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

by Sue Roe

  Cinematic technology evolved fast. Gags were accentuated by frame changes; objects could be absurdly transformed before the audience’s eyes. In L’Accordéon (1906), the instrument expanded to giant proportions before being reduced to normal size; a paper-thin image of a young man then fell to earth from between its folds. Objects in films took on a life of their own, displaying ‘magical’, transformative powers, in their own way as powerful as the African carvings in the Trocadéro. By 1907, techniques had developed to incorporate moving shots, close-ups, reversals and altered or transformed objects.

  The image in art was being destabilized by this new medium. Unlike the spectator at the theatre or the cabaret, the camera eye could change position, altering whatever was being looked at from one moment to the next. It was this multi-perspectival view that Gertrude Stein was aiming to incorporate into her shifting, repetitive narratives; this is what she meant when she compared her techniques in writing to those of the cinema. The movie camera transformed the act of spectatorship. Whereas in the theatre or cabaret, the act of looking was always collective, in the cinema it became a more private, individual experience. Now, too, the peepshow found its way from the brothel, or the wooden box in the corner of a café, on to the big screen. Some of Pathé’s earliest erotic (peepshow) films from 1902 onwards were about painters, for example, Le Peintre et son modèle (1902); Borgia s’amuse (1902); and Le Bain des dames de la cour (1904). In many of them the main attraction for the audience was the theatrical sensation of the voyeur being caught in the act of watching the erotic show, thus the artist and his model made ideal subjects; and the new technology even enabled sequences composed of two shots: one of a person looking; another of what was being viewed through the keyhole.

  Cinema also exposed the fundamental difficulty of photography as art. If the cinema confounded everyone by projecting the moving image from all angles and in many changing perspectives, photography also posed a major challenge to the modern artist. The fact that the image in cinema could change drew attention to a whole range of infinitely complex pictorial problems and opportunities that had come to light with the use of photography. Druet, the art dealer who had started as a photographer and also dealt in photographic reproductions, was among those championing Matisse, but photographic reproductions and photographic works of art were two different things. One evening, as usual, the Picasso gang was gathered at the home of one of their Montmartrois neighbours. Though hardly new to most of them, on this occasion the opium they were smoking seemed to have a strong effect on them all. Max Jacob fell uncharacteristically silent. Apollinaire shouted out that he was in a brothel. Maurice Princet was in tears. Picasso, in despair, announced that there was nothing left for him to live for; he had discovered photography. His stricken lament may have been merely throwaway – or perhaps it was more profound. David Hockney would later note that ‘Picasso and Braque saw the flaw in photography’: that the act of looking from more than one viewpoint creates problems of time as well as space; because there is not enough time within a single photograph to perceive the space being depicted, the photograph is rendered essentially static. Picasso and his circle would discuss this problem in the months and years to come.

  And Picasso had yet to uncover his new masterwork – if such it was. Though he completed it during the summer of 1907, it was autumn (once Braque was back in Paris) before he found the confidence to reveal it. Who knew what would be unveiled? As Norman Mailer later pointed out, this was a period of great turmoil for the artist, one in which he and Fernande were regularly taking opium. The drug made Picasso’s mind race with extraordinary images while at the same time inhibiting his desire to paint. If the previous summer in Gosol had had a calming effect, it was because there had been no distractions, no challenges from threatening competition – and no stimulants. In Paris, he was surrounded by friends (including Max Jacob), who practised various forms of mysticism, stimulated by various substances. Impeded rather than inspired by the effects of opium, Picasso was also increasingly aware of his main competitor, Matisse. If the latter’s reputation was based on his skill as a colourist, perhaps – as has often been suggested – Picasso felt under pressure to prove himself by experimenting with form. For the time being, however, Picasso continued to work on his preparatory sketches and figure studies. And the painting was not his only problem. Picasso at this point was in two minds about Fernande. He had never felt entirely secure with her, especially in Paris. When he was anxious, he became combative, then inhibited, first accusing her, then being reduced to sullen silences.

  4.

  Alice B. Toklas

  By August 1907, Fernande was convinced it was all over between her and Picasso. On the 24th, she wrote to Gertrude Stein, who was still in Italy, ‘Would you like to hear some big news? My life with Pablo is over. We are going to separate definitively next month … What a disappointment!’ She urged Gertrude not to assume that things would work out all right in the end. Pablo had had enough, he said; he had assured Fernande she was not to blame, but he was just not cut out for the kind of life she seemed to need. She was desperate, she told Gertrude, and confiding in her because no one else was really interested in her. She was doing her best to hide her unhappiness but, in her heart, she was disgusted with Picasso. Everything was hopeless; she was in despair. However, she was already making plans for her future alone. Did Gertrude think she could help her earn some money by giving French lessons? She was looking for somewhere to live and wished Gertrude could be there to help her search; it would be so much more fun.

  On 2 September, she wrote again, signing herself Fernande Belvalet (for Belle-Vallée; no longer Picasso, as before). She had spent the last few days looking for somewhere to live. The place she had found, at 5, rue Girardon, was unsuitably close to rue Ravignan, but it would do for the time being. She would be leaving the Bateau-Lavoir in two or three days, a week at the most; she would already have left had Vollard not been out of Paris: she was waiting for him to return so that Picasso could give her sufficient funds to set up on her own. (In the event, she would have only a couple of weeks to wait.) Pablo, she told Gertrude, was fine. The prospect of their separation, despite the fact that they had been happy together for three years, was apparently having no effect on him at all. In fact, she suspected he was relieved, though she assured Gertrude she had never been a burden on him or interfered with his work. Evidently, she had followed the wrong path. She would simply have to trust to destiny to set her on the right one. How was Gertrude? Was the weather fine in Italy? In Paris, it was wet and stormy …

  In her first letter, of 24 August, Fernande had referred to someone called Alice: ‘Tell Alice I can’t write to her, I’m too sad, I’m sure she’ll excuse me …’ Unless (as seems very unlikely) Fernande’s friend Alice Princet was in Italy with the Steins, Gertrude must already have mentioned her new friend, Alice B. Toklas, who was shortly to join her in Paris from her home in San Francisco. Sometime during September, after the Steins’ return from Italy, Alice duly arrived.

  Alice B. Toklas was an extraordinary character. Of Polish-Jewish extraction, in appearance she was bony and wafer-thin, with a craggy face and long nose, like a figure in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. She had got to know Gertrude through Harriet Levy, her neighbour in San Francisco, who had been in Paris and there met Gertrude and Leo Stein, probably through the Michael Steins, since Alice had seen them in San Francisco the previous year when they visited following the 1906 earthquake. They had shown her Matisse’s portrait ‘of Madame Matisse with a green line down her face’ (The Green Line), which had impressed her immensely.

  Alice B. Toklas had been raised in California, where her prospecting maternal grandfather had bought a goldmine. As a child she was taken to Europe, including England, before returning to California, where she attended Miss Mary West’s school, until a little girl in her class asked her if her father was a millionaire. When Alice said she did not know, the child asked her, had they a yacht? When she heard this, Al
ice’s mother decided it was time to send her to another school, where the children were not so snobbish. At home, they had a garden full of lovely flowers, her mother being a keen gardener. She also displayed a unique ability to be both imaginative and precise, from which Alice clearly learned. ‘I once said to her, “You have such lovely watery periwinkle blue eyes.” “You mean, dearest, ‘liquid eyes’,” she corrected.’ Alice attended the University of Washington and studied music with Otto Bendix, a pupil of Liszt, graduating as a Bachelor of Music. On her grandfather’s death, she inherited a quarter of his estate, and the family moved to a smaller home in O’Farrell Street, San Francisco, where Harriet lived next door. It was Harriet who had proposed they go to Paris together. They made frequent plans to do so; Alice was thirty by the time they finally left, in September 1907. They travelled by steamer, Alice with a copy of Flaubert’s letters to read on the journey, Harriet dutifully burdened with a friend’s ‘tactless choice’ of Lord Jim – which somehow beautifully sums up the difference between the two.

  Later that month, they arrived in Cherbourg, where they stayed overnight and where Alice got her first taste of France, before continuing their journey by rail to Paris. Alice was immediately struck by the difference between France and their own country. Waking in the morning, she looked out of the window to see men cleaning the streets with water from small buckets and oddly shaped brooms – more like household cleaning, she observed, than the kind of street cleaning that went on in San Francisco. From the window of the train, she watched as fields dotted with poppies, marguerites and cornflowers streamed past beneath a ‘heavenly’ blue sky. Arriving in Paris, they found themselves in a station ‘busier and noisier than any I had ever known. People were getting off and on [trains], hurrying to the right and to the left. It took me a long time to become accustomed to French confusion.’

  They put up at the Hôtel Magellan, near the place de l’Étoile, and telephoned Michael and Sarah Stein. They then crossed Paris in a fiacre (a horse-drawn carriage – another fascinating novelty) to the rue Madame, Alice observing that the streets were all different: not only did no district resemble another; each house was different in character from the next. A grand-looking dwelling stood next to a grocery, which stood next to a laundry; she remarked with interest that one could thus shop without leaving one’s own quartier. She noted also the proliferation of fine florists and flower markets, and that everywhere she looked there seemed to be something new to see. Alice had an unusual talent for observation: wherever she went she seemed to see things it seemed nobody else had noticed. She was also a good listener. Arriving at Michael and Sarah Stein’s home, she soon established that their building in the rue Madame had been built and once occupied by the Protestant Church and that the enormous living room had been the assembly and Sunday School room. In that room, where large, light windows gave on to a garden, she first encountered Gertrude Stein.

  ‘It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention … She was a golden brown presence,’ tanned by the Tuscan sun, with golden glints in her hair. She was dressed in brown corduroy and wore a large coral brooch; when she talked or laughed her distinctive voice seemed to rise up from her brooch, ‘deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices’. Alice also noticed her unusually fine bone structure and distinctive head, which some had compared to that of a Roman emperor, others to that of ‘a primitive Greek’.

  Alice and Harriet were given tea, and Alice was invited to visit Gertrude Stein in the rue de Fleurus the following afternoon, when Gertrude would take her for a walk. The next morning, she and Harriet decided to lunch in one of the restaurants in the Bois de Boulogne. Foreseeing that their lunch might make her a little late, Alice thoughtfully sent Gertrude a telegram to warn her. When she arrived at 27, rue de Fleurus, delayed by just half an hour, the door was opened by Gertrude, Alice’s telegram in her hand. Since the previous day, she had been transformed into a ‘vengeful goddess’. She said nothing, just paced about, unsmiling, beside her long Florentine table, before finally announcing, ‘Now you understand. It is over. It is not too late to go for a walk. You can look at the pictures while I change my clothes.’ As Alice philosophically observed, at least while all this was going on she had a chance to have a good look around Gertrude’s apartment. In the studio, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with pictures, and the dining room was dark with heavy, ornate furniture, dominated by a large, octagonal Tuscan table with clawed feet and a double-decked Henry IV dresser decorated with three carved eagles. There were interesting ornaments, too: pieces of Italian pottery and seventeenth-century terracotta figures of women. Once Gertrude had calmed down, she reappeared and they walked round the corner to the Jardins du Luxembourg and saw children sailing their boats on the artificial lake and nurses in long capes and starched white caps with long, broad ribbons. Alice was led through the gardens into the Petit Luxembourg, then on down the boulevard Saint Germain as Gertrude asked her which books she had read on the journey and whether the Flaubert letters had been translated into English.

  The following Saturday, Alice met Leo, the next to emerge through the glow of her imaginative observation. Leo, she observed, was ‘golden’, a vividly economical description of Picasso’s 1906 portrait of him, which she would surely have been shown. She also noticed his graceful way of walking and the elegant way he carried himself, and that the two brothers, Leo and Michael, though they resembled each other, were quite different from Gertrude, the similarity between Leo and Gertrude being more or less restricted to their brown, unstructured, bohemian-style clothing and ‘Grecian’ sandals.

  Alice was soon initiated into the rites of the Saturday soirées and forming her inimitable impressions of the regulars, who included Germaine, Picasso’s one-time lover and the cause of Casagema’s suicide (though Alice seems to have been spared those details), now married to Picasso’s friend Ramon Pichot. She noted Matisse’s ‘astonishing virility’ but found him paradoxically lifeless compared with the profound sense of vitality which emanated from Amélie, whom Alice wonderfully summed up in a single gesture: ‘She always placed a large black hat-pin well in the middle of the hat and the middle of the top of her head and then with a large firm gesture, down it came.’ Next, she met Marie Laurencin, observing her as she made her way through the studio looking at each picture in turn, ‘bringing her eye close and moving over the whole of it with her lorgnette, an inch at a time. The pictures out of reach she ignored.’ Marie told Alice, ‘as for myself I prefer portraits and that is of course quite natural, as I myself am a Clouet’. Alice noted that she did indeed have the thin, square build of medieval Frenchwomen in the paintings of the French primitives. Her voice, which Fernande found so irritating, she judged high-pitched and beautifully modulated. Having scrutinized all the pictures, Marie sat down with Gertrude Stein on the couch and told her the story of her life (which was the effect Gertrude tended to have on people), explaining that her mother, despite her temperamental dislike of men, had for many years been the mistress of an important personage, the union that had produced Marie herself. As for what the bande thought of Alice, there never seems to have been any question of her not being accepted; she was deceptively reticent, untiringly understanding and never did anything to upset or alarm anyone. She infiltrated Gertrude’s social world so deftly that no sooner had she arrived than it seemed she had always been part of it.

  Gertrude filled her in on recent events concerning Picasso and Fernande. It emerged that Gertrude had been counselling not only Fernande but also Picasso, who had been telling her ‘wonderful tales’. Alice was thus given both sides of the story. According to Gertrude, Picasso had told her that ‘if you love a woman you give her money’. He had added that, by the same token, if you wanted to leave her, you had to wait until you had sufficient funds to finance her independence. By 14 September, he had the wherewithal, 1,100 francs for eleven pictures from Vollard, and money from a separate sale of one of his paintings of the saltimbanques, to
support Fernande in the business of setting up home alone. Meanwhile, Gertrude had taken seriously Fernande’s request to find her a pupil.

  The day before the vernissage of the Salon d’Automne, despite their imminent break-up, Picasso and Fernande were invited to dinner at the Steins’. When the time came, there was no sign of them, so everyone sat down to eat. Just as they did so there came ‘a loud knocking at the pavilion door’. The maid announced the arrival of Monsieur Picasso and Madame Fernande, who entered, very flustered; Alice noticed at once Picasso’s ‘marvellous all-seeing brilliant black eyes’. He was explaining, ‘You know how as a Spaniard I would want to be on time, how I always am.’ Fernande, with a characteristic gesture, one arm extended above her head, pointing her forefinger, asked Gertrude to excuse them. The new outfit she was wearing, especially made for the next day’s vernissage, had not been delivered on time and there had of course been nothing for it but to wait. Alice, meeting them for the first time, observed Fernande. She saw ‘a large heavy woman with the sensational natural colouring of a maquillage, her dark eyes were narrow slits. She was an oriental odalisque,’ pleased by the attention she was attracting.While they were still at dessert, the maid announced that there were other guests waiting in the studio. Gertrude hurried off to receive them. They turned out to be ‘a group of Montmartrois who surrounded Picasso like the cuadrilla does a bullfighter’. Among them was Georges Braque, evidently already so at ease with the Steins that Alice initially assumed he was American. Alice, Picasso and Fernande joined them to find Gertrude already seated on her high leather Tuscan armchair, her feet on a pile of cushions. From the description of this episode, it seems evident that Braque had somehow by now already made Picasso’s acquaintance, or at least Fernande’s, since Fernande and Braque were fooling around together, pretending to be ignoramuses. Gertrude took the opportunity of asking Alice if she would like to take French lessons from Fernande, assuring her Fernande was well educated; she had read aloud from La Fontaine’s fables while Picasso painted her (Gertrude’s) portrait.