In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art

by Sue Roe

  As the evenings wore on, the singing in the Lapin Agile gathered momentum as bawdy couplets, street romances, Marseilles refrains, Breton melodies and provincial folk songs were belted out, accompanied by Frédé on his guitar. Poets read their poetry; painters sat swapping stories. People would become regulars for a while, then disappear. Some rolled out at the end of a long night on to a nearby bench, or just stretched out on the ground beneath the trees. The Lapin Agile soon became the centre of the community in haute Montmartre, the place where artists gathered with artists manqués, the jobless bourgeois or the black sheep of the family, the place where the local scoundrel became an autodidact. Dancers who had seen better days occasionally came up from the Moulin Rouge to sell opium (also available in Montparnasse, at the Closerie des Lilas). The Lapin Agile was where everyone went to be seen, and to share their troubles, drown their sorrows, confess to secret romances or expound their particular theory of life.

  Not everyone who went there had an interest in painting, writing or music; the place still occasionally attracted undesirables. Frédé, distinctive in this period in his red scarf and broad-brimmed hat (a battered version of Bruant himself, perhaps, though Frédé kept his tangled, greying beard), was not above deterring them by firing a few pistol shots. Eventually everyone who was still standing would make their way home after a long night’s revelry, singing and calling to one another across the square, and sometimes firing a few shots of their own, out of sheer exuberance. Most people, including Picasso, carried guns; it is a wonder there were not more accidental killings and dramatic suicides in this strange rural underworld consisting of Catalans, artists manqués, poor workers, petty criminals, whores and gangsters. In 1904, the artists who would soon bring about a revolution in the arts were still in the wings.

  4.

  New Searches for Arcadia: Enter the Steins

  By autumn 1904, Matisse was back in Paris. He brought with him another new painting, Luxe, calme et volupté, a sunny Arcadian scene painted predominantly in warm pink tones depicting a group of nude women relaxing on the beach and a single figure, her arms raised to her wet hair, emerging from the sea. However, the Arcadian dream, even on canvas, remained elusive, and under the constraining influence of Signac. Though the new picture was painted entirely in the divisionist method, Signac had once again been disapproving. Matisse had taken his title from Charles Baudelaire’s poem ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ – ‘Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,/Luxe, calme et volupté …’, the borrowed title implying shared ideals of balance and harmony – but Signac saw only elements of deviation from his own inflexible methods.

  Despite his exasperation with his protégé’s work, Signac continued to assign Matisse public roles. He had now made him assistant secretary of the Salon d’Automne and a member of the selection committee. But none of that paid the rent; Matisse and Amélie were down to their last fifty francs when, in autumn 1904, she made the journey from Paris to Perpignan, where her sister Berthe now lived. After visiting Berthe, she took the opportunity of continuing along the coast to explore the area between the mountains and the sea. At the end of a road that wound steeply down the hillside, past the pink house where the anchovies were salted and on towards the harbour, she discovered a small fishing village where secluded beaches caught the light, giving the dark-blue water a silver, sparkling sheen. The church of St Vincent, with its glittering gold altar, stood at the edge of the harbour. At dusk, its stone seemed to draw a delicate, pink light across the waves. When the sun began to set, the sky glowed pale blue and pink, and a sail, billowing out, made a shape like a pale-yellow flame. Perhaps this would be the place where Matisse would finally discover his own vision of Arcadia.

  In October 1904, the second Salon d’Automne took place, this time in the Grand Palais, the larger of the two ‘palaces’ built to celebrate the Franco–Russian alliance. The exhibition included, among its 2,044 works, a Renoir room (thirty-five), a Toulouse-Lautrec room (twenty-eight) and a section on ‘Photographie’, consisting of photographic reproductions of paintings by a small selection of artists, including Cézanne, represented by three containers of nine photographs each. The third (no. 2047) was the property of Monsieur Vollard – his latest piece of ingenuity, cleverly tantalizing the audience with reproductions, the better to augment the value of the original works. The exhibition included a work everyone found spellbinding, The Artist’s Wife (or Madame Cézanne à l’éventail), Cézanne’s arresting portrait of his wife in a blue dress, seated in a dark-red armchair, which was being seen in Paris for the first time. In the painting, Madame Cézanne’s face seemed to be composed in two halves, one side expressive, the other mask-like. The posture of the figure (like Cézanne’s earlier portrait of his father) seemed powered by a centrifugal energy, the picture planes interconnecting to establish a particular kind of sculptural dynamic, as if the figure were truly alive. The artist has captured his wife’s slight unease as a sitter, her delicacy and her fragility, as well as the softness of her flesh and the contrasting coarseness of her clothes. The impact of Cézanne’s work at the exhibition was substantial, spreading as far as America, where the anonymous reviewer in the New York Sun reported that he was the central attraction of the exhibition, with his ‘crude, violent … altogether bizarre canvases’, his ‘tang of the soil’.

  Visitors to the exhibition included a young American, a tall, graceful man from Pennsylvania with a long, bony, almost translucent face and golden hair. His name was Leo Stein. He returned to the Grand Palais several times, sometimes with his older brother, Michael, and younger sister, Gertrude, who cut a strikingly squat figure. Vollard, who had lent the painting by Cézanne to the Salon, also visited several times. Every time he went, he saw the Steins, the two brothers and their sister, seated side by side on a bench, looking up at the portrait. After the exhibition closed, Leo and Gertrude Stein approached Vollard to make him an offer for the painting, which he accepted, struck by their remarkable passion for the work they were about to possess. ‘“Now,” said [Gertrude], “the picture is ours!” They might have been ransoming someone they loved.’

  Leo Stein had arrived in Paris two years earlier, in 1902, to study (like Matisse before him) at the Académie Julian. He took a spacious apartment in a large, Haussmann-built building at 27, rue de Fleurus, close to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where, the following autumn, Gertrude joined him. Leo’s life had been dedicated to the study of art for the previous three years, since, in 1900, aged twenty-four, he had graduated from Harvard University. With fellow Harvard alumnus and American art connoisseur Bernard Berenson as his older guide, he had begun by familiarizing himself with quattrocento Italian art, encouraged by Berenson, who was in the process of writing the essays on the history and aesthetics of Italian painting which were eventually collected and published (in 1956) as The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Leo had been planning to write a book of his own, on northern Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, until he discovered there were two already being written, whereupon he resumed his general study of art and aesthetics. He had expected to be excited by modern French art, but, so far, he had been disappointed. He had not yet discovered Montmartre, nor really seen any modern art in Paris. His main acquisition as yet was a painting by the British painter Philip Wilson Steer, purchased in London before he left for France, an auspicious purchase, since it had made Leo realize that people did not need to be millionaires to collect art, a revelation that had made him feel ‘a bit like a desperado’.

  During the first few weeks of 1903, a decisive event had convinced Leo Stern that his future lay in Paris. Dining with cellist Pablo Casals one evening, as he did every week, he had suddenly ‘felt myself growing into an artist’. He had rushed back to his hotel, built a rousing fire, discarded his clothes and begun work on a nude self-portrait. He spent the following week in the Louvre, practising his figure drawing by sketching statues. Nevertheless, his artistic ambition was manifested primarily in conversation, which before long
he would develop into what he was to call his ‘atmosphere of propaganda’. In spring 1904, Berenson happened to ask him if he knew Cézanne’s work: ‘I said that I did not. Where did one see him? He said, “At Vollard’s”; so I went to Vollard’s, and was launched.’

  Leo spent many happy hours trawling through dusty piles of canvases, turning paintings the right way up and getting on amiably with the dealer. That summer, Berenson introduced him to another Harvard alumnus, Charles Loeser, heir to the fortune of Macy’s Brooklyn department store and owner of a prominent collection of works by Cézanne, who now lived in Florence, where Leo visited him. What followed, Leo called his ‘Cézanne debauch’. By looking at the artist’s work, he absorbed principles of painting which made him determined to discover the works of other modern painters.

  By 1904, Michael Stein had also made his home in Paris, with his wife, Sarah, and their young son, Allan. They settled in the rue Madame, also on the outskirts of the Jardins du Luxembourg, round the corner from the rue de Fleurus. As the eldest child of deceased parents, Michael was in charge of the Stein family finances. He had brought his considerable business acumen to bear on the wise investment of their inheritance, selling their father’s holdings in his cable-car company at a profit to the head of the Central Pacific Railway, where he, Michael, became branch manager before extricating himself, in 1902, from the still-thriving business. Though they were not exactly millionaires, the Steins were certainly wealthy by the standards of those whose company they were about to keep. Leo and Gertrude had about a hundred and fifty dollars a month to spend on travel, books or pictures, at a time when rents in Paris were comparatively low and food was inexpensive. Occasionally, there was a windfall; on one occasion, Michael announced that there was an extra eight thousand francs to be spent: ‘As this was regarded as a criminal waste, we went at once to Vollard’s.’ Such sums would soon be invested in pictures which would later be regarded as some of the twentieth century’s most significant works of art.

  Though The Artist’s Wife was purchased by Michael Stein, it soon appeared at 27, rue du Fleurus, where Gertrude hung it above her desk so that she could look at it every day. By the opening of the 1904 Salon d’Automne, Leo was on the lookout for undiscovered talent, but he saw there nothing that interested him as much as the works of Cézanne. He noticed paintings by Matisse, but dismissed them as too divisionist for his taste. Nevertheless, his general disappointment did not prevent him, as he explained to friends, from feeling keenly from now on ‘the obligation that I have been under ever since the Autumn Salon, of expounding L’Art Moderne (you will observe that this is not the same as L’Art Nouveau)’. As yet, for Leo, the ‘Big Four’ were still Manet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne. None of the Steins had yet been introduced to the work of Picasso. In autumn 1904, Leo purchased works by Henri Manguin, a French painter associated with the Fauves, and the Swiss Félix Vallotton, but, as far as the Steins were concerned, Cézanne was still, for the time being, the incontestable master.

  Vollard, however, was keeping his eyes wide open, all the more so since the Steins had appeared on the scene; and he was still closely watching Matisse. He was also (since Matisse’s appointment to the committees of the Salon d’Automne and Salon des Indépendants) beginning to trust the artist’s judgement; he had recently taken on work by Manguin, Albert Marquet and Jean Puy, all associates of Matisse. It is possible he may also have known that, at the end of 1904, Matisse’s work was reproduced in Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), a magazine published from St Petersburg since 1899, its editor the future maestro of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev. It is unclear how Matisse knew of it – perhaps through Russians in Paris, or through one of the gallery owners in Montmartre. By contemporary Russian standards, Diaghilev’s magazine was radical in its outlook; the issue in which Matisse’s work appeared also included reproductions of work by Degas, Gauguin and van Gogh. In fact, by late 1904, the future of Mir Iskusstva was already precarious, given the developing political situation in Russia and also because, by that point, Diaghilev’s interest in it had begun to wane. On the whole, then, Mir Iskusstva made little impact in Paris. Nevertheless, its existence was significant, since the appearance of works by Matisse, Gauguin and van Gogh in its final issue clearly signalled the extent of Diaghilev’s steadily developing interest in contemporary French art.

  In Montmartre, Vollard was beginning to make new investments. Although he was watching Matisse with interest, since the exhibition of 1901 he had shown no further interest in Picasso, whose paintings of acrobats were about to be included in a show (from 25 February to 6 March) with two other artists at the Serrurier Gallery at 37, boulevard Haussmann. Picasso had high hopes. ‘It’s such a terrible waste of time, scrounging the last peseta to pay for the studio or a restaurant,’ he wrote home to friends in Barcelona. ‘God willing, people will like it and I’ll sell everything I’m showing.’ It was the first time he had shown his work since the previous October, when Berthe Weill had included him in a group show. He had been described in the catalogue preface as ‘a good image maker’; the author had praised his pastels and his depictions of ‘flowers, draperies, dresses, the shawls of lively Spanish women’ – it sounds almost as if he was being confused with another painter. Max Jacob was among the visitors; in a postscript to a letter of 27 February to André Salmon, he reminded him, ‘Exposition Picasso – Lundi a 2 h ½ précises.’ Picasso added greetings: ‘Bonjour à Salmon, Picasso.’ Though the Serrurier show brought him some attention in the press, however, he sold little; just enough, perhaps, to consider the possibility of a short retreat from Paris once summer came.

  In March 1905, Matisse helped Signac organize the first official exhibition of forty-five works by van Gogh, shown as part of the Salon des Indépendants. The show constituted a turning point for Matisse; he later said that, when he finally broke away from the constraints of Signac’s divisionist methods, it was van Gogh’s work that had encouraged him. At the Indépendants, he showed eight paintings, including Luxe, calme et volupté, which, despite his persistent criticisms, Signac immediately snapped up. When the influential critic Louis Vauxcelles saw it, he hailed Matisse in the press as the new ‘chef d’école’. The public was more equivocal; Berthe Weill said she heard sarcastic laughter the length of the exhibition hall. Viewers in early 1905 had barely had an opportunity to absorb the shock of Impressionism: this alarming new spectacle of paintings consisting of coloured dots and depicting naked figures in mythological settings was still too much for them. As soon as the exhibition closed, in May, Matisse and his family headed south to investigate the place Amélie had come across when she had made her extended journey along the coast near Perpignan.

  5.

  In Collioure

  When she discovered the small fishing village of Collioure the previous autumn, Amélie had seen at once that it might be the perfect retreat for Matisse, perhaps even the Arcadian idyll he was searching for. In this tiny, animated place, where most of the locals spoke only Catalan, in summer the hillsides were burned orange by the sun and the oleander faded to the colour of old roses. Above the port, the place was sparse and deserted, the foliage reminiscent of the shrubland of Corsica; there was dense woodland and the fir trees stood tall and dark against indigo skies. In 1905, summer came early; in May, the place already dazzled in the sunlight. The couple arrived in searing heat, which remained unabated all summer long.

  Lining the steep, twisting lanes that cut streets into the hillside were narrow houses paved with stones of shale, bound by the sand and limned into the colour of the earth. Here, the fishing people lived, in their tall, three-storey dwellings consisting of three rooms, one above another. The Matisses put up at the somewhat misleadingly named Hôtel de la Gare, above the port behind the railway line; in fact, it was nothing more than a modest lodging house, where la dame Roussette let out one or two spare rooms to the occasional travelling salesman or railway worker. On the ground floor was a large room sometimes used for weddings and ban
quets, and at the back a courtyard, where the rabbits’ cage was kept and hens pecked about in the dirt. La dame Roussette was an alarming-looking woman with an enormous beaked nose and chin and scraggy neck; her hair was rolled into the traditional Catalan coif. A widow of a certain age, and in character typical of the women of the region, she took a dim view of ‘foreigners’ – anyone, in other words, not from Collioure – and admitted only those who spoke Catalan, unless they were long known to those in the village. One look at Matisse, however, convinced her that this gentleman was special: he had about him the quiet air of a man who means business.

  Collioure, despite its ambience of remoteness, was the principal fishing port on the Mediterranean coast, abundant in anchovies and sardines, which served the entire region. It was a fishing port typical of the Catalan coast, and the way of life had evolved to suit its location, nestling among the mountains. The elderly still wore the accessories of the traditional costume: a white, lace-trimmed bonnet and wide woollen belt in red, blue or black, and a black or white kerchief right up to the chin. The women were matriarchs; they ran the homes, worked in the salting shop and mended the nets. In the narrow, winding lanes paved with polished pebbles lived a vibrant, working population.