by Sue Roe
As far as Diaghilev was concerned, these French artists expressed his vision absolutely and, for the next few years, they continued to work for him on sets and costume designs – Matisse’s graphic robes for Le Chant du rossignol (1920); Marie Laurencin’s fluid, pastel costumes for Les Biches (1924); Picasso’s backdrop for Le Train bleu (1924), which had heavy, carved-looking goddesses running around ecstatically before a vast blue sky (for this, Coco Chanel designed the costumes). In the meantime, he continued his habit of making impossibly ambitious plans for the future, even as he worked on current projects. His notebooks for 1923/4 list the names of artists he initially planned to appoint to contribute to future productions (Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marie Laurencin, Braque, Utrillo and Gris), though not all of these came to fruition. Diaghilev somehow managed to combine meticulous planning with a complete lack of a system. His aim was continual experimentation, and he was determined to incorporate into the ballet ever newer and more avant-garde forms of expression. Even when he returned a ballet to the stage he was determined never to repeat himself. In 1928, a year before his death, he was still hoping to update Scheherazade by introducing new decors by Matisse – though Matisse in fact worked for him only once: he found Diaghilev’s draconian style of management exhausting and the prospect of a long-term working relationship with him unimaginable.
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In the cultural climate of 1910, in which, in the wake of the Futurists’ declaration that ‘a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’ and fashionable women ‘looked as though they had just escaped from Bakst’s harem as they stepped down from the running boards of their Panhards and de Dion-Boutons’, it can be difficult to remember that this was still pre-war Paris and, outside the sphere of the arts, old customs and superstitions prevailed. On 16 May 1910, almost exactly a year after the debut performance by the Ballets Russes, all Paris turned out to watch the sky. Huddled on balconies and terraces in a state of nervous anticipation, everyone was waiting for the appearance the following night of Halley’s Comet, an event which the superstitious – that is, many – believed would mean the end of the world. The return of the comet (which occurs approximately every seventy-six years) was the main story in all the newspapers, upstaging even the magnificent funeral of Edward VII in London’s Westminster Abbey, which was attended by all the crowned heads of Europe. According to Le Figaro, homes throughout Sèvres, Saint-Cloud and Meudon were crowded with people, telescopes poised on balconies to follow the path of the comet from midnight until four in the morning. By the following day, tension was mounting and terror rife, especially in ‘the southern regions of Europe, where the population is convinced that the arrival of the comet will bring about the end of the world …’ In Italy, the Pope instructed priests to reassure the faithful, as many prepared to spend the night in church.
On 18 May, the newspapers finally announced the anti-climactic news: ‘We can report quite simply that today the world continues to exist: the comet passed by like a bomb that failed to go off. The end of the world is deferred …’ Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic, the crowds stayed gathered, just in case.
That evening, Modigliani walked round to rue Vaugirard and posted a card to Paul Alexandre (it was postmarked 8.15 p.m.): ‘Carissimo. The comet has not yet arrived (by ten to six). Terrible. I’ll definitely see you on Friday – after death of course …’ Two days later, the crowds were still anxiously waiting, Le Figaro reporting that, ‘At the summit of the Butte Montmartre two thousand sightseers were stationed, as ironical and raucous as on the dawn of a public execution. A police contingent had to be called in … In far-away New York, “comet-parties” were organized on all the terraces of the large hotels. There was drinking, laughter, eating, dancing, but nothing was seen …’
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By 1910 or so, the disparate, fragmented social circles that revolved around Picasso, Diaghilev, Poiret and the Steins had begun to overlap. In the arts, overt connections could now be made between painting, music, writing, couture and the ballet. From now on, painters and sculptors would, in their turn, find inspiration in modern dance. Rodin invited Nijinsky to sit for him; Picasso and Braque pursued their experiments, continuing to explore the problems of perspective and the ‘projection’ of objects on canvas. Poiret’s latest fashions consisted of simple tunics and shift dresses worn with elaborate, spun fascinators in the evenings; his fashion advice focused on the individuality of the wearer rather than that of the designer: elegance had become synonymous with chance and circumstance, what Poiret called ‘decorum’. ‘Choose what is suitable, Madame,’ he advised his clients, ‘what is suitable to the hour, the circumstances, the temperature, the setting, the landscape … capital, spa, beach resort or country. Choose with taste what is suitable to your mood, what is most appropriate to your character, for a gown, like a faithful portrait, reflects a state of mind …’
And the circles were widening. In London on 8 November, Roger Fry, British painter and independent art critic of the Athenaeum, mounted an exhibition of contemporary French art at the Grafton Galleries. Fry had studied art in Paris (he entered the Académie Julian in 1892) and in 1904 had been appointed, largely on the strength of his articles for the Athenaeum, to purchase examples of modern European art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Following the curtailment of that post, he decided to bring modern French art before a London audience. He called his exhibition ‘The French Post-Impressionists’, a title intended to be non-committal as to genre and indicating simply that this was work that post-dated the introduction of Impressionism. (Manet was included, and was of course painting before – and alongside – the Impressionists, but, displayed in this new context, his work in some respects took on a more ‘modern’ appearance, with its strong colours, pared-down forms and references to the art of the past, than the work of Monet, Pissarro or Sisley.) The exhibition of works by artists including Manet, Cézanne, Matisse, van Gogh and Gauguin provoked the same general incomprehension, derision and ridicule as had the exhibition of the Fauves five years earlier in Paris. When Fry showed the works again in 1912, he defended them in a catalogue introduction (entitled, more simply, ‘The French Group’), providing a lucid description of what they had collectively achieved in their work by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In Fry’s estimation, the French painters, though clearly influenced by the Italian primitives, were best understood as ‘modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook’. As he saw it:
The difficulty [in the paintings’ reception] springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom, that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms. Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
He was echoing Braque, who by this time believed that ‘The painter aims to construct not an anecdote but a pictorial fact. One must not imitate what one wishes to create. The painter thinks in terms of forms and colours. The aesthetic object is the pictorial fact – a lyrical and poetic object.’
Fry predicted that the logical outcome of such an ambition might be a movement towards abstraction; he could already see in Picasso’s work evidence of ‘a purely abstract language of form – a visual music’. There was no such evidence, however, in the work of Matisse, who was clearly working with recognizable objects, establishing forms ‘by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the log
ic of his space relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour’. In any case, Fry insisted it was too soon to make predictions about future directions. His main point was that ridicule might have been expected had any of the artists set out to make an exact copy of the model and found himself incapable of achieving a better likeness. As capable as anyone of copying nature, artists such as Picasso were ‘here attempting to do something quite different’. Common to all was their simplification of forms; ‘the great originator of the whole idea’, in Fry’s opinion, was Cézanne.
If the long lens of twentieth-century modernism thus takes in both London and New York, in real terms the art that later came to be thought of as a movement originated in the studios and cafés of Montmartre. In the book she published three decades later, Paris France (1940), Gertrude Stein put it all more simply, declaring that modernism could only ever have begun in France, where the habits of day-to-day life were paradoxically eternal. French traditions of rural and family life were profound, yet in her attitude to incomers France displayed the detachment of an artist. ‘Foreigners’ would come, go or stay; and through it all France would remain herself – which is why so many came to France to live as artists, when they could not at home. In France, they lived as they pleased, painting, writing or dancing, for what the French really respected were art and letters. ‘And that,’ concludes Stein, ‘is what made Paris and France the natural background of the art and literature of the twentieth century.’ As for the French, ‘their tradition kept them from changing and yet they naturally saw things as they were, and accepted life as it is, and mixed things up without any reason at the same time. Foreigners were not romantic to them, they were just facts, nothing was sentimental they were just there, and strangely enough it did not make them make the art and literature of the twentieth century but it made them the inevitable background for it.’
Throughout 1910 and 1911, Matisse continued to explore new ways of depicting the flow of rhythm on canvas. Following the completion of the Danse and Musique panels, he painted distinctive interiors such as Le Studio rouge and Intérieur aux aubergines, a large decorative piece around which Michael and Sarah Stein rearranged their room to display to best advantage. In Fleurs et céramique (1911), pattern is alert with movement and space enveloped by forms rendered dynamic with vivid colour. In La Fenêtre bleue (1911), solid forms seem massed and crouched, like dancers in a pose on a stage set. In November 1910, Matisse went to Spain, where he painted two versions of Nature morte de Seville (1910/11), an extraordinary work in which pattern, as distinguished painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing has remarked, ‘finally broke loose and sprawled across the pictures’ – like the firebird.
6.
The Interior Life
Picasso gradually settled into the boulevard de Clichy and the demands of his more sociable lifestyle. For the next four years, he made it his business to attend every annual Salon des Indépendants and Salon d’Automne. With Braque, he continued to explore the experiments with perspective by now widely referred to as cubism. At around the time of the appearance of the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Musicians’, they were both beginning to introduce musical instruments into their work. Picasso had been intrigued by the allegorical connotations of musical instruments since publishing an article in an issue of his short-lived magazine Arte Joven back in 1901, in which the author had compared the body of a woman with a guitar. As for Braque, he was naturally musical, understanding the sensuous properties of musical instruments and drawn to them now as subjects because, as he put it, ‘they have the advantage of being animated by touch’. Throughout the first half of 1910, he and Picasso continued to work closely together, experimenting with ways of depicting solid objects on canvas that would make a viewer want to reach out and touch them. In a few months, they rapidly produced substantial quantities of new work, until summer came, and Picasso began once again to yearn for Spain.
The family of his friend Ramon Pichot owned a property and a boat near the bay of Cadaqués, Dalí’s birthplace. (Dalí later claimed that as a child he had noticed Picasso, but Picasso had no memory of him.) Pichot, lanky, learned, with a serious face (later appointed to acquire rare books for Pierpoint Morgan, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of New York), still spent some of his time in Montmartre, where he prepared for exhibitions in his rose-coloured house behind the Lapin Agile. His sister, an opera singer, was also on her way to Cadaqués that summer; she had a free travel pass and could include anyone accompanying her on her company’s ‘circus discount’. Already travelling with more than eighteen people, including family and friends, her dresser, accompanist, several dogs and a parrot, she generously offered to add Picasso, Fernande, their dog, Frika, and their maid to her party. They left on Friday 1 July 1910.
Pichot’s mother, a native of Cadaqués, had turned their house into an artists’ colony; members of the old El Quatres Gats group had been going there since the turn of the century. The place was so isolated, cut off by a mountain ridge two thousand feet high, that until (after 1910) a proper road was built, the easiest access was by sea. Fishing boats sailed from there as far as Cuba; many of the locals said they felt ‘closer to Havana than to Madrid’. By land, the journey was four hours by train from Barcelona to Figueres, followed by a trek across rough terrain in a covered wagon which took a further seven hours and two changes of horses. Since the Pichots’ house was already full, Picasso had rented a sparsely furnished cottage in the village, at 162 (now no. 11), Carrer d’es Poal, on the north side of the bay. ‘We are paying a hundred francs a month for a house that has only two beds, two tables, and some chairs,’ Fernande wrote to Gertrude Stein. Though she was not exactly bored, she was unimpressed. Perhaps because of her mood, she confided that, for her, the place had none of the charm of Horta, though the maid was getting used to it all – and doing all the chores.
Picasso was absorbed in his work, painting the local fishing boats – as Fernande described them, ‘stranded in little heaps around the harbour’. Fishing boats had always been a subject for Braque; now, Picasso, too, studied the ‘navicular structure – the dovetailing and the joinery’ that made them ideal subjects for the structural methods of cubism. Braque had lent him an orthogonal grid which enabled him to adjust the tension, rhythm and structure of a composition, not unlike the traditional technique of squaring up a drawing for enlargement on the canvas.
Along with other artists at the time, both were also beginning to look at X-ray photographs, recommended by the Futurists in their ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting’, since, with their ‘doubled power of our sight’, they enabled the artist to contemplate the human body not simply as a solid object but as a form with an interior life. The X-ray photograph provided new potential for experimentation – and for the introduction of an element of humour. From this point on, as Picasso’s biographer John Richardson has noted, Picasso began to incorporate into his work objects such as knobs, keys and nails, which appear in his paintings like the ‘swallowed safety pins, forgotten forceps, fatal bullets’, which could now be detected by X-rays – a reference to the Futurists’ ‘Technical Manifesto’, or a gentle jibe?
Picasso spent long hours alone in his studio. He was exploring how far he could take the experiment to position, or enfold, an object in pictorial space in such a way that the viewer could ‘walk’ around it, introducing into the painting a sense of time as well as space. The vivid colours of his first faceted still lifes and individual figure studies of 1907 had given way to monochrome experiments as he concentrated on exploring the limits in painting of three-dimensional form. Richardson has observed that the draining of colour from Picasso’s Cadaqués works reflects the surrounding bleached, white houses and grey-black rocks, and the calma blanca of the small, secluded bay. And perhaps his works of this period which were ‘faded’ towards the edges of the picture frame, took their cue from film reels or photographs, which in those days always faded out towards the edges.
Picasso was also
making engravings. Ramon Pichot had a printing press, which he put at Picasso’s disposal so that he could work on a commission from Kahnweiler that he had accepted back in April to provide illustrations for Max Jacob’s autobiographical fantasy Saint Matorel. In his engravings, Picasso also experimented with perspective and original methods of depicting objects, discovering, for example, ways of juxtaposing small with large objects to establish simple new perspectival effects. All this seemed to calm him down, perhaps because he was experimenting having already laid the groundwork and working with a sense of being in dialogue rather than labouring, as it were, alone in the dark, as he had with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Or, perhaps, for once in his life, he allowed the peace of his surroundings to influence his mood. Whatever the reason, that summer Picasso seemed uncharacteristically calm, working with quiet concentration throughout July.
As August approached, however, he began to crave company. Fernande was very much at home with the Pichot women, but Picasso missed the camaraderie of fellow artists – in particular, of course, Braque. He tried to persuade him to come to Cadaqués, but Braque was unwilling to leave Paris. So Picasso tried Derain, who, despite the fact that their work was increasingly divergent, gamely agreed to join them, as he had willingly joined Matisse five years earlier in Collioure. Derain and Alice (who had dyed and bobbed her hair, which made her look more Amazonian than Madonna-like) arrived towards the end of July. As they approached Cadaqués by covered wagon, they were startled in the darkness by a bearded passenger who joined them and sat jeering from the seat opposite. The stranger turned out to be Picasso, come in disguise to escort his friends on the final lap of their journey.
