13.
The 1906 Salon d’Automne was formally opened at the Grand Palais by the President of France, Fallières, himself. It included Diaghilev’s exhibition of the largest collection of Russian art Paris had ever seen – some four thousand works representing the art of historical and contemporary Russia. For the previous two years, Diaghilev’s pursuit of modern French art had been temporarily stalled by events. By 1904, the year he published Matisse’s work in what was to be the final issue of Mir Iskusstva, life in St Petersburg had already become precarious. In artistic circles, there was growing disillusionment with the imperial regime and, in February 1904, Russia had become embroiled in a disastrous war with Japan. Realizing that life in Russia was about to change irrevocably, Diaghilev had turned his attention to the artists of his own country. He had been working tirelessly to mount an exhibition of ‘Artistic and Historical Portraits’, making long journeys across vast areas of the country, visiting over a hundred disintegrating country estates. ‘From rooms where the plaster was falling from the ceiling, from attics and old closets where the paintings hung loose in their frames, and from cellars where the damp had mildewed the canvas’, he had uncovered thousands of portraits by Russia’s forgotten masters, selecting paintings for his exhibition from a great cargo of artistic treasures.
By New Year 1905, there was tragedy in St Petersburg, with shooting in the streets, and many dead and wounded. In the evenings, the city was plunged into darkness. People stayed in their homes, not daring to venture out, amidst rumours that the railways would be stopped from running and water supplies cut off as the city witnessed the beginning of the civil unrest many would later see as the start of the revolution of 1917. In February, Diaghilev went ahead with his exhibition, held at the Tauride Palace in St Petersburg.At a gala banquet to celebrate the opening, he gave a speech he wrote himself under the title ‘The Hour of Reckoning’. As he journeyed ‘the length and breadth of infinite Russia’, he told his audience, he had been overwhelmed by the feeling that the portraits he was recovering, though as indisputably precious as the grand country estates that still housed them, already seemed consigned to the past. Change was afoot, the modern era already in a state of advance. ‘The end was here in front of me.’ The derelict, boarded-up family estates had struck him as ‘palaces frightening in their dead grandeur, weirdly inhabited by dear, mediocre people no longer able to bear the weight of past splendours. It wasn’t just men and women ending their lives here, but a whole way of life. And that was when I became quite sure that we are living in a terrifying era of upheaval; we must give up our lives for the resurgence of a new culture . . . I raise my glass,’ he concluded, ‘to the ruined walls of those beautiful palaces, and in equal measure to the commandments of the new aesthetic.’
His words were prophetic. On 17 October 1905, the Duma was created, establishing a radical new form of government. Though it included an amnesty for strikers (many of whom were artists), throughout 1905 and 1906, the political situation remained tense and dangerous, and this had a direct impact on the arts. Because Russia’s cultural institutions, theatres, concert halls and galleries were run by the State, artists of all persuasions were vulnerable, even those with established reputations. Dissenting artists risked imprisonment, or worse. The destruction of large numbers of works of art resulted in the defection of many young artists, some of whom took refuge in Paris.
By May 1906, Diaghilev himself was in the French capital, with one of his friends from his student days, Alexandre Benois, a painter, theatrical designer and one of the illustrators for Mir Iskusstva. There, they met officials from the Russian embassy, French intellectuals and influential individuals, including Robert de Montesquiou and the Countess de Greffuhle (a prominent socialite and one of Paul Poiret’s most influential clients). Léon Benedict, a curator at the Musée du Luxembourg, put them in touch with the organizers of the Salon d’Automne, who by now included Derain as well as Matisse. Diaghilev successfully worked his charm on the director, Monsieur Jourdain. He now began outlining his plans for a spectacular show of Russian art there, to include a simulated conservatory, latticed and heavy with foliage, to show the sculptures; and a substantial collection of Russian icons, which he already envisaged displayed against a backdrop of sumptuous silk drapery. The exhibition would include the work not only of illustrious Russian painters and sculptors but also that of Russia’s youngest contemporary artists.
In the world of rigid, legally imposed class distinctions that characterized imperial Russia, Diaghilev had always moved in elevated, cultured circles. His father and stepmother were both talented musicians (his mother died shortly after his birth), and Diaghilev had studied first (for six years) at the University of St Petersburg as a reluctant law student, then at the Conservatory of Music, under Rimsky-Korsakov. He met Benois at university in 1890; his other close friend was painter and illustrator Léon Bakst, a talented colourist and original set designer who had studied in Paris and who had also worked with Diaghilev on the production of Mir Iskusstva. Through the auspices of one of his friends, Prince Volonsky, Director of the Imperial Theatres, Diaghilev had entered the official world of the arts. The prince had invited him to edit the Imperial Theatre Yearbook for the year 1899/1900, a project which had also given his illustrators Alexandre Benois and Léon Bakst their first breaks. However, it was not until he founded Mir Iskusstvaand began to gather around him a group of artists who, like him, admired the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the Decadents (the ‘modern’ artists who had first inspired Picasso) that he felt he had truly begun to learn about art. Through their links with Prince Volonsky, Diaghilev and Benois had also succeeded in staging one of the first experimental ballets, Sylvia, a dance piece liberated (even before Isadora Duncan’s debut in Moscow later that year) from the restrictions of classical dance. Rows over the management of that production had resulted in Diaghilev’s dismissal, setting a precedent for the pattern of the next few years, during which he would be continually in and out of favour with the Russian imperial authorities as he searched for a way of making his mark on the development of modern art.
Now, at the Salon d’Automne, in twelve rooms of the Grand Palais (four of them vast) he was showing 750 Russian works of all periods, from medieval icons onwards, including the work of Mikhail Vrubel, whose flamboyant, vividly coloured, sensual paintings had strongly influenced the developing style of Léon Bakst. The Russian collection was shown as a separate exhibition (with concerts of Russian music to entertain viewers in the evenings) and went unmentioned in the catalogue, but it was open to all visitors to the salon free of charge. The Russian exhibition was a huge draw, and Paris in the final months of 1906 saw ‘an invasion of Petersburgers’.
What of the Parisian viewers? Did either Matisse or Picasso see the work of the Russian artists, the display of icons? Could they possibly have missed – or dismissed – it? Particularly given his relationship with Shchukin and his connection with Mir Iskusstva,Matisse, if not Picasso, might feasibly have been interested in the Russian works . . . Nevertheless, for the French artists the major sensation of the 1906 Salon d’Automne was not the Russian art but the retrospective exhibition of the works of Paul Gauguin, in which, together with drawings, ceramics and 227 paintings, his large, totemic wood carvings were shown for the first time.
Whether or not its viewers included the artists of Montmartre, the Russian exhibition was a public success, favourably reviewed in Le Figaro. Diaghilev, Benois and Bakst were made honorary members of the salon. The art of Russia had made its mark on Paris. Nonetheless, Diaghilev still had work to do, since an honourable reception did not amount to an artistic sensation. Compared, for example, with the impact of the Fauves in 1905, the Russians had a long way to go before being hailed as in any sense path-breaking. After the salon closed, the Russian exhibition travelled on to Berlin, and a selection of works was then shown at the Venice Biennale. Then Diaghilev returned to St Petersburg until the end of the year, where he immediately began to work on his next idea, staging a series of Russian musical concerts at Paris’s Grand Opéra. In the meantime, he had made his first impression, albeit indirectly, on the world of French contemporary art, at the same time taking the opportunity to bring himself up to date with all the latest developments.
Matisse was briefly in Paris for the Salon d’Automne, before returning to Collioure for the winter. Before he left, he showed Sarah and Michael Stein the three portraits of sailors he had painted there that summer – the Self-Portrait (in striped mariner’s jersey) and the two portraits of a young sailor, which he initially pretended he had acquired from the postman in Collioure, before admitting he had painted them himself. Michael and Sarah purchased the new self-portrait and the first version of Young Sailor, which they considered more vibrant and less stylized than the second. They hung Young Sailor, I at the centre of the wall covered with pictures by the dining-room table in the rue Madame, beneath Matisse’s new self-portrait. When she saw it, Gertrude brought out her small, intimate self-portrait by Picasso and displayed it on her own wall.
Before Matisse left for Collioure, he and Picasso met for the second time, on this occasion at the rue de Fleurus, as dinner guests of Leo and Gertrude Stein. On his way there, Matisse passed a shop in the rue de Rennes, where he happened to notice a little Congolese vili figure. He bought it, and took it with him to the Steins’. The story of Picasso’s response to it is bizarre; by all accounts, he refused to be parted from the statue. According to Max Jacob, he stayed up all that night and was found (by Jacob) the next morning ‘surrounded by drawings of a one-eyed, four-eared, square-mouthed monster which he claimed was the image of his mistress’. Whether or not the mistress was Fernande, why Matisse agreed to part with the statue and whether indeed the story was apocryphal must remain mysteries. What was becoming clear, especially since the recent exhibition of Gauguin’s towering, totemic wooden figures, was the extent of everyone’s growing fascination with such works.
Picasso could not now help but perceive Matisse as a potential rival. Ten years older than Picasso, the French painter already had the backing and continued interest of a growing number of purchasers, including Shchukin, Druet and the Steins. Sarah Stein was rapidly collecting his work, and introducing it to America. Matisse was well-dressed, articulate and already well known – by now – throughout Paris; he had also produced three children. To Picasso, he was a disconcerting presence from every point of view. In his work of the Blue and Rose periods, Picasso had continually taken as his subjects mothers, children and family groups. The children of the acrobats and circus performers had impressed him quite as deeply as had the adults. For several months, van Dongen, Guus and Dolly had brought the Bateau-Lavoir to life, but in December 1905 they had moved to a bigger apartment at the foot of the Butte, in one of the streets behind the Moulin Rouge. For van Dongen, at least, substantial success had followed from the 1905 Salon d’Automne, which had brought his Fauvist paintings of figures to the attention of a newly appreciative public – in commercial terms, it was his kind of ‘wildness’, not that of Derain or Vlaminck, that appealed to the sort of purchaser keen to own a painting of a woman in her undergarments which was also a work of art. Life in the Bateau-Lavoir was quiet without the van Dongens, and Picasso missed Dolly. Fernande’s memoirs reveal that she and Picasso had hoped for a child of their own, but the long-term effects of her miscarriage six years ago meant she was destined to be disappointed – though Picasso may not yet have known that.
Picasso had surely seen La Joie de vivre, the large Arcadian work Matisse had exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, and perhaps also his sailor portraits, before he embarked on the work he began that autumn. Even if he had somehow missed the former there, he would certainly have seen it regularly that autumn on the wall of 27, rue de Fleurus. It is thus possible, even likely, that Matisse’s large work (and perhaps, too, Luxe, Calme et Volupté) was one influence on the development of the painting Picasso now began work on in earnest, alone in his studio, inspired also by Cézanne’s Bather compositions. He clearly had great expectations for this work; Leo had already noticed with amusement the huge canvas, eight feet square, he had had relined, as for a classic piece. Since it would have been impossible to work on a painting of this scale amidst the cramped and chaotic conditions of his current studio, the Steins rented a second for him, on a different floor of the Bateau-Lavoir.
Matisse left Paris in November for Collioure, first making a detour to visit Derain, who was in L’Estaque, painting the landscapes which had inspired Cézanne. By the time news of Cézanne’s death (in Aix on 23 October 1906) reached Paris, Derain was not the only painter to have returned to Cézanne as one of the major influences on his developing work. In L’Estaque, he and Matisse set up a wager as to who could paint the better blue nude, then Matisse retreated to Collioure for the winter. As for Picasso, all that autumn he painted alone in his new studio, locked away by himself with the large new work of which nobody, not even Fernande, had yet been permitted so much as a glimpse.