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

by Sue Roe

  10.

  Immaculate Modigliani

  January 1906 was unusually mild. In Paris, the pavements were swept with sunshine. In Montmartre, everyone was talking about a newcomer, a beautiful Italian boy aged twenty-one, dark and handsome as a movie star, with black hair and deep-set eyes, immaculate in a black suit with wide lapels, starched collar and cuffs, flowing black cape and red scarf. His name was Amedeo Modigliani. He had arrived in Paris with his Chilean friend nineteen-year-old painter Ortiz de Zárate, who had first come to France in 1904 and was now heading back to Paris, where he was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. Together, they explored the sights of Paris, and the Louvre, before going up to Montmartre, where Zárate took Modigliani to the small galleries in and around the rue Laffitte. They found paintings by Renoir and Degas at Durand-Ruel’s, Gauguins and Cézannes at Vollard’s; and, at Sagot’s and Berthe Weill’s, works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen, van Dongen, Matisse and Picasso. Among his works by Picasso, Sagot had a painting of a blue-black raven that made a particular impression on Modigliani.

  In the cafés, the Italian began to meet other artists from all over the world, though Picasso and his friends viewed him with circumspection from the start; their circle had begun to consolidate, and to some extent close ranks, before Modigliani’s arrival – a misfortune of timing we can only regret. Modigliani knew about life in Montmartre; he had met an artist in Venice, the painter, writer and critic Ardengo Soffici. Soffici was later a vehement supporter of Futurism, and had lived in Paris and worked for Gil Blas with Steinlen and for the satirical French annuals Le Rire and La Sourire with Toulouse-Lautrec; for a while, he had lived in the Bateau-Lavoir. Modigliani was sitting in a café with a glass of red wine when he saw Picasso pass by. He introduced himself, and told him he had seen and admired his work.

  ‘Oh, those are old things,’ said Picasso, ‘though I cared about them at the time. What are you painting?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m still finding my way.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’ asked Picasso. Modigliani told him.

  ‘Get yourself a room in Montmartre,’ said Picasso. ‘Van Dongen came to Montmartre when he started painting … He could get all the women he wanted to come up from the boulevard Rochechouart to the Bateau-Lavoir, where I’m living now … Go up to Montmartre, you’ll see everything there: painting and all the rest of it, women, too, if that’s what you like. Unless you want to paint flowers there’s not much point staying in the Madeleine.’

  At the top of the hillside, Modigliani discovered the Maquis, where by now practically all the cleared land had become a shanty town. He saw the windmills and quiet rural lanes bordered with tumble-down dwellings. He noticed that people had added bits of Virginia creeper to their shacks, some of which stood in patches of garden in a tangle of seringas, lilacs, hawthorn and roses. There were small expanses of green cut through with precipices, and streams trickled through the clay, detaching little by little the islands of greenery where goats grazed among the acanthus suspended from the rocks, as Romantic writer and translator Gérard de Nerval had poetically observed when he lived for a time at the top of the Butte in the Château des Brouillards. Modigliani, too, saw the place through the eyes of a romantic. The inhabitants seemed to him an eccentric mix; he noted that the prostitutes must be well kept by their employers, since though they lived in broken shacks they walked the streets like queens, creating a splash of colour as they strolled by. They certainly stood out among the rag-pickers, collectors of rabbit skins, barrow boys, upholsterers, scrap merchants and rag-and-bone men.

  At the edge of the Maquis, in or near the rue Norvins, Modigliani found himself a vacant shack, with a cherry tree on the surrounding patch of scrubland. André Salmon went up to see where the newcomer had settled himself. The shack was scantily furnished with a few chairs, a bed, a couch and a broken-down piano draped with a cashmere shawl – at least, that was the inventory as Salmon recalled it. (Jeanne Modigliani, the artist’s daughter, later doubted the plausibility of there being a piano, but perhaps it dated back to the days when the Bateau-Lavoir had been a piano factory.) Modigliani had patched it up and cleaned it, pasting up reproductions of his beloved Italian masters; his own pictures remained in their stretcher frames on the floor, facing the wall. He was so self-conscious about his work, he rarely agreed to show it to anyone.

  Anyone who observed him as he sat sketching at a café table could see straight away that he was talented. Vlaminck was among those who watched ‘those intelligent hands tracing a drawing in a single line without faltering’. Modigliani seemed to have an ability to evoke the interior life of a sitter, even a stranger, in a few rapidly drawn lines. He had his own particular technique: he drew in pencil on paper, then, just before finishing the drawing, he slid carbon paper beneath it and made a simplified tracing. As for his paintings, if anyone asked to see them, he said he was still trying to find his way. He painted on a small scale (small sheets of paper were cheaper than large) and finished each painting with several layers of coloured varnish, sometimes as many as ten, glazing them like the works of the old masters. Yet his work did not satisfy him. He was ahead of his time, in some respects impatient for breakthroughs he had already made, with his subjective colours and pared-down forms. His uniqueness made him anxious and defensive, especially in a tiny community in which he knew he was under surveillance from those who had staked their claims in it before him. ‘My damned Italian eyes are to blame,’ he would complain. ‘Somehow they can’t get used to this Paris light, and I wonder if I ever will. But you can’t imagine what I’ve conceived in the way of colours – violet, orange, dark ochre.’ True, but his work would never meet his own standards; he was fatally self-deprecating. ‘All junk!’ he would say, if anyone asked to see his paintings.

  Like Derain, he passionately admired the work of the Italian primitives, which he had seen in Venice. In March 1903, he had enrolled in life classes at the Reale Istituto di Belle Arti, where he discovered the works of Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, and Botticelli, who had illustrated Dante’s Il Paradiso. By the time he arrived in Paris, he had also been to Rome (with his mother, in 1901), and to the great marble quarries at Carrara, where he first began to sculpt, inspired by the great master, Michelangelo. It was in Venice that he had first dreamed of going to Paris. In 1903, Soffici had told him about the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne and talked about the great artistic cauldron of Paris, where artists and bohemians of all ages and nationalities converged. By the time Modigliani returned to Venice two years later in 1905, Soffici was no longer there and everyone seemed to be talking about Paris. Modigliani had seen Toulouse-Lautrec’s drawings reproduced in Le Rire (widely distributed in Italy from 1895 to 1900) and longed to see them for himself. His opportunity came when his maternal uncle died suddenly, leaving him a small sum of money – enough to travel. By early January 1906, he was in the French capital.

  As Montmartre gradually became more accessible to visitors, renovations continued on some of the buildings, with stonemasons working on the façades. Modigliani made friends with them and went drinking with them in the evenings. They gave him blocks of stone, which he worked on with a hammer and chisel in the garden of his shack, carving primitive, elongated figures. The builders hid good pieces for him in the bushes, and even produced a wheelbarrow for him to trundle them home in after dark. The Métro line was also under development, in the process of being extended as far as Barbes Rochechouart, and the wooden ties made good-sized pieces for carving; sometimes, he went out after dark, scavenging for bits of wood among the debris caused by the excavations. He enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, in the rue Grande-Chaumière in Montparnasse, where in the daytime he studied the model there and made sketches in his large, blue-covered sketchbooks. Afterwards, back in Montmartre, he sat in the cafés where the models gathered, getting strangers to pose for drawings he then tried to sell. Or he sketched the local women:
neighbours, concierges, laundry workers. Occasionally, he visited the brothels but, as lovers, he preferred the laundresses. Despite his itinerant life, it was widely remarked that he somehow continued to maintain his immaculate appearance; his linen was always regularly mended and washed.

  The Picasso gang sat in Mère Catherine’s bar, in the tall old house on the place du Tertre, discussing the glamorous Italian. They were surprised that, although he had been seen in the Lapin Agile, he always seemed to steer clear of Picasso. Then, someone remarked, if he persisted in drowning his sorrows in red wine, any talent he had might never see the light of day. But, said someone else, it was not the drink that was worrying, but the women. Whenever they ran into him in the lanes around the place du Tertre, Modigliani was usually with a pretty girl. André Salmon had observed his tactics: he would ‘accost the girl with a certain formality, then take her home with him, gently but firmly’. He was seen returning home late at night with women of varying descriptions. He had a brief affair with a girl, probably Spanish, known only as ‘La Quique’; someone had seen them dancing together by moonlight in the waste ground outside his shack, Modigliani naked as a faun. For a while, he went around with Madeleine, the laundress who had modelled for Picasso, which may have been one reason he and Picasso seemed to be avoiding each other. In 1916, poet and film-maker Jean Cocteau took a series of photographs of Picasso and friends in which Modigliani appears, looking very much part of the group, but that was during the war, ten years later. In 1906, everyone was still wondering how he was ever going to produce a great work of art while he led such a dissolute life. They had noticed he was given to persistent, unexplained disappearances from his shack. Sometimes, he turned up asleep on the bench outside the Lapin Agile. There was certainly an air of mystery about him, and they could not work out how to reconcile his apparently ‘aristocratic’ image with his obvious penury. He spoke fluent French, taught by his mother at home in Livorno, and knew the works of Dante by heart, as Picasso’s gang discovered when he recited them, sometimes, in the bars late at night when he was in his cups. (Both his mother and his aunt were intelligent and well-read; though an indifferent pupil at school, Modigliani discussed literature with his mother and the philosophy of Spinoza with his scholarly aunt Laure.)

  In Paris, he was shy, and physically weakened by the effects of the chronic tuberculosis which plagued him all his life. He hid behind drink and drugs, both freely available in Montmartre. When, from time to time, he did find himself in conversation with Picasso and his friends, ‘his occasional remarks’, as someone once observed, gave the impression of a lively intelligence, at least, so far as one could ever ascertain – ‘before it blazed into incoherent brilliance’. And those primitive carvings of his had a peculiar power. Surely it was not possible that such a man could fail to produce something significant. However, his drinking made him a difficult companion. For the time being, it was not Picasso who became his closest friend but Maurice Utrillo.

  Aged twenty-three in 1906, Utrillo had recently been released from a sanatorium for the mentally ill; he now wandered around Montmartre painting the crooked, broken-down houses in the lanes in thick, dry impasto, using high-key, subtly subjective colours, both cool and vibrant – but only when no one was looking; he hated to be watched as he worked. Like Modigliani, Utrillo was a true solitary and a natural wanderer. In 1906, he seemed to have no friends; only Modigliani took him seriously and admired his work, fascinated by his methods. Utrillo ground his pigments himself, mixing them with lime and cement, sand or glue to create texture, the better to evoke the crumbling façades. A familiar figure in the lanes of Montmartre, he could be seen at all times of the day and night meandering up the steps of the Butte with a bottle of cheap red wine, sometimes one in each hand.

  Perhaps because he knew Utrillo’s father, Miquel, Picasso kept his distance from both Utrillo fils and Modigliani but, for the Picasso gang, Modigliani was an object of ongoing fascination. They could hardly ignore the new arrival – he came and went among them, a curiously talented, undeniably glamorous muse. Sometimes, he turned up in someone’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir (which occasionally he used as his address), but he showed no particular desire to stay there for long; it was tacitly established that he belonged somewhere just outside the rim of Picasso’s immediate circle. Such associates were seldom seen in Picasso’s studio, they usually met at the Lapin Agile or Mère Catherine’s, or they went to Spielman’s, with the sign of the hunting horn, or sometimes the Chalet, also known as Mère Adèle’s, where the proprietress was so devoted to her artists, or to the Fauvet bar in the rue des Abbesses, where for two sous in the slot of the wooden peephole machine you could peer down and see a life-size wax figure of Salammbô perform a bellydance. ‘The illusion was perfect after the third mominette, the cheap absinthe made from potatoes which everyone drank in Montmartre.

  If January 1906 had been unseasonably mild, March was bitterly cold. In the Bateau-Lavoir, Fernande sometimes stayed in bed all day, just to keep warm. She had been living there with Picasso seven months now, and the tenor of their life had hardly changed. Often, they had no fire, no coal and no money to buy any unless Picasso sold a few drawings. Occasionally, he did; then there would be coal enough to heat the stove for supper. If there was no money, they sometimes went up to Azon’s or Vernin’s; though these were little more than ‘soup kitchens’, the couple always seemed to be able to dine there on credit. Most evenings they spent in the Bateau-Lavoir with friends. When the discussion moved to artistic matters, Fernande kept silent and listened. She had begun to work on her own painting sometimes during the daytime and wanted to take lessons, but Picasso discouraged her. ‘Just paint to please yourself,’ he would say. ‘That’s enough. What you’re doing is more interesting than anything you would do if you had lessons.’ This was frustrating, as she had hoped to be able to explore her ideas in more depth. She returned to her reading: at least lying comfortably on the sofa she could study that seriously.

  Down at the Lapin Agile, Frédé’s wife, Berthe, kept the tables clean and added her strong, clear voice to the singing in the dingy old room with sawdust on the floor where the petrol lamps, suspended from the ceiling on two lengths of wire, smoked beneath their shades of red, honeycombed paper. As the evening wore on, the sound of thick glasses hitting the table crescendoed and the discussion gained momentum. Fernande was not, of course, permitted in the Lapin Agile without Picasso, even in the daytime. When she wandered in once to talk to Berthe, there was a scene when he came to find her. There were often scenes in the Lapin Agile; if Picasso thought someone was looking at Fernande, he would vehemently object and she would be forced to retaliate – after all, had she not seen him with a woman on his knee? The problem with these arguments was that they reminded her how desultory her life still seemed to be. Yet, if she pressurized him, he would come home with presents, a few notes to spend or a bottle of her favourite perfume. Despite their quarrels, she was confident they were still very much in love.

  On Sunday mornings, they went to the open-air market in the place Saint Pierre, one of Fernande’s favourite outings. They got up early and left at eleven, Fernande dressed for the occasion in her black lace mantilla, Picasso as usual in his blue worker’s overalls. A bizarre assortment of merchandise would be spread out on the ground, strewn right to the edges of the pavements, including bales of cloth sold by the gross. You could get a whole, nearly new trousseau here; or a man’s shirt for seventy-five centimes – or one franc forty-five, according to the delicacy of the colour. There were thick checked handkerchiefs or silk ones bordered with lace, lingerie in gaudy pink or blue, silk stockings from forty-five centimes to one franc ninety a pair, ‘luxury’ blouses in all colours that ran like butter after one wash, when they became marbled like endpapers in a book. There were battered hats decorated with flowers and hat shapes waiting to be decorated from packs of artificial flowers. There were dusters, towels, bedlinen, saucepans, umbrellas and children’s toys. And there wer
e piles of shoes, from the stoutest military boot to the lightest dancing slipper – although, once you selected one, there followed a long rummage to make up the pair.

  The traders were all rigged out in items selected from the piles to entice their purchasers. They called their wares as if to see who could shout the loudest, haggling and bargaining as customers – men and women alike – peeled off their coats to try on a shirt or stood back to admire the effect of an outfit on a child sending up screams of protest. Everyone gathered here: the pimp found his peaked cap, his lady friend her luxury stockings; and it was here that Picasso acquired his famous (much photographed) red shirt with white spots, which he wore for years, treasuring it for so long because he liked the colour and it seemed indestructible. When the couple had exhausted the market at the place Saint Pierre they went to the flea market, where Picasso would find picture frames, books – even, for a few sous, stretchers for canvases – and the bits of curious bric-a-brac he could never resist collecting. He loved the market: it stopped him worrying about his prospects, brought him out of himself and gave him a break from the intensity of his work.

  11.

  The North and South Poles of Modern Art: Picasso and Matisse

  In spring 1906, Matisse was exhibiting at both the Salon des Indépendants and the Galerie Druet in the Faubourg St-Honoré. One of the more enterprising and inspiring dealers, Druet had run a popular bistro (patronized, among others, by Rodin) before setting up as an artist’s photographer and instituting the ‘Druet process’, the production of large, handsome photographs taken to record an artist’s paintings. Matisse’s one-man show at Druet’s opened on 19 March, the day before the vernissage of the 1906 Salon des Indépendants. Larger than his earlier show at Vollard’s, it included some sixty works from the past decade but, despite the placard of brightly coloured sailing boats he had painted for Druet’s window to advertise the exhibition, it attracted little attention, its only reviewer warning the public against this ‘meretricious showman’. Druet took the long view, investing 2,000 francs in a stock of Matisse’s latest work. Vollard promptly followed, purchasing work for a total of 2,200 francs.