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

by Sue Roe

  It was early December before he began to recover and, by the time Shchukin sent a new request for a pair of large still lifes, Matisse was in Spain. In Seville, the artist saw Spanish gypsies dancing, ‘a miracle of suppleness and rhythm’. He spent the next few months in Madrid, exploring the art of the museums. He extended his stay, not even returning home for Christmas but travelling instead through Spain well into the New Year. In spring 1911, despite having resolved to have nothing further to do with the art world of Paris, he sent a large painting of Amélie in Spanish costume (The Spanish Woman) to the Salon des Indépendants. It was to be almost the last time she modelled for him. When he returned to Paris, rumours were already spreading – what had Matisse been doing for the past few months in sunny Spain, without his wife? Within five days of the opening of the Indépendants on 21 April, he had withdrawn his own painting, tortured by the sight of it. In its place he sent the work he had just completed, Pink Studio. The target of the gossip press now became Olga Meerson and her ‘monstrous images’, worse even, reported the Journal, than the barely mentionable ‘frightful Spanish Woman of M. Henri Matisse’.

  • • •

  By 1911, in the streets, shops, bars and theatres of Paris, ‘art’ (as redefined by Picasso and Braque) was everywhere. Art was performance, pastiche, mimesis; art was visual spectacle, speed and urban chic, incorporating and celebrating everyday life just as Severini and his fellow Futurists had urged it should. The success of Diaghilev’s 1911 season, which featured Petrushka (a folkloric ballet that told the story of three puppets), was colossal. The avant-garde mood and strange, articulated dancing – Nijinsky, his toes turned in, wearing a tragic, mournful expression like a clown’s – were dramatically underpinned by Stravinsky’s extraordinary dissonant music, the accordions’ tuneless ‘breathing’. Stravinsky’s composition ingeniously unified all the heterogeneous elements of the score, making his listeners aware of the significance of every note and every tonal shift. Like a cubist painting, the suggestive rapports of Gertrude Stein’s writing, or the new medium of narrative cinema composed in successive frames, Petrushka celebrated the eclectic, nuanced vision and method of radical juxtaposition now emerging across all the arts. Admirers of the music this time included Picasso, who went around singing his favourite air from the production (always the same one) ‘very joyously … his eyes all [lit] up with the glow of the footlights’. Art encompassed street life, commerce and personal style. At the Belle Jardinière department stores, Braque found Picasso one of the much coveted ‘Singapores’, natty blue American-style suits that were très à la mode worn with a cloche hat. Braque had returned from a trip to Le Havre with a whole parcel of these hats, part of a job lot of a hundred which he picked up at an auction for twenty sous each. They both wore them, looking like a couple of Second Empire bookmakers. Picasso took a pile of them to Céret, the elegant town with ancient cloisters nearest to Collioure on the Catalan border, where he spent the summer of 1911. He and his friends wore them with cork-smudged sideburns and false moustaches.

  When Picasso went to Céret that summer he travelled, for the first time since they had met, without Fernande. That year, so far, Braque and Picasso had been more or less inseparable: ‘Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished unless both of us felt it was.’ At first, Picasso missed Fernande, writing on 8 August to tell her he loved her, asking when she was coming to Céret. She had barely arrived when they were joined by Braque, who immediately replaced her as the centre of Picasso’s attention. Braque tactfully waited until Picasso had left before travelling on to nearby Collioure, where he (his words) ‘bumped into’ Matisse. (In later years, once Braque had revealed his interest in Picasso’s rival, the Picasso–Matisse feud had settled into a kind of mutual respect. Though there would always be a rivalry based on competition, in succeeding years their regard for each other steadily grew; one measure of it was Picasso’s acquisition, over the years, of eleven works by Matisse, all gifts, the result of their continuing habit of exchanging paintings.)

  Back in Paris, Picasso and Fernande renewed their friendship with the couple they had met at the circus, Markus the illustrator-turned-cubist and his lover, Marcelle (or Eva/Eve). One evening in 1911, Picasso and Fernande took them both to meet Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who understood immediately what Fernande saw in Eve: she was ‘a little French Evelyn Thaw, small and perfect’. After they left, Gertrude asked Alice, ‘Is Picasso leaving Fernande for this young thing?’ Some days later, the two women went up to Montmartre, to Picasso’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. He was out, so Gertrude left her visiting card. The next time they visited, there was a new painting on his easel. Painted into the lower corner, collage-style, was Gertrude’s card; also incorporated were the words ‘ma jolie’. As they left, Gertrude remarked, ‘Fernande is certainly not ma jolie, I wonder who it is. In a few days we knew.’ His new love, the woman for whom he finally abandoned Fernande, was Eve.

  8.

  Endings

  In Montmartre in 1911, the long-projected clearance of the Maquis for reconstruction finally began to take place. To facilitate works, most of the old windmills up on the Butte were demolished, as the shanty town that had been the Maquis was practically razed to the ground. In Montparnasse, the Café Rotonde opened, marking the definitive removal of artistic café life from Montmartre to Montparnasse. Although Picasso still kept his studios at the Bateau-Lavoir, he knew the days of the intimate community village life of Montmartre were over. In years to come, he always said he had never been so happy as he had been in the old days there. One day, Frédé’s son was seen in heated argument with a young girl. Soon afterwards, though no one knew whether the two events were connected, he was shot and fatally wounded at the bar of the Lapin Agile. After that, the place was never the same again. Already, by 1911, the district had become a tourist attraction, the funicular bringing increasing numbers up the hillside to the cafés in the place du Tertre. Amateurs sat at their easels in the lanes painting portraits of passers-by, but the serious artists had moved across the river. In the early days, Frédé’s cabaret artistique had been full of painters – Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, van Dongen, Modigliani – as well as actors, musicians and writers, all sitting together on the little terrace in the shade of the old plane tree. On the wall of the Lapin Agile, a plaster figure of Christ had seemed to watch over them all. On the same wall, for a long time, a painting by Picasso hung by a nail. It lit up the place, painted in vivid reds and yellows. One day it vanished, discreetly spirited away by a canny collector, its disappearance a sign of loss, change, good times and prosperity to come.

  • • •

  In November 1911, Matisse made his first visit to Moscow, where he visited Shchukin in his grand home, the Trubetskoy Palace, which was regularly open to the public and by now hung throughout with Matisse’s work. La Danse and La Musique (the latter bearing a fresh daub of red paint acting as a fig leaf) were displayed on the staircase for all to see. (By 1914, Shchukin’s collection as a whole included over two hundred and fifty paintings, including thirty-eight by Matisse, sixteen by Derain, sixteen by Gauguin and eight by Cézanne – by which time his ‘Picasso gallery’, which Matisse may not have seen in 1911, as it was always kept separate from the rest of Shchukin’s collection, contained over fifty works.) The morning after his arrival, Matisse won the hearts of the Russian people when he told a reporter from the Moscow Times that he had fallen in love with Russia’s icons. He became an overnight sensation, the whole of Moscow’s art world gathering to see him. He was taken to the most sought after venues, including The Bat, Moscow’s smartest cabaret, where he was presented with a painting showing himself on a pedestal surrounded by a ring of half-naked ladies. The caption read ‘Adoration du grand Henri’. Shchukin proposed a commission, on an unprecedented scale, for a row of decorative panels to be displayed above the still lifes in his drawing room. Only in Moscow, Mati
sse told his captive audience, had he found true connoisseurs of modern art, able to understand the future because of the richness of their artistic heritage. Presumably, he omitted to mention that Diaghilev had painstakingly introduced that very heritage, those very icons, to Paris when he exhibited Russian art in the Grand Palais back in 1906.

  Matisse’s stay in Russia brought about the disintegration of his marriage, after he wrote home to both Amélie and Olga. When the former intercepted a message intended for the latter, life in Issy was thrown into turmoil. Amélie immediately fell ill; Olga was admitted to a clinic to treat her drug addiction. Meanwhile, ‘le grand Henri’ was preparing a retrospective, to be held on his last night in Moscow, in Shchukin’s drawing room. There, for the next two years, his works hung, floor to ceiling, in gold and silver cases like the tiers of Russian icons Matisse was seeing in the churches, ‘the true source’, he announced, ‘of all creative search’.

  • • •

  It would be another eight years (following Eve’s untimely death from cancer, in December 1915) before Picasso met and fell in love with one of Diaghilev’s dancers, Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in Paris, in the Russian Orthodox Church in the rue Daru, in 1918. The previous year, through Cocteau, Diaghilev had commissioned set designs from Picasso for his new ballet, Parade, a word Larousse defines as ‘a comic act, put on at the entrance of a travelling theatre to attract a crowd’. The plan for Parade was to produce an entirely contemporary spectacle, a ballet every bit as avant-garde as Diaghilev’s earlier triumph of 1911, Petrushka; and, this time, it would overtly incorporate the sights and sounds of the modern urban world. The title suggested the worlds of circus and music hall, and the performance was intended to be noticeably democratic, bringing everyday life, and the theatre of the people, before the cream of Parisian society. To Satie’s music (against Satie’s better judgement), Cocteau added the sounds of cars backfiring, typewriters clacking and the whirring of machinery. Picasso went to Rome with him to work on the ballet, designing the drop-curtain, costumes and scenery. It was to be the beginning of an ongoing working relationship with Diaghilev.

  By the time Picasso met his Russian dancer, the seeds of change had been sown, beginning back in 1900. By the end of the decade, the art world already encompassed dynamic new forms of expression and a heady sense of interconnectedness. From now on, painters, dancers, musicians, designers, photographers, film-makers and writers were all set to share similar and overlapping concerns. The struggles of a few dedicated, near-destitute artists working in the broken-down shacks and hovels of rural Montmartre seemed to have created the foundations for the wider arena of modern art. In retrospect, the bohemian world of the artists in Montmartre in the first decade of the century may be seen as a kind of living parade, a brief, dynamic, entertaining drama containing all the seeds of the main, twentieth-century show – and all the fun of the fair.

  Acknowledgements

  Warm thanks to my literary agent Gill Coleridge of Rogers, Coleridge and White for support and encouragement from the start, and to Cara Jones; also to Melanie Jackson of Melanie Jackson Agency, New York; and to my editors Juliet Annan of Fig Tree and Ginny Smith and Jeff Alexander of Penguin, New York; and to copy-editor, Sarah Day. Thanks also to the team at Documentations Orsay, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, for kindly supplying information. In researching this book, I benefited greatly from visits to the museums of Paris and Collioure, particularly the Musée de Montmartre and the Musée du Cinéma, Bercy, Paris, the Musée de Collioure and the Médiathèque Ludovic Massé, Céret. In researching the pictures, I was very grateful for the assistance of John Moelwyn-Hughes of the Bridgeman Art Library; Mark Dowd of TopFoto; and Sue Bateman and Jehane Boden-Spiers of Yellow House Art Licensing. Steve Ward has generously supported and encouraged me throughout. I was in grateful receipt of generous support from the Authors’ Foundation, via the Society of Authors.

  Pablo Picasso: L’Attente, 1901

  Maurice de Vlaminck: Portrait of a Woman at the Rat Mort, c.1905–6

  Pablo Picasso: Au Lapin Agile, c.1904–5

  Paul Cézanne: The Artist’s Wife in an Armchair, c.1878–88

  Henri Matisse: La Joie de vivre, 1905/6

  Pablo Picasso: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907

  André Derain: Bathers, 1907

  Amedeo Modigliani: Caryatid, 1911

  Street-seller on the northern flank of Montmartre (the Maquis)

  Pablo Picasso, 1904

  Henri Matisse

  Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

  Gertrude Stein and her portrait by Picasso

  Amedeo Modigliani

  Paul Poiret

  The Lapin Agile – Frédé’s cabaret artistique

  The Moulin de la Galette

  Leo, Gertrude and Michael Stein, c.1906

  Sergei Diaghilev

  The Bateau-Lavoir

  Georges Braque, 1908

  The rue Saint-Vincent, where the amateurs came to paint

  Notes

  Introduction

  ‘My inner self is bound to be in my canvas …’: Pablo Picasso, in Hélène Parmelin, Picasso Says …, p. 70

  ‘All the rest’: ibid.

  ‘like a kaleidoscope slowly turning’: quoted in Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 98

  ‘a new beauty: the beauty of speed’: F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909’, in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, p. 21

  Part I: The World Fair and Arrivals

  ‘Me’: in Dan Franck, The Bohemians: The Birth of Modern Art: Paris 1900–1930, p. 18

  ‘Every member … had a listening-tube … with the pictures’: Claude Lepape and Thierry Defert, From the Ballets Russes to Vogue: The Art of Georges Lepape, p. 15

  ‘visions d’art’: Richard Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896–1914, p. 17

  ‘roses twelve feet in diameter …’: Lepape and Defert, From the Ballets Russes to Vogue, p. 16

  ‘the Fair shows … a new era in the history of humanity’: Jeanine Warnod, Washboat Days: Montmartre, Picasso and the Artists’ Revolution, p. 50

  ‘modernisme’: John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, 1881–1906, Volume I, p. 110

  ‘Catalan art nouveau with overtones of symbolism’: ibid.

  ‘to translate eternal verities … as it contemplates the pit’: ibid., p. 113

  ‘We prefer to be … unstable … rather than fallen and meek’: ibid.

  ‘full of crazy places … a goldmine …’: ibid., p. 161

  ‘with extensions’: ibid.

  ‘À la moule! … Couteaux! Couteaux!’: Jean-Paul Crespelle, La Vie quotidienne à Montmartre au temps de Picasso, 1900–1910, p. 21

  ‘as if they were breaking stones’: Hilary Spurling, Matisse: The Life, p. 80

  ‘a kind of hell-hole near the Buttes Chaumont’: Francis Carco, L’Ami des peintres, p. 231

  ‘a world of exotic fantasies … under a veneer of religious iconography’: Bernard Denvir, Post-Impressionism, p. 148

  ‘a kind of literary and symbolic idealism’: Raymond Escholier, Matisse from the Life, p. 28

  ‘pure painting’: ibid.

  ‘Don’t be satisfied … go down into the street’: ibid., p. 33

  ‘un grand comic triste de café-concert’: Georges Hilaire, Derain, p. 9

  ‘to me … pure, absolute painting’: Escholier, Matisse from the Life, p. 32

  ‘transposing rather … pure vermilion’: André Derain, in ibid., p. 32

  ‘pommes frites and chloroform’: Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 4

  ‘pompous bachelors …’: Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, p. 160

  ‘lots of deaths, shootings, conflagrations …’: ibid., p. 161

  ‘The workmen pay for the oil … I am safe from a strike’: Ambroise Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 219

  ‘SPECULATORS! Buy art! … worth 10 000 Francs in ten years’ time’: Franck, The Bo
hemians, p. 15

  ‘never a real Impressionist … since Cézanne’: Maurice Sembat, in Escholier, Matisse from the Life, p. 38

  ‘as still as an apple’: Richard Verdi, Cézanne, p. 155

  ‘a man of learning and introspection’: ibid.

  ‘a head like a door’: Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life, p. 296 (quoting Giacometti, interviewed by Georges Charbonnier, 16 April 1957, in Le Monologue du peintre (1959) (Paris: Durier, 1980), pp. 186–7

  ‘beginning to catch on with the public’: Verdi, Cézanne, p. 196

  ‘masterpieces everywhere, and going … for a song’: Vollard, Recollections of a Picture Dealer, p. 22

  ‘la cave’: Isabelle Cahn, Ambroise Vollard: un marchand d’art et ses trésors, p. 22

  ‘the painter, utterly and beautifully …’: Marilyn McCully, ed., Picasso: The Early Years, 1892–1906 (exhibition catalogue), p. 35

  ‘youthful impetuous spontaneity … easy success’: ibid.

  ‘every kind of courtesan’: Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Volume I, p. 198

  ‘I believe the Realist period is over …’: André Derain, October 1901, in Gaston Diehl, Derain, p. 25

  ‘feeling and expressing are two entirely separate actions …’: ibid.

  ‘bougre des guinguettes fleuries’: Maurice Genevoix, Vlaminck, p. 7