by Sue Roe
3.
New Directions
When Picasso and Fernande contacted Gertrude Stein in September 1909, it was to invite her to their new home at 11, boulevard de Clichy. They had moved in that morning, though they were far from properly installed. Before they left Montmartre, Vollard visited Picasso in the Bateau-Lavoir, buying so many pictures (thirty, for two thousand francs) that by the time he had them all piled in a cab ready to leave, there was no room for him. Bystanders stood amazed as he climbed up beside the driver for the return journey. Picasso and Fernande were able to furnish the new apartment so lavishly that one of the packers remarked, ‘these people must have hit the jackpot’ as he heaved in all their new possessions.
The couple sent Gertrude an invitation each. Picasso’s included a postscript, ‘Shchukin has bought my picture at Sagot’s, the portrait with the fan.’ This was one of Picasso’s earliest cubist portraits of Fernande, seated in an armchair. This apparently casual afterthought in fact marked the commencement of a significant new phase in Picasso’s fortunes. Shchukin’s first purchase of a work by Picasso was immensely significant, since it signalled an interest in abstract work which soon established the Russian dealer as one of the major purchasers of cubist pieces. Though it is sometimes assumed that Matisse had introduced Picasso to Shchukin, this is by no means certain (especially given the ‘two-man race’). In fact, the collector had somehow become acquainted with Fernande; his purchase of Woman with a Fan (1908) was just as likely to have been influenced or even suggested by her. Though he did not immediately take to cubism, as Shchukin learned more about its methods, he began to follow its development carefully. Reluctant at first to add Picasso’s work to his collection, since he felt it would strike a dissonant note, he was eventually persuaded, hanging Woman with a Fan separately from the gallery which housed the rest of his collection, in a dark corridor where he passed it every day. Before long, it began to exert a strange hold over him. In the same way that he had found the more sensually charged works of Matisse and Gauguin cathartic, looking at Picasso’s work, he experienced another kind of catharsis, this time of loss and grief, responding powerfully to what he described as the darkness of Picasso’s work and reminded of the traumatic deaths of members of his family during and following the events of 1905 by Picasso’s ability to take the viewer right through into the inner structure or essence of the picture in works the Russian described as ‘ghostly’.
Kahnweiler was quick to observe that Shchukin was so far the only major admirer of cubism. The next time Picasso sent the former a whole series of works, Kahnweiler telegraphed Shchukin in Moscow, who immediately set out for Paris. That year, 1909, was the year Shchukin opened his Moscow mansion to the public to show his collection of French avant-garde works (Monet, Gauguin, van Gogh, Derain and Matisse); and he began to collect Picasso’s work with a vengeance.
Gertrude and Leo Stein purchased two of Picasso’s new landscapes of Horta, Reservoir View and Houses on the Hill (both painted in 1909). Gertrude said, ‘When I hang these on the wall, everyone will naturally start protesting.’ She was reassured when Picasso produced some photographs he had taken of the place; ‘it always amused me’, she wrote later, ‘when everyone protested against the fantasy of the pictures to make them look at the photographs which made them see that the pictures were almost exactly like the photographs … Certainly the Spanish villages were as cubistic as these paintings.’ She would always see these particular paintings as ‘really the beginning of cubism’, proof, so far as she was concerned, that cubism was essentially a Spanish conception. If Gertrude’s conviction that ‘only Spaniards can be cubists’ was her way of explaining why she had failed to take much notice of Braque, she was certainly quick, as ever, to recognize the significance of new directions in Picasso’s work.
By September 1909, Picasso’s works had been selling so successfully (during the past year, Leo and Gertrude Stein had acquired a large number) that he could have afforded to leave the Bateau-Lavoir earlier than he did. Perhaps Fernande finally put pressure on him to move, or perhaps he realized his opportunities for advancement would be significantly increased away from the ramshackle environment of haute Montmartre and the Bateau-Lavoir. In bas Montmartre and Clichy, new dealers were rapidly establishing themselves, and Picasso’s increasing success meant that he was able, had he wished it, to move in more elevated circles. (Also, the first of his paintings crossed the Atlantic, in the hands of Max Weber.) Although the couple had gone only as far as the foot of the hillside, they were now in a very different social arena. Gradually, one after another, by 1909 artists were beginning to leave Montmartre, as the serious artistic centre of Paris began to shift towards Montparnasse.
Despite his move to Clichy, Picasso retained both studios in the Bateau-Lavoir, as well as a third, which he sometimes used, at the foot of a garden in the rue Cortot, where, away from the watchful eye of Fernande, he had been trying out new ideas – and new female models. Although he now had a large, airy studio in the boulevard de Clichy apartment, he had no wish to make a definitive break with Montmartre. It was still the environment he found most inspiring. Matisse used to see him in ‘the humblest galleries where the “jeunes” showed their work, always scrupulously keeping in touch with what his contemporaries were doing’. Another reason for delaying the move to a more salubrious address may have been that Picasso was still wary of anything to do with money. He kept his earnings in wads of notes stuffed in his inside pocket, secured with a safety pin, he had no confidence in banks and hated financial transactions. When he needed to pay someone, he made such inadvertently conspicuous efforts to delve discreetly into his overcoat pocket that no one could help noticing. It was beginning to be a source of amusement, especially when, one day, he noticed ‘the pin wasn’t fastened quite as usual. He looked searchingly at everybody … convinced that somebody had been tinkering with his “safe”.’
In the boulevard de Clichy, the two homeowners were as astonished as everyone else by the difference between their old premises and the new. This apartment was furnished eccentrically, reflecting Picasso’s penchant for bizarre knick-knacks. In preparation for the move, they had gone on a hunt for furniture, since there had not been much to take with them from the Bateau-Lavoir other than linen, easels and books; they had lived for years in an atmosphere of makeshift bohemianism, sleeping on a bed base too short to accommodate their feet, eating on a table which had to be moved into a corner afterwards and hanging their linen to dry in an old wardrobe. Here, everything worth transporting from the Bateau-Lavoir fitted into the maid’s room. They now ate in a dining room with mahogany furniture, served by a maid in a white apron (whose room, presumably, was full of junk), and slept in a deep bed mounted on heavy leather castors. At the back of the apartment was a little salon with a divan, a piano and various items of acceptable furniture, including a pretty Italian piece encrusted with ivory, pearl and tortoiseshell sent by Picasso’s father. The walls were hung with African masks, carpets and musical instruments. On the tables, Picasso displayed the Negro carvings he had been collecting for the previous few years. Fernande made a point of these in her memoirs, where she records that it was Matisse who first discovered the artistic value of these African works, then Derain; but now that he had somewhere to store them, Picasso became fanatical about them, taking great pleasure in hunting down and accumulating statues, masks and fetishistic objects from every African country. Fernande admired them, too, especially those with necklaces, bracelets and beaded belts she would have liked to wear herself.
The spaciousness of the new apartment was enhanced by its outlooks. The apartment had windows at both front and rear, a luxury after the Bateau-Lavoir’s single, bleak outlook across grimy rooftops. Leaning out of the windows, they could enjoy the sun, a view of trees, and even hear birdsong. In Picasso’s studio in the boulevard de Clichy no one was allowed to touch anything, and no one entered without permission; the maid was authorized to clean only after he had tidied it himsel
f. He worked there from early afternoon until dawn, so, in the mornings, they left him asleep and, because nothing could start early, even the maid took to getting up late. Nevertheless, despite the choice of studios and all these domestic improvements, Picasso seemed unhappy.
He was not enjoying the social responsibilities he seemed to have acquired along with their new address. They were now ‘at home’ on Sundays and soon began receiving invitations from all kinds of socialites and celebrities. Perhaps they made him feel small. As Gertrude Stein noted in The Making of Americans:
Some … spend all their living struggling to adjust the being that slowly comes to active stirring in them to the aspirations they had in them, some want to create their aspirations from the being in them and they have not the courage in them. It is a wonderful thing how much courage it takes even to buy a clock you are very much liking when it is a kind of one every one thinks only a servant should be owning. It is very wonderful how much courage it takes to buy bright coloured handkerchiefs when every one having good taste uses white ones or pale coloured ones, when a bright coloured one gives you so much pleasure you suffer always at not having them. It is very hard to have the courage of your being in you, in clocks, in handkerchiefs, in aspirations, in liking things that are low, in anything.
Picasso’s collection of strange possessions did not appear to be a problem for him, but he was uncomfortable with his new social identity. With his work at a turning point, he found all social interruptions irritating; even Saturday evenings at the Steins’ had begun to pall. Fernande failed to see why he did not simply turn down invitations. She, on the other hand, was in her element. Paul Poiret had invited them to join him on his colossal houseboat, Le Nomad, his pride and joy. It was moored on the Seine, and on it he gave lavish parties for his artist friends, taking along his cook from Paris and his accordion, with which he entertained his guests. Poiret was keen to bring his friends, including the artists whose works he was purchasing, together on Le Nomad, where, after a good dinner, he plied everyone with the best Calvados and marcs and initiated long conversations about art and literature, particularly seeking everyone’s opinion on his favourite subject, beauty. He was disappointed, however, when he tried to encourage them to take up their brushes; nobody seemed to want to rise to the challenge of painting riverside scenes from on board Le Nomad. The days of Impressionism were over; the painters were all talking about geometry, space and perspective.
During the next few years, Poiret was to form the private opinion that cubist paintings were merely artist’s sketches and should never be seen outside their studios. He was already sceptical about the directions modern art was moving in; and the way the painters seemed to lose interest in their art once on board Le Nomad seemed to him odd, compared with his own reputation for industry, which continued to earn him fabulously wealthy, if temperamental, clients. Diaghilev’s backer, the Comtesse de Greffuhle, had caused something of a stir when she visited Poiret’s salons to try on a golden dress for her daughter’s wedding, ‘a marvellous gold sheath, bordered with sable’ that made the entire salon look like a fairy’s chamber. Having lifted her head and ‘pointed her nose in every direction’, she announced, ‘I thought that you only knew how to dress midinettes and hussies, but I did not know that you were capable of making a dress for a great lady.’ Those midinettes, replied Poiret, were the very seamstresses who had made her dress; and ‘the great ladies of Belgium could always trust themselves to the taste of the midinettes of Paris’. When the comtesse visited again, his saleswoman quoted prices which had suddenly become astronomical; Poiret wasted no time with disrespectful clients. Other visitors included the British Prime Minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, who had entered his Paris salons ‘like a thunder-clap’, displayed her violet satin knickers and nearly destroyed Poiret’s reputation, along with that of the Prime Minister (a committed Free Trader). She had recklessly invited Poiret to show a collection at Downing Street, which had been embarrassingly successful – ‘FRENCH TRADE REPRESENTED BY THE ENGLISH PREMIER’, ran the headlines the following morning. Poiret and his trunks of fabulous garments had been promptly and unceremoniously dispatched back to France.
In his own country, Poiret was equally unabashed by scandal. One Sunday afternoon, he attended the Longchamp races accompanied by three attractive models dressed in his latest creations, Hellenic gowns, the sides split from knee to ankle and displaying glimpses of coloured stocking. Outrage. ‘Wives dragged husbands towards the exits. Timid maidens dropped unconscious into the arms of eligible bachelors.’ The scandal rocked the French nation, energetically inflamed by the press: ‘Those gowns are … the worst of all the recent insanities’ (Le Figaro); ‘I shall have the charity to refrain from mentioning the name of the couturier who is guilty of this outrage’ (La Vie Parisienne); ‘To think of it! Under those straight gowns we could sense their bodies!’ (L’Illustration).
• • •
In Issy les Moulineaux, Matisse was still working on La Danse and La Musique. With the move to Issy, he had made a definitive break with the artistic life of Paris. The house there was secluded and remote; when, occasionally, he returned to the city, he felt like an outcast. On one visit he wandered into a café in Montparnasse where Picasso and his friends were gathered; when he seated himself at the next table, they failed to acknowledge him. The episode compounded his feelings of rejection and increased his resentment of Picasso’s popularity; everyone (perhaps especially Shchukin) now seemed to be converging on his rival. Perhaps the Picasso gang found it hard to forget that Matisse’s Salon d’Automne committee had rejected Braque’s work. And Matisse’s feelings of acute anxiety and insecurity may not, despite appearances, have been any keener than Picasso’s. Or, perhaps, in the busy, crowded café, the Picasso bande had simply failed to notice him. Whatever the reason, as Matisse himself put it, ‘I rolled myself into a ball in my corner as an observer, and waited to see what would happen.’
The last two students to join his school had included two Russian girls, unchaperoned and (unusually for those days) living independently. Maria Vasilieva and Olga Meerson had only recently arrived in Paris, where Olga had just exhibited with the official Paris Salon. An attractive redhead, she had studied at the Moscow School of Art before, in 1889, aged twenty-one, she had left home to join Kandinsky’s colony of artists in Munich. Matisse told her that if she wished to study with him she would need to unlearn all she knew. She took two weeks to think this over before agreeing, whereupon the two girls moved into rented rooms in the attic above the Matisse family lodging. In October 1909, she visited him regularly in his new studio to pose for a sculpted clay nude. His connection with her was exhilarating for them both, especially as it coincided with a period of major new developments in his work. That year he also made experimental bas relief wood carvings, including a large figure study, Nu de dos, which he eventually created in three versions (the second in 1913, the third in 1916/17). The 1909 version is roughly carved, primitive, Gauguinesque. He later said of his work in wood, ‘I did sculpture when I was tired of painting, for a change of medium. But I sculpted as a painter.’ The agreement he had made with Félix Fénéon meant that, for the first time in his life, he now had the prospect of a regular income, since the Bernheim-Jeunes had firmed up their agreement to buy everything he painted for a fixed price (ranging from 1,875 francs for a large painting down to 450 for the smallest), with a royalty of 25 per cent on sales. Even so, the responsibility of the annual rent of three thousand francs on the new house and all the usual anxieties about the children’s health and schooling continued to worry him. Work on La Danse and La Musique required intense effort and stamina as well as sustained periods of solitude, but even in the relative isolation of Issy, he could not slough off the responsibilities of family life, nor stop himself feeling inadequate and anxious.
• • •
The winter of 1909/10 brought spectacularly turbulent weather to France. It rained and snowed incessantly throughout half the cou
ntry, causing conditions unprecedented for three centuries, especially in the region of Paris, where the storms persisted unabated. At the turn of the year, snow fell in Montmartre, turning everything white. The streetwalkers’ hair and make-up looked blacker, redder, than ever, their faces like masks against the strange light of dusk in the snow. At the foot of the Butte, the omnibus ran as usual, those on the roof crowded beneath a jostling huddle of umbrellas. The pavements shone. The lights of the place Blanche showed dully through squalls of wind, and snow hurled against the sodden benches, grey façades, newspaper kiosks and rooftops, though the sun sent blazing reflections through the branches of the trees amidst the whirling flakes.
On 26 January 1910, the Seine burst its banks and began piling up flotsam as, all along the river, the embankments burst, submerging the quays. Weeks went by and the river rose ever higher, at the Pont de l’Alma reaching almost to the shoulders of the four statues of soldiers on the bridge supports. Tugs and barges were thrown up, strewn across the nearby streets and left stranded. The bridges were impassable. Parisians gathered to watch the roaring, icy Seine as it foamed through the city. Not until the beginning of March would it eventually subside and return to its bed; the river traffic was finally able to run again after the apocalypse had broken, after well over a month.
