10.
On the bitterly cold night of 31 October 1903, artists and viewers gathered for the inaugural exhibition of the Salon d’Automne, which took place in the freezing, unheated basement of the Petit Palais. The crowd of carriages lined up outside indicated that not only artists but fashionable socialites had been attracted by the prospect of a daring new Salon; they attended the opening in full evening dress. The works represented included paintings by Gauguin, Cézanne and Matisse, though the two the latter had submitted were hardly groundbreaking: one was a flower painting, Tulipes, the other an old-fashioned interior in the Flemish style, Dévideuse picarde (intérieur) – hardly the likely precursors of La Danse and La Musique. It would be another two years before the introduction of the wild, fiery landscapes by Derain and Vlaminck that earned them the label ‘Fauves’; a further five before the first appearance of cubism, which by 1910 signalled the beginning of abstraction and the end – as Braque was to put it – of art as imitation. (It was first identified when Braque produced landscapes some said looked like ‘little cubes’.) In autumn 1903, the discoveries that by the end of the decade would form the basis of modern art were still in the future. Matisse was still willing to please his unambitious public. Picasso, still in Barcelona, was probably unaware that the first exhibition of the Salon d’Automne was even taking place.
Though the hundreds of artists showing their work were all practically unknown, the exhibition was huge in scale. The catalogue, a modest-looking small-format publication (printed on cheap paper illustrated with a simple cover sketch and priced at one franc), listed 990 works. Among them were three avant-garde works by a Spanish artist, Joaquim Sunyer, who lived in the rue de Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and had studied with Nonell. Fernande Olivier, an artist’s model living with her lover Laurent Dubienne, an aspiring sculptor, in the place Ravignan, had already noticed Sunyer coming and going in the lanes around the place du Tertre. He was small and wiry, she noted, ‘like a Spanish guitarist’. She and Dubienne were living in a beaten-up old building with no running water which resembled one of the laundry boats that were familiar sights along the Seine. During the next year or so it would acquire the nickname ‘the Bateau-Lavoir’; at the time, it was still familiarly known as the Maison du Trappeur. In 1900, Picasso’s friend Paco Durrio had left his shack in the Maquis and moved into a studio there; it was fast becoming a cheap place for artists renting makeshift studios that doubled up as living spaces.
Fernande had also been there since 1900, when she came up from the country one April day on the early-morning train looking for work. She had made her way straight to the employment bureau. When they asked her to come back at four she had wandered about looking longingly in pastry-shop windows – in Paris, the patisserie was so pretty – while she waited to see if they could find her a position (in an office, perhaps, since she was educated) that would enable her to buy food and rent a room. She was spotted by Dubienne, who took her to a café and asked her what kind of life she hoped to live in Paris. He pointed out that any employer would expect her to work for a month before she earned a penny and she would have no life of her own (though the working day for women had been reduced to ten hours, the weekly day’s holiday for workers was not introduced until 1906). She would surely do better to go up to the heights of Montmartre with him. In exchange for a few modelling sessions he could offer her a roof over her head and her freedom, with no strings attached. She accepted his offer and thereafter spent her days modelling for him and other local artists.
She had been happy with Dubienne but had begun to notice he had his limitations. Though he was kind and understanding, he had started to seem to her somehow lacking in ambition. He did everything slowly. It took him weeks to put up shelves, and he was no quicker at producing his sculptures. She was keeping a weather eye out, since clearly there were other artists in Montmartre who, unlike Dubienne, had drive and initiative, more notable talent, and perhaps even prospects.