bateau-Lavoir, but, for the time being, he and Picasso moved in very different circles and frequented different cafés and bars.
In Picasso’s life, the role of women was as yet uncertain. For him, women were transitory, provisional; like the itinerant actors, they came and went. The general image of womanhood in his work at this time is melancholy and fragile: he painted frail, vulnerable madonnas. No longer robust and seductive, as they had been in 1900, his muses were now working women, laundresses or seamstresses, like the models Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas favoured, worn down by their labours but with a poignant, ethereal beauty. Picasso had become romantically involved with a wraith-like girl named Madeleine, probably a local laundress, whom he painted in a thin chemise, her hair piled up to highlight her delicate bone structure, in accents of pale, chalky rose (Girl in a Chemise). Another of his regular models was a girl called Alice Géry. When he nicknamed her la vierge he was being ironic; since adolescence, she had been the lover of government actuary and gifted mathematician Maurice Princet, faithful to him ‘in the Montmartre way’ – that is, despite her other ‘amusements’. Though she was in real life quite tough, she had a celestial aura, with huge eyes, golden hair and pious looks somehow not at all at odds with her quality of natural wildness. In his work, Picasso fused the features of Madeleine and Alice, producing at the beginning of his Rose Period some of his most gentle, compassionate studies of women.
He may already have spotted Fernande Olivier coming in and out of the Bateau-Lavoir by the time he met her at Coco’s, the colour merchant’s in the boulevard de Clichy. Here she was now, the beautiful, tall redhead. She seemed languid, aloof, more voluptuous than the girls he was accustomed to, with strong, vivid features and a contrasting aura of lightness. From now on, wherever he went, he kept seeing her. When he spoke to her at Coco’s, she said her real name was Fernande Belle-Vallée. She had already noticed Picasso. ‘There is a Spanish painter,’ she wrote in her journal. ‘I keep coming across him, looking at me with big, heavy eyes. I couldn’t say how old he is – his mouth is a nice shape, but he has a deep line from his nose to his mouth, which ages him.’ She thought him a little coarse, but there was something – ‘une personnalité émouvante’ – which somehow shone through.
Summer 1904 came early, and Paris was stifling. The sky seemed to press down ‘like a heated roof’, as Fernande described it, the intense blue broken up only at the end of the day, when everyone gathered beneath the trees in the place Ravignan, looking for shade. The benches blistered. Working men and women trudged heavily up the steps of the Butte after a day’s work, weary with the heat. Not until late August did it begin to abate, when finally there seemed to be some air. Now, the shutters were tentatively pushed back, creating bays of shade between the houses. The leaves, already brown, fell from the trees, rustling on the ground. A gentle breeze began to agitate the leaves. When Picasso and his friends brought their chairs outside to sit discussing the day’s events, they noticed Fernande, already seated outside the Bateau-Lavoir, quietly reading her book.
2.
Anarchy and the Joy of Life
Matisse was in St Tropez. He owed this much needed retreat from Paris to Paul Signac, who owned a big house and garden there and had found Matisse a small fisherman’s cottage just large enough to house him, Amélie and their son, Pierre. During the past few years, Matisse had had increasingly more to do with Signac, who by now was vice-president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Signac clearly saw Matisse as something of a protégé; he had made him a member of the hanging committee and recently appointed him as one of his deputies. The assumption of these public roles, however, had had no impact at all on the way Matisse’s work was received. Though he had shown work at the Salon des Indépendants, only two minor purchases had resulted. His sole substantial sale that spring was to André Level, who regularly patronized the small dealers of Montmartre before founding the Peau d’Ours, a society to enable young collectors to acquire the works of their contemporaries. When Level paid him four hundred francs, it seemed like a fortune.
In 1904, Matisse was still wrestling with Signac’s divisionist techniques and broadly anarchist agenda, which he related to his own thoughts on the fundamental question of the social purpose of art. He had begun to reflect that, if painting could come closer to a form of decoration, it could surely be introduced into the lives and homes of ordinary working people. Painting would thus be liberated from the realms of academic art, becoming artisanal. In a subtle paradox, art might thus become decorative in its most intrinsic, expressive sense, and useful rather than ornamental. When Matisse looked at Signac’s work, he saw ‘canvases which restore light to the walls of our urban apartments, which enclose pure colour within rhythmic lines, which share the charm of oriental carpets, mosaics and tapestries’, and asked himself, ‘are they not also decorations?’
However,
Signac in person was another matter. There was a controlling side to his personality, which had begun to grate on Matisse. One problem was that Signac regarded his theories of divisionism as inflexible rules, whereas Matisse would have liked to see them simply as a way of moving beyond Impressionism which opened up new possibilities for improvisation – the beginning, not the end, of true freedom of expression. St Tropez might have been liberating, as Corsica had once been, but Matisse was stymied by Signac, since as soon as he began to improvise on Signac’s rules, Signac criticized his work, making him so angry that only Amélie could calm him down. Nevertheless, he continued to admire Signac’s painting, particularly his major work of art, The Age of Anarchy, which showed beautiful, half-naked people in an Arcadian idyll – his vision of freedom from the tyrannies of industrial exploitation. Matisse had almost certainly seen this work in St Tropez when he began to paint his own vision of Arcadia, La Joie de vivre.
