by Sue Roe
In Cadaqués, Derain took full advantage of the music and dancing organized by the Pichots, playing his instruments and joining in; he even persuaded Picasso to oblige them with a flamenco routine. Every weekend, a Catalan band playing pipes (the tibles and tenores which appeared in Picasso’s paintings) struck up a sardana in the square, the villagers dancing solemnly (despite the lively steps) to the harsh, traditional music. The sardana was a serious dance, Picasso later told Braque, ‘And difficult! Each step must be counted.’ It was a ‘communion of souls’, he explained, in which all distinctions of class, social status and age were abolished. ‘Rich and poor, young and old, dance it together … the servants hand-in-hand with their masters.’
If Derain threw himself with enthusiasm into all this, however, there were tensions between Fernande and Alice, who was being combative, and flirtatious with Picasso. On 6 August, she and Derain left, and Picasso and Fernande prepared to return to Barcelona. In her letters to Gertrude Stein, the latter admitted she had never really taken to Cadaqués: ‘At the risk of offending the Pichots I must admit the place is hideous. There is nothing but the sea, some wretched little mountains, houses that look as if made of cardboard, local people without any character who may be fisherfolk but have as much allure as workmen …’ Alice had obviously rubbed her up the wrong way.
Moreover, although Derain had always been dependably diverting company, the truth was that by now his artistic concerns had begun to depart significantly from Picasso’s. He and Alice had just that June moved from Montmartre to a romantic attic on the Left Bank in the rue Bonaparte, directly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts. Derain, who had boasted of his salubrious address near the police station of Montmartre, now bragged about his proximity to the École, despite having never found anything very positive to say about it before. He especially loved being in the thick of things on the night of the Quatres Arts ball, when students in fancy dress swarmed through the streets by torchlight, singing and shouting beneath his window. With the move across the river, he appeared to have (temporarily) shed his image as an ‘English’ dandy; for the Left Bank, he dressed in old, thick woollen sweaters and sat smoking a long Red Indian pipe, telling tall stories of captains and horsemen he may or may not have encountered during his early years of military service – at least, that was André Salmon’s story. Others noted that for the past year his primary preoccupation had been the study of Hindu thought.
Although already increasingly alienated artistically from Picasso and Braque, even after his move to the rue Bonaparte Derain had continued to socialize with them, meeting regularly at Azon’s and elsewhere. After the holiday in Cadaqués, both he and Vlaminck began gradually to distance themselves. Both were alienated above all by the idea that art could be reduced to an aesthetic, or theory, which was how they viewed cubism. Acknowledged as inventors of a kind of ‘lyricism of the banlieusard’, neither had found a definitive artistic direction that took them satisfactorily beyond Fauvism. For Derain, the great merit of Fauvism had been that it had set the painted picture free from all connections with naturalist imitation. In retrospect, he realized that, as Fauves, they had been pure colourists, applying that new freedom primarily to the use of colour without taking much account of the framework – an approach that, in some respects, had caused them to lose their way. For both he and Vlaminck, the theory that art should avoid any form of imitation had proved inhibiting rather than liberating. ‘What was wrong in our attitude,’ Derain later reflected, ‘was a kind of fear of imitating life, which made us approach things from too far off and led us to hasty judgements’. He became increasingly convinced that the primary role of the artist was to find ways of transposing the true expression of his feelings on to canvas, without distortion: ‘Where there is temperament, there can be no imitation. Thus it became necessary for us to return to more cautious attitudes, to lay in a store of resources from the outset, to secure patiently for each painting a long development.’ The advantage of Fauvism had been that the canvas became a crucible from which the painter had been able to draw objects that were still alive in his imagination. The subjects of their paintings had thus been brought to life by the feelings of the artist – the sensation – which, as Derain insisted, was surely the very proof of his existence. In one of his last letters to Vlaminck he wrote that he was still seeking not a synthesis of unified expression in a given moment but rather a way of expressing fixed, complex things for all eternity. The young deist remained unprepared to relinquish his belief in the spiritual value of his work.
The cubists’ emphasis on ideas alienated Derain and Vlaminck once and for all from Picasso and Braque. Suspicious of definitive statements, Derain believed painting had a function, and a dignity, that should make it substantial, profound, not constrained by any ‘esthétisme hasardeux’ (‘dangerous aestheticism’). As he put it, ‘Un tableau ne commence pas par être une idée’ (‘A picture does not begin by being an idea’). Vlaminck and Derain distrusted, too, the notion that trends in art supercede one another, each invalidating all that went before; as he lucidly put it, the point of one artist was not simply to replace another. Turning their backs on the cubists, both returned to their original practice of painting out of doors, close to the soil. Ultimately, Derain came to believe that the great danger for the artist was an excess of culture, that the true artist would need to be (or feel) uncultivated, uneducated; wild in the truest sense. In reality, it was all a sublime game – a hazardous game of coincidence and chance – which departed from the life of the imagination only to return to it constantly, in a spirit of playful, sometimes exasperated, provocation.
Derain’s argument – if such it was – was not only with Picasso. In a different way, he felt Matisse had oversimplified things. The ancients had known how to paint a wine glass, they had understood things in depth; they had not been satisfied with an intelligent glance, as Matisse seemed to be. In Derain’s opinion, it was too easy, selling talent too short, this ‘façon directe de sentir des choses’. Eventually, he became disenchanted even with Cézanne, finding his search for perfection incompatible with the ludic freedom of human thought. The mistake of all theory was surely its aim to be definitive; for Derain, the wish to be definitive was death. Even the concession that the artist’s temperament determined the nature of the work became suspect, since surely what counted was not the temperament of the artist but the personality of the man, expressed through character, conviction, free will.
Vlaminck agreed, unable to see cubism as in any sense the natural development of Fauvism, which for them had been not so much an attitude (still less a theory) but a way of life, a means of expressing a response to nature, society, the world. For him, cubism was inexplicable as a way forward because it sealed off emotional possibilities. He could see how it could inspire decorative applications, even introduce some valuable insights: ‘Mais la Peinture, c’est autre chose.’
Both returned to painting landscapes, in the South of France and in the region around Chatou. Paradoxically, they (particularly Derain) may be regarded as modernists more for what they said and wrote – about chance and coincidence – than for their later works, which may explain the distinction Jean Cocteau made between ‘the classicism of cubism [opposing] the romanticism of the Fauves’. As for Picasso, he offered no apology for or explanation of his work. He preferred anecdote to analysis and was often most serious when he seemed least so. ‘If you can’t paint the entire person,’ he once told a crowd of young artists in the Lapin Agile, ‘put the legs on the canvas, to one side.’ No one dared ask him what he meant; it was just clear by now that no one would think of painting from life – at least, not in the old way – any longer. He once told Cocteau that in Avignon one day he had seen an elderly painter, partially blind, painting the castle in the square of the Château des Papes. His wife, standing beside him, looked at the castle through binoculars and described it to him: ‘He was painting from his wife.’ For a while, Picasso and Braque even left their works unsigned. A
s Braque put it, ‘From the moment that someone else could do the same thing as I, there seemed to be no difference between the paintings, which therefore did not have to be signed.’ They soon, however, began signing them again: ‘I realized that a painter could not make himself known without his peculiar “tricks”, without the slightest trace of individuality.’
• • •
Picasso’s return to Paris in the summer of 1910 was disappointing. He had been hoping to interest Kahnweiler in the work he had brought back from Cadaqués, landscapes which clearly demonstrated a move towards abstraction. However, Kahnweiler made his old objection: they looked unfinished. He bought only one, a painting of boats. Vollard was less cautious, purchasing most of the remainder, though he was sceptical about the new direction of Picasso’s work. In fact, it seemed, that summer, he had moved as far as he ever would towards abstraction. He may have been anxious that Shchukin would take his cue from Kahnweiler and also begin to lose interest in his work. That autumn, he accepted a commission to make a decorative piece for an American collector, a large-scale work capable of rivalling Matisse’s La Danse and La Musique; but, unlike Matisse, he had no experience of working on a piece intended to be decorative on this scale. Furthermore, decorative panels required bold colouration, the virtuoso handling of surface effects and an understanding of texture, which, for Matisse, went back to his early studies with Moreau, to his long familiarity with Byzantine mosaics and Islamic ornamentation, and perhaps even to his childhood and his proximity to the production and display of textiles. Picasso’s decorative panel presented him with the insuperable difficulty of reconciling strong colour with the intricacies of cubist form, and the commission came to nothing.
Instead, he resumed work on the portraits of dealers – Uhde, Kahnweiler and Vollard – which he had been working on before leaving for Cadaqués, all multifaceted, essentially cubist works, which left Vollard, for one, unmoved. He remained sceptical of cu-bism and was never especially fond of his portrait; a year or two later, he sold it on to a Russian collector for three thousand francs. He kept an open mind, however, since he knew he had been wrong about Picasso in the past. He made the occasional purchase in the autumns of 1909 and 1910, but really he was waiting to see whether Kahnweiler could first establish a lucrative market for cubist art before taking any major risks himself. He arranged to give Picasso an exhibition (of works painted between 1900 and 1910), which opened on 20 December 1910, but his investment in the show was minimal; he provided no frames, produced no catalogue and sent out no invitations.
Cubism, nevertheless, was rapidly flourishing, already an acknowledged movement practised, as Vlaminck had anticipated, by the talented and the untalented alike. By 1910, there seemed to be cubists at every party. Though she did not even know his name, Alice B. Toklas had already met ‘the youngest of the cubists’, apparently destined for the diplomatic service as soon as he had completed his military service: ‘How he drifted in and whether he painted I do not know. All I know is that he was known as the youngest of the cubists.’ More promisingly for the development of cubism, in 1910 Juan Gris arrived in Montmartre, where Picasso arranged for him to rent van Dongen’s old studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. Gris moved in with his lover and their baby, who could be seen suspended from the window in a makeshift hammock. There was no room for a pram in the hall in the Bateau-Lavoir. Dark, reserved and handsome, he immediately attracted the attention of Gertrude Stein, fortuitously adding weight to her theory that cubism was really a Spanish invention.
The new cubists also included a former illustrator for the Assiette au beurre, a Polish cartoonist from Warsaw who signed himself Markus and had given up working as a graphic artist to take up cu-bism rather, as someone remarked, ‘as one would join a religious faith’ – though his cubism largely consisted of ‘reducing the architecture of the Sacré Coeur to several volumes’ on canvas and decorating the walls of a back room at the top of the rue Ravignon – Émile’s bistro, the new rendezvous for painters and poets. As an illustrator, Markus had been successful. He lived in a large apartment in the rue Delambre with his lover, Marcelle Humbert, whom everyone called Eva (or Eve), who was pretty and petite and an accomplished housekeeper and hostess. The couple, who had so far resisted family pressure to marry, regularly gave dinners for ‘visiting Poles and the more respectable Montmartre bohemians’. At the Cirque Medrano one evening, they met Picasso and Fernande, who immediately took to Eva.
• • •
Matisse spent the summer of 1910 in his studio in Issy, working well into the autumn on La Danse and La Musique. Since each panel measured eight and a half feet high and well over twelve feet long, he painted from stepladders, humming old dance tunes from the Moulin de la Galette as he worked, appearing to the casual observer to be slapping on paint with abandon. In fact, the process required intense concentration. The finished work seemed ‘primitive, diabolical, barbaric, even cannibalistic’ to those who first saw it. Matisse responded by insisting again, as he repeatedly had in the past, that all he was trying to achieve was an art of peace, harmony and balance.
La Danse and La Musique made their public debuts at the 1910 Salon d’Automne, where, five years on, the public reacted exactly as they had back in 1905 to the works of the Fauves. The day of the opening was mild. As one reporter lyrically commented, the flowers in the beds of the rond-pointe, the elegant outfits of the women and the sunlight sparkling through the trees put one in mind of a painting by Bonnard, despite the crowd of unkempt bohemians shoving through the turnstile. It was a contrast that continued inside the exhibition hall, where the art of the past vied with contemporary pieces which still had the capacity to shock. At the sight of Matisse’s work, old friends were dismayed, fellow artists outraged. The reviews were so damning that Amélie had to hide them, though reviewer Maurice Sembat made some attempt to paraphrase the artist’s achievement: ‘We have been to the Salon d’Automne,’ he reported, ‘where we have seen the astounding La Danse – pink movement turning on a blue background in a frantic round. The huge figure on the left leads the entire line. What rapture! What a bacchanal! This supreme arabesque, this thrilling curve that extends from the turned head to the projecting hip, and down through the turned-out legs, seems to embody the orgiastic dithryamb with which Nietzsche sums up his enthusiasm for ancient Greece.’
Within a week of the opening, Matisse left for Munich, where he barely had time to catch the last ten days of an exhibition of Islamic art before news reached him of his father’s sudden death, on 15 October. He rushed home to Bohain, in Aisne in northern France, arriving to the sound of funeral bells tolling through the town.
7.
‘Art’
At 27, rue de Fleurus, Alice B. Toklas was now living with Gertrude and Leo Stein. Harriet had already written from San Francisco, asking Alice to close the flat and carefully pack the paintings, especially Matisse’s La Femme aux yeux bleus, and send them to her in California, where she was ‘probably remaining’. When their landlady in the rue Notre Dame des Champs objected to Alice’s abrupt termination of her and Harriet’s tenancy, Leo helped her with letters to French lawyers: ‘And with that I moved [sometime during the winter of 1909/1910] over to the rue de Fleurus, where I was given the small room that later we called the salon des refusés.’ In the mornings, she typed Gertrude’s manuscript; in the afternoons, they visited friends, including an old acquaintance of Gertrude from her Johns Hopkins days, Grace Lounsbery, ‘an intimate friend of two of Gertrude’s intimate friends. Gertrude thought that she was a false alarm.’ Nonetheless, she was, as Alice realized, one of the two new ‘infant prodigies of the social world’, the nature of which was rapidly changing. Grace, who ‘considered herself a Greek scholar and wrote Greek plays’, had fallen in with Jean Cocteau, the other infant prodigy. Perhaps it was at the Steins’, then, through Grace Lounsbery, that Picasso first encountered Cocteau (though not until about 1917) and, through him, soon afterwards, Diaghilev. (Cocteau later considered that the real fo
unders of modernism were Picasso, Stravinsky and Modigliani – a story impossible to tell except, in the essential spirit of modernism, through nuance and juxtaposition, since, though their work had much in common, their paths rarely crossed until during and after the First World War.)
On 1 November 1910, Sergei Shchukin arrived in Paris, a week before the close of the Salon d’Automne. His catalogue of personal disasters was extended that year by the death of the second of his twin sons, who took his own life on his deceased mother’s birthday. The ‘darkness’ Shchukin had recognized in Picasso’s work, he now sought almost obsessively. He wanted more of his work, especially paintings with overt references to death; in 1910, he purchased Composition with Skull (1908), as well as Derain’s Still Life with Skull. His interest now extended to Picasso’s early work, which he also began to collect, again choosing paintings that stirred up his own feelings of loss and despair, including the 1901 version of The Absinthe Drinker.
Shchukin had already seen the reviews of Matisse’s La Danse and La Musique, and read them with dismay. Meanwhile, the Bernheim-Jeunes went bustling down to Issy with the news that the Russian collector was considering abandoning Matisse’s panels in favour of a more suitable work by Puvis de Chavannes. In their opinion, the latter’s work was so large that the only way of displaying it properly for Shchukin to make his decision would be to hang it in Matisse’s studio alongside La Danse and La Musique. When he saw Matisse’s panels of naked dancers alongside Puvis’s ascetic The Muses Greeting Genius: The Herald of Light, with its ‘ghostly pallor and elegant, etiolated figures’, Shchukin decided he had no choice but to choose the latter’s work. He returned immediately to Moscow, leaving Matisse devastated. Just as before, no sooner had he made his decision than he immediately wrote to revoke it. But the damage was done; Matisse was traumatized by the whole episode. He felt betrayed, not only by Shchukin, whom he had thought was his friend, but also by the Bernheim-Jeunes. For the next two months, he was in deep despair.
