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

by Sue Roe

  In fact, Marie was awkward in Picasso’s company and awed by his circle of friends. In his studio, on one occasion her nervousness manifested itself when she was trying to show an interest in his work, rummaging short-sightedly through all his things as Fernande looked on, astonished by her unembarrassed curiosity. All of a sudden, Marie stopped and sat down. She appeared to be taking an interest in the conversation until, just as abruptly, she uttered a shrill, inarticulate shriek. There was an astonished silence. Then, ‘“It’s the cry of the Grand Lama,” she informed us helpfully.’ She then untied her hair, so that it billowed down for all to see.

  Marie fascinated Apollinaire, but everyone else was bewildered. Fernande could only assume that Marie was simply unable to stop noticing the effect she had on others – perhaps hardly surprisingly, given the company. Her chief crime seemed to be that, unlike Fernande, she evidently made no attempt to be glamorous. That this jarred so profoundly on Fernande was a pity since, like Lepape and Braque, she had sensed straight away that Marie was unusual; it was just that, in Fernande’s company, Marie seemed to find it impossible to be herself.

  For the time being, Marie kept her own counsel. In her private notebooks (Le Carnet des nuits), she made no mention of Fernande. She did reveal that, despite her own considerable talent, she felt very distant from the male painters and their pictorial problems. She felt obliterated by their work and their genius, and wary of them because they were men and always seemed to her to create problems it was difficult to resolve. It was possible to live in their shadow, she felt, so long as she made no attempt to emulate them. The technicalities of cubism, in particular, she felt were beyond her. As a painter, she was essentially poetic. She filled her notebooks with original jottings and observations, including her thoughts on Goya (perhaps she had even discussed him with Picasso), whose work transported her into a world of dance and artifice; she described his figures as ‘thoroughbred marionettes made of steel’. She wrote original poetry, too, whimsical, mythological poems in lyrical free verse expressing her own emotions and describing the natural world in fantastical images; she depicts zebras, in one poem, as cavorting Spaniards. With Apollinaire, she infiltrated Picasso’s world, respected as a painter even though, as a woman, she would never quite be accepted as one of the bande.

  As for Fernande, her mind was on other things. On that day in April, the 9th, she and Picasso brought their newly adopted daughter, Raymonde, home to the Bateau-Lavoir, where she settled in among the general muddle and squalor. She was introduced to Picasso’s friends and taken to school every morning. Picasso helped her with her mathematics homework. Fernande was always busy with the little girl’s hair, brushing it and tying it in coloured ribbons before she left for school. Picasso’s friends gathered to compete for the attention of the beautiful child. It emerged that Max Jacob, too, loved children (his only brief flirtation with a member of the opposite sex had been with a girl who made doll’s clothes for a living, but after a while her incessant knitting of tiny garments had allegedly become too much for him, although this was not actually the most plausible reason for their break-up) and seemed particularly suited to the role of kindly godfather or tonton. Picasso painted a portrait of the young girl with Fernande, Mother and Child, the two simply drawn figures with primitive, doll-like masks facing forward, the mother’s arms forming a curved frame around the child. Perhaps he saw in their connection a kind of performance, but they were not clowns but pierrots, and the double act hinted at pathos, not slapstick.

  On 27 April, the Steins received an Easter card inviting them to the Bateau-Lavoir the following day, Easter Sunday. If Fernande had intended this as an opportunity to introduce Raymonde to Gertrude, the event went unrecorded. In general, time passed with Raymonde and Fernande amusing each other, trying on clothes and playing with dolls, while Picasso continued working through the night on sketches for the huge canvas he was still keeping out of sight in the studio the Steins had rented for him upstairs. During the spring and summer months of 1907, which covered the gestation of this mysterious work, he filled some sixteen sketchbooks with four to five hundred sketches. The melancholy abjection of the Blue Period was gone and now, as he worked on, so was the romantic lightness of the Rose Period. He continued to draw dynamic, animated figures in striking pinkish reds and oranges, or bright yellows, blues and greens. In among a large number of these figures, expressionist in form, Fauvist in colour, appear pencil and ink sketches of acrobats, dogs and birds – simple line drawings he may have done to amuse Raymonde, or even to teach her to draw. Meanwhile, there was still no sign that the large-scale canvas was anywhere near completion.

  • • •

  In July, Matisse and Amélie visited Leo and Gertrude Stein in Florence, a trip made possible by a payment of 18,000 francs from the Bernheim-Jeunes, who had just exhibited 79 watercolours by Cézanne, the first show of that artist’s work in Paris since his death. Everyone had crowded into the gallery to see for the first time examples of Cézanne’s extraordinarily delicate draftsmanship. In Florence, by contrast, even the treasures of the Uffizi left Matisse unmoved, perhaps because Leo’s attempts to instruct him drove him crazy. Leo made the mistake of asking him for a candid opinion of his own work, which the artist fatally provided. After their visit to Florence, Leo never bought another of his paintings.

  Matisse and Amélie continued on to Venice, where Matisse was similarly unaffected by what he saw, until he discovered the works of primitive painters Piero della Francesca and Giotto (artists passionately admired by both Derain and Modigliani), which renewed his energy and revived his interest. At the end of the trip, he returned with relief to Collioure, where, in August 1907, he began to consolidate his ideas on painting with a view to publishing them. (‘Notes of a Painter’, or ‘A Painter’s Notes’, was published more than a year later.) The focus of the ‘Notes’ was the integrity of composition, driven by the subjective response to both nature and the figure which Cézanne had called ‘sensation’. Matisse explained his understanding of composition as ‘the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings’, stressing the importance of harmony and balance that was achieved only by working and reworking a picture to reflect an integrity of understanding way beyond the artist’s first impressions. ‘What I am after, above all,’ he wrote, ‘is expression.’ Like Cézanne, Matisse believed that artistic understanding could be achieved only by copying nature, but that the practice of copying involved a profound emotional response. As Matisse put it, ‘I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. When I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones.’ In selecting colour, he relied on observation, feeling and ‘the very nature of each experience’, rather than on any scientific system. In this, he distinguished himself overtly from his friend Paul Signac, the most keenly intellectual of the generation of painters who followed the Impressionists. Since the late 1880s, Signac had kept an open studio on the boulevard de Clichy, where painters and writers regularly converged. In his ‘Notes’, Matisse referred explicitly to Signac, explaining that while Signac relied on divisionist theory for the selection of tones, Matisse’s own method of selection was intuitive – his colours corresponded with his emotions. He picked an unfortunate metaphor when he tried to describe his intended effect on the viewer: he wrote that he hoped his art of balance and purity would have ‘an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue’ – a comparison almost bound to invite misinterpretation.

  That summer, Matisse began work on a new painting, seven feet high, which he called Le Luxe. The setting was Collioure, the figure reminiscent of the figure in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and the picture was constructed in horizontal bands, like the frescoes he had seen in Italy. In a second version, he emphasized the fresco effect by mixing his paints with glue. By n
ow, his work, like Picasso’s, was becoming truly experimental, pushing the boundaries of formal constraints – but Matisse had the advantage over Picasso of having been exposed to a broader range of influences, including the art of the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks and Peruvians, Cambodian stone carving and Algerian textiles as well as African tribal figures.

  • • •

  In the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso worked on, alone in his studio night after night, though when Raymonde came home from school in the afternoon he spent time with the child. Though his own childhood had been happy in most respects, he had been a volatile pupil. His parents had removed him from his primary school when all attempts to teach him mathematics resulted only in ear-splitting screams, audible throughout the village. It was decided he would go to a new school. He consented to this only when allowed to take his pigeon; when there, he sat quietly at his desk all day making sketches of his caged bird. With Raymonde, he may have been doing his best to put matters right. He made little drawings of the things that had captivated him as a child: human pyramids of castellers (rural athletes) he had seen at folk festivals, the human tower rising and rising until the enxaneta, the child at the top, was forced to jump off. He did sums in his notebooks to instruct Raymonde in mathematics; he evidently took her seriously.

  The one problem was Raymonde’s age. Apollinaire thought she was nine, which may have been the age Picasso and Fernande were told when they selected her. However, it soon became apparent that Raymonde was approaching adolescence. One or two drawings made by Picasso betray the difficulty: adolescence removed her from the sphere of childhood into that of potential muse, even lover; there was, perhaps, too much temptation being put in his way. Some of his most gently beautiful ‘carved’ figures of a young girl combing her hair may have been inspired by Raymonde. The Steins purchased these, along with other paintings of individual figures which demonstrate the extent to which Picasso’s style was undergoing a radical transformation.

  Perhaps, as some said, Fernande simply became bored and disenchanted with the responsibilities of motherhood. Or perhaps (as John Richardson suggests) the prospect of Raymonde’s approaching adolescence in the close quarters of the Bateau-Lavoir was too much for either adoptive parent to contemplate. Whatever went wrong, by now it was becoming clear that Raymonde’s days with her new parents were numbered. In July, it was decided she must return to the orphanage. Late that month, Fernande took her back to the Sisters of Mercy. At first, the orphanage refused to accept her. You wanted her, argued the Mother Superior, you take responsibility for her. Fernande had no choice then but to take her back to the Bateau-Lavoir, but that was no solution. Eventually, with Max Jacob leading her by the hand, Raymonde returned to her former home with the nuns.

  The fate of the poor, orphaned child, though undeniably sad, can hardly have been unusual for the time and place. Raymonde had already been fostered and returned to the convent once, by an elderly couple who lost interest in her when she seemed unable to learn the violin. Montmartre, in particular, was a district in which illegitimate children abounded. Many were brought up by the matriarchs of the family but, equally, the convent orphanages were always full. It is virtually impossible to imagine a growing adolescent thriving in the cramped and squalid conditions of the Bateau-Lavoir, even without such eccentric adoptive parents as Picasso and Fernande. Although Raymonde’s return to the convent may seem shocking to a modern reader, the nuns would have been used to such comings and goings, and at least in the convent she would have been sure of food, shelter and a decent education. (She was by no means alone; others at around this time suffered similarly peripatetic childhoods; Coco Chanel, for one.) Once Raymonde was back in the convent, Fernande was allowed to visit her on the first Sunday of every month; a postcard signed ‘Raymonde’ dated 22 June 1919 suggests she remained in touch. If, by today’s standards, the story is indisputably miserable, in 1907 it would have shocked few who were familiar with the make-do-and-mend ways of the community of Montmartre.

  The return of Raymonde to the convent did little to improve Picasso’s mood. He spent whole days back in the Trocadéro, looking at Egyptian war gods and Negro fetishes. He accumulated a large collection of postcards of semi-naked African women, from which he made figure drawings. His vision of painting as a kind of exorcism clashed uncomfortably with the purpose of art as Fernande had always understood it – as an act of homage, a tribute to the muse – but she had had as yet no opportunity to see the new work in progress. In fact, Picasso had not been working very extensively on the large canvas itself, but the group of women he was creating had nevertheless undergone some significant changes, particularly in the later stages. Only he knew that some of the figures were evolving into grotesques. The head of one now resembled the head of an ape; the painting seemed to have begun to possess him. Then, one day, he put the huge canvas aside. He continued work on his expressive figure drawings, as if his individual figures had been liberated from the herculean work he was still not quite ready to show to prospective purchasers and friends. It stayed shut in the attic a few weeks longer, while the artist allowed himself other distractions.

  3.

  Motion Pictures

  In Paris, by autumn 1907 everyone was going to the movies. During the previous six or seven years, technological advances had been rapid. Cinema audiences could now see historical films, chase films, even drama documentaries – the first biopics. Picasso and his friends had started going to the pictures at least once a week, on Fridays when the programmes changed, an innovation introduced that August, when Pathé began to distribute films for rent. (Until then, cinema venues had bought film priced by the metre and used the print until it wore out and was melted down to make new stock.) The cinema now vied with the circus as Picasso’s all-consuming passion. Film actors were being recruited from theatres, music halls and circuses and the actors themselves becoming the main draw; people now went to see a film because of its star. Posters on Morris columns all over Paris appealed to prospective cinema audiences with glamorous photographs of the new cinema stars, many of whom had already made their names in the theatre. One of the painters in Montmartre found a way of earning a few sous as a stuntman when all the professional actors turned the job down as too dangerous. He became so successful he gave up painting, and the Bateau-Lavoir gang went to the open-air cinema in the rue de Douai to see him in Zigoto se suicide and Calino cambrioleur (Zigoto Commits Suicide and Calino the Burglar).

  By now, Fernande, too, was captivated, particularly by the heady appeal of the female stars. She modelled herself on the vamps and sirens of the screen and, thanks to the steadily increasing numbers of purchasers for Picasso’s work, had taken to wearing extravagant outfits and hats top-heavy with feathers which looked, someone remarked, like an aviary in the Jardin des Plantes. The cinema, for Fernande, at least, had become associated with glamour. And the quality of films was improving all the time. More films were colour-tinted, the tinting and stencilling done by Pathé’s growing workforce. Over 1,200 workers, many of them female, had found employment splicing and colouring prints, a process similar to work they would otherwise have done in the textile factories. Le Pêcheur des perles (1907) was one such visually spectacular rags-to-riches story enhanced by tinting and stencil colour.

  That year, hundreds of permanent cinema venues sprang up all over Paris. The first, the 300-seat Omnia-Pathé, next to the Théâtre des Variétés, had opened on 15 December the previous year. On the place de Clichy, the giant Hippodrome, formerly one of the major circus arenas, debuted as a cinema, and by December 1907 the Cirque d’Hiver’s programmes also included films. Already by the summer, there were at least fifty new or converted permanent cinemas throughout the city, with posters on every wall, advertising films designed to appeal to audiences of all ages, from every social class. The main attractions were often Georges Méliès’ new ‘longer’ films (five or ten minutes in duration; sometimes more), featuring increasingly eye-catching special effects. The programme
s were interspersed with lantern slide shows and live vaudeville acts. Méliès’ films were formulated in tableaux (scenes), so the cinema audience had the same experience as the theatregoer, with an orchestra providing the sound. The actors performed before sets, the walls, skies and backdrops painted in trompe l’oeil. Sometimes, to complete the illusion, the title of the film would rise like a curtain. Often, at the end of a scene, the actors returned to salute the audience and thank them for their anticipated applause. Outside the city, fairground cinemas sprang up, running on electricity produced by their own generators, which were transported by train along with the performers, who set up camp in fairground spaces for three or four weeks at a time, most of them using Pathé projectors and film. In France, the year 1907 was dubbed ‘the year of the cinema’.

  In an abrupt volte-face, the music halls, formerly the inexpensive haunts of the working classes, now became luxury entertainment. With entry to the cinemas so cheap, the cabarets of bas Montmartre increased their entry fees. Entry to the Folies Bergère was now at least three francs; the newly renovated Moulin Rouge charged upwards of four francs; the Scala and the Olympia were seven or eight. The cinemas had even taken over the programming format used by the cabarets, normally a two-hour programme every evening, with an additional matinee on Thursdays and Sundays (unlike the American nickelodeons, where screenings were from morning to midnight). The popularity of the cinema had also spread to most other ‘First World’ countries. In France, the café-concerts and music halls survived by incorporating film showings into their live programmes, advertising exclusive screenings in mass dailies such as Le Petit Parisien. The domain of the cinema was a world of magical phantasmagoria. A few years later, Paul Éluard would describe the flickering enchantment of the silver screen: ‘Between nine o’clock and midnight, between evening and bedtime, a plethora of real images overwhelmed this world of unreality. The cinema revealed a whole new world, an imaginary version of the real, like poetry; and when it tried to imitate the old world of nature or the theatre it produced merely phantasms.’