4.
By August 1907, Fernande was convinced it was all over between her and Picasso. On the 24th, she wrote to Gertrude Stein, who was still in Italy, ‘Would you like to hear some big news? My life with Pablo is over. We are going to separate definitively next month . . . What a disappointment!’ She urged Gertrude not to assume that things would work out all right in the end. Pablo had had enough, he said; he had assured Fernande she was not to blame, but he was just not cut out for the kind of life she seemed to need. She was desperate, she told Gertrude, and confiding in her because no one else was really interested in her. She was doing her best to hide her unhappiness but, in her heart, she was disgusted with Picasso. Everything was hopeless; she was in despair. However, she was already making plans for her future alone. Did Gertrude think she could help her earn some money by giving French lessons? She was looking for somewhere to live and wished Gertrude could be there to help her search; it would be so much more fun.
On 2 September, she wrote again, signing herself Fernande Belvalet (for Belle-Vallée; no longer Picasso, as before). She had spent the last few days looking for somewhere to live. The place she had found, at 5, rue Girardon, was unsuitably close to rue Ravignan, but it would do for the time being. She would be leaving the Bateau-Lavoir in two or three days, a week at the most; she would already have left had Vollard not been out of Paris: she was waiting for him to return so that Picasso could give her sufficient funds to set up on her own. (In the event, she would have only a couple of weeks to wait.) Pablo, she told Gertrude, was fine. The prospect of their separation, despite the fact that they had been happy together for three years, was apparently having no effect on him at all. In fact, she suspected he was relieved, though she assured Gertrude she had never been a burden on him or interfered with his work. Evidently, she had followed the wrong path. She would simply have to trust to destiny to set her on the right one. How was Gertrude? Was the weather fine in Italy? In Paris, it was wet and stormy . . .
In her first letter, of 24 August, Fernande had referred to someone called Alice: ‘Tell Alice I can’t write to her, I’m too sad, I’m sure she’ll excuse me . . .’ Unless (as seems very unlikely) Fernande’s friend Alice Princet was in Italy with the Steins, Gertrude must already have mentioned her new friend, Alice B. Toklas, who was shortly to join her in Paris from her home in San Francisco. Sometime during September, after the Steins’ return from Italy, Alice duly arrived.
Alice B. Toklas was an extraordinary character. Of Polish-Jewish extraction, in appearance she was bony and wafer-thin, with a craggy face and long nose, like a figure in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. She had got to know Gertrude through Harriet Levy, her neighbour in San Francisco, who had been in Paris and there met Gertrude and Leo Stein, probably through the Michael Steins, since Alice had seen them in San Francisco the previous year when they visited following the 1906 earthquake. They had shown her Matisse’s portrait ‘of Madame Matisse with a green line down her face’ (The Green Line), which had impressed her immensely.
Alice B. Toklas had been raised in California, where her prospecting maternal grandfather had bought a goldmine. As a child she was taken to Europe, including England, before returning to California, where she attended Miss Mary West’s school, until a little girl in her class asked her if her father was a millionaire. When Alice said she did not know, the child asked her, had they a yacht? When she heard this, Alice’s mother decided it was time to send her to another school, where the children were not so snobbish. At home, they had a garden full of lovely flowers, her mother being a keen gardener. She also displayed a unique ability to be both imaginative and precise, from which Alice clearly learned. ‘I once said to her, “You have such lovely watery periwinkle blue eyes.” “You mean, dearest, ‘liquid eyes’,” she corrected.’ Alice attended the University of Washington and studied music with Otto Bendix, a pupil of Liszt, graduating as a Bachelor of Music. On her grandfather’s death, she inherited a quarter of his estate, and the family moved to a smaller home in O’Farrell Street, San Francisco, where Harriet lived next door. It was Harriet who had proposed they go to Paris together. They made frequent plans to do so; Alice was thirty by the time they finally left, in September 1907. They travelled by steamer, Alice with a copy of Flaubert’s letters to read on the journey, Harriet dutifully burdened with a friend’s ‘tactless choice’ of Lord Jim – which somehow beautifully sums up the difference between the two.
Later that month, they arrived in Cherbourg, where they stayed overnight and where Alice got her first taste of France, before continuing their journey by rail to Paris. Alice was immediately struck by the difference between France and their own country. Waking in the morning, she looked out of the window to see men cleaning the streets with water from small buckets and oddly shaped brooms – more like household cleaning, she observed, than the kind of street cleaning that went on in San Francisco. From the window of the train, she watched as fields dotted with poppies, marguerites and cornflowers streamed past beneath a ‘heavenly’ blue sky. Arriving in Paris, they found themselves in a station ‘busier and noisier than any I had ever known. People were getting off and on [trains], hurrying to the right and to the left. It took me a long time to become accustomed to French confusion.’
They put up at the Hôtel Magellan, near the place de l’Étoile, and telephoned Michael and Sarah Stein. They then crossed Paris in a fiacre (a horse-drawn carriage – another fascinating novelty) to the rue Madame, Alice observing that the streets were all different: not only did no district resemble another; each house was different in character from the next. A grand-looking dwelling stood next to a grocery, which stood next to a laundry; she remarked with interest that one could thus shop without leaving one’s own quartier. She noted also the proliferation of fine florists and flower markets, and that everywhere she looked there seemed to be something new to see. Alice had an unusual talent for observation: wherever she went she seemed to see things it seemed nobody else had noticed. She was also a good listener. Arriving at Michael and Sarah Stein’s home, she soon established that their building in the rue Madame had been built and once occupied by the Protestant Church and that the enormous living room had been the assembly and Sunday School room. In that room, where large, light windows gave on to a garden, she first encountered Gertrude Stein.
‘It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention . . . She was a golden brown presence,’ tanned by the Tuscan sun, with golden glints in her hair. She was dressed in brown corduroy and wore a large coral brooch; when she talked or laughed her distinctive voice seemed to rise up from her brooch, ‘deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices’. Alice also noticed her unusually fine bone structure and distinctive head, which some had compared to that of a Roman emperor, others to that of ‘a primitive Greek’.
Alice and Harriet were given tea, and Alice was invited to visit Gertrude Stein in the rue de Fleurus the following afternoon, when Gertrude would take her for a walk. The next morning, she and Harriet decided to lunch in one of the restaurants in the Bois de Boulogne. Foreseeing that their lunch might make her a little late, Alice thoughtfully sent Gertrude a telegram to warn her. When she arrived at 27, rue de Fleurus, delayed by just half an hour, the door was opened by Gertrude, Alice’s telegram in her hand. Since the previous day, she had been transformed into a ‘vengeful goddess’. She said nothing, just paced about, unsmiling, beside her long Florentine table, before finally announcing, ‘Now you understand. It is over. It is not too late to go for a walk. You can look at the pictures while I change my clothes.’ As Alice philosophically observed, at least while all this was going on she had a chance to have a good look around Gertrude’s apartment. In the studio, the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with pictures, and the dining room was dark with heavy, ornate furniture, dominated by a large, octagonal Tuscan table with clawed feet and a double-decked Henry IV dresser decorated with three carved eagles. There were interesting ornaments, too: pieces of Italian pottery and seventeenth-century terracotta figures of women. Once Gertrude had calmed down, she reappeared and they walked round the corner to the Jardins du Luxembourg and saw children sailing their boats on the artificial lake and nurses in long capes and starched white caps with long, broad ribbons. Alice was led through the gardens into the Petit Luxembourg, then on down the boulevard Saint Germain as Gertrude asked her which books she had read on the journey and whether the Flaubert letters had been translated into English.
The following Saturday, Alice met Leo, the next to emerge through the glow of her imaginative observation. Leo, she observed, was ‘golden’, a vividly economical description of Picasso’s 1906 portrait of him, which she would surely have been shown. She also noticed his graceful way of walking and the elegant way he carried himself, and that the two brothers, Leo and Michael, though they resembled each other, were quite different from Gertrude, the similarity between Leo and Gertrude being more or less restricted to their brown, unstructured, bohemian-style clothing and ‘Grecian’ sandals.
Alice was soon initiated into the rites of the Saturday soirées and forming her inimitable impressions of the regulars, who included Germaine, Picasso’s one-time lover and the cause of Casagema’s suicide (though Alice seems to have been spared those details), now married to Picasso’s friend Ramon Pichot. She noted Matisse’s ‘astonishing virility’ but found him paradoxically lifeless compared with the profound sense of vitality which emanated from Amélie, whom Alice wonderfully summed up in a single gesture: ‘She always placed a large black hat-pin well in the middle of the hat and the middle of the top of her head and then with a large firm gesture, down it came.’ Next, she met Marie Laurencin, observing her as she made her way through the studio looking at each picture in turn, ‘bringing her eye close and moving over the whole of it with her lorgnette, an inch at a time. The pictures out of reach she ignored.’ Marie told Alice, ‘as for myself I prefer portraits and that is of course quite natural, as I myself am a Clouet’. Alice noted that she did indeed have the thin, square build of medieval Frenchwomen in the paintings of the French primitives. Her voice, which Fernande found so irritating, she judged high-pitched and beautifully modulated. Having scrutinized all the pictures, Marie sat down with Gertrude Stein on the couch and told her the story of her life (which was the effect Gertrude tended to have on people), explaining that her mother, despite her temperamental dislike of men, had for many years been the mistress of an important personage, the union that had produced Marie herself. As for what the bande thought of Alice, there never seems to have been any question of her not being accepted; she was deceptively reticent, untiringly understanding and never did anything to upset or alarm anyone. She infiltrated Gertrude’s social world so deftly that no sooner had she arrived than it seemed she had always been part of it.
Gertrude filled her in on recent events concerning Picasso and Fernande. It emerged that Gertrude had been counselling not only Fernande but also Picasso, who had been telling her ‘wonderful tales’. Alice was thus given both sides of the story. According to Gertrude, Picasso had told her that ‘if you love a woman you give her money’. He had added that, by the same token, if you wanted to leave her, you had to wait until you had sufficient funds to finance her independence. By 14 September, he had the wherewithal, 1,100 francs for eleven pictures from Vollard, and money from a separate sale of one of his paintings of the saltimbanques, to support Fernande in the business of setting up home alone. Meanwhile, Gertrude had taken seriously Fernande’s request to find her a pupil.
The day before the vernissage of the Salon d’Automne, despite their imminent break-up, Picasso and Fernande were invited to dinner at the Steins’. When the time came, there was no sign of them, so everyone sat down to eat. Just as they did so there came ‘a loud knocking at the pavilion door’. The maid announced the arrival of Monsieur Picasso and Madame Fernande, who entered, very flustered; Alice noticed at once Picasso’s ‘marvellous all-seeing brilliant black eyes’. He was explaining, ‘You know how as a Spaniard I would want to be on time, how I always am.’ Fernande, with a characteristic gesture, one arm extended above her head, pointing her forefinger, asked Gertrude to excuse them. The new outfit she was wearing, especially made for the next day’svernissage, had not been delivered on time and there had of course been nothing for it but to wait. Alice, meeting them for the first time, observed Fernande. She saw ‘a large heavy woman with the sensational natural colouring of a maquillage, her dark eyes were narrow slits. She was an oriental odalisque,’ pleased by the attention she was attracting.While they were still at dessert, the maid announced that there were other guests waiting in the studio. Gertrude hurried off to receive them. They turned out to be ‘a group of Montmartrois who surrounded Picasso like the cuadrilla does a bullfighter’. Among them was Georges Braque, evidently already so at ease with the Steins that Alice initially assumed he was American. Alice, Picasso and Fernande joined them to find Gertrude already seated on her high leather Tuscan armchair, her feet on a pile of cushions. From the description of this episode, it seems evident that Braque had somehow by now already made Picasso’s acquaintance, or at least Fernande’s, since Fernande and Braque were fooling around together, pretending to be ignoramuses. Gertrude took the opportunity of asking Alice if she would like to take French lessons from Fernande, assuring her Fernande was well educated; she had read aloud from La Fontaine’s fables while Picasso painted her (Gertrude’s) portrait.
Alice B. Toklas, Fernande announced to Picasso, would be taking French lessons from her. ‘Ah, the Miss Toklas,’ replied Picasso, ‘with small feet like a Spanish woman and earrings like a gypsy and a father who is king of Poland like the Poniatowskis, of course she will take lessons.’
The following evening, Alice arrived early at the Grand Palais for the vernissage. She found Picasso surrounded by his gang, all except Braque, who once again seemed to be hanging around Fernande. Recognizing Alice and her friend Harriet, Fernande wandered over and introduced them to her friends Alice Princet and Germaine Pichot. The conversation turned again to the French lessons. Alice suggested mornings, from ten until one, and that Fernande come over to her hotel. Fernande said she would charge ‘Mees Toklas’ two francs fifty an hour. When Alice said that she would of course pay her taxi fares, Fernande assured her there was no need, she would take the bus or the Métro. They arranged to start the following week. The room was crowding now, filling up with visitors and painters of all nationalities – American, Hungarian, German, Russian – and the odd student from Matisse’s school. Among them, ‘a very small Russian girl was holding forth explaining her picture, a nude holding aloft a severed leg. It was the beginning of the Russian horrors’. These were the catastrophic events of 1905, which brought large numbers of Russian emigrés to settle in Paris, including many of the dancers soon to be associated with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
• • •
The 1907 Salon d’Automne opened to the public on 1 October. This year, the exhibition was more extensive than ever; it was a monumental show including retrospectives of Berthe Morisot, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Paul Cézanne. According to Félix Vallotton, who reviewed the show in La Grande Revue on the 25th, the main draw was a gigantic work consisting of fragments of a mural for the Vich Cathedral near Barcelona by Catalan muralist José-Maria Sert. Though Vallatton had reservations – he found the finished sections somewhat unattractive and the colours a little vulgar – he praised Sert for the gesture, since ‘To exhibit frescoes for a cathedral is not an everyday thing to do.’ Sert was a man of grand gestures. Descended from an immensely rich Catalan family of textile manufacturers, he had been commissioned to decorate the cathedral by King Alfonso XIII of Spain. A favourite of the royal family, he was flamboyantly talented, mercurial in temperament and immensely knowledgeable. In sombrero and cape, noticeably hirsute, he dashed around Paris, endowing every drawing room he entered with the kind of charisma so appreciated by the artistic upper crust of Paris. His passions were alcohol, morphine and the art of the museums, and his work included flourishes of quotation from not only Tintoretto but Goya and Velásquez.
For Picasso and his friends, the 1907 Salon d’Automne was significant not for the audacious mural but for the retrospective exhibition of forty-eight paintings by Cézanne. At this exhibition, where Parisian audiences saw Cézanne’s luminous oranges for the first time, the artists of Montmartre first understood the extent of his genius and experienced what it felt like to be in the presence of his vivid colours. The objects seemed so alive on his canvases that their textures seemed to invite the viewer to touch them. To coincide with the exhibition, in October, Le Mercure de France published extracts from Cézanne’s correspondence with Émile Bernard, a painter and friend of van Gogh and Gauguin who had lived for a while, as had van Gogh, at 10, rue Cortot. (It was there that Renoir painted the local girls in the garden; it is now the Musée de Montmartre.) Bernard had first noticed Cézanne’s work in the cramped, dingy shop where Père Tanguy, friend to Cézanne, van Gogh and the Impressionists before him, had sold artists’ materials and a few paintings before the turn of the century, sharing a smoke with them in the back room and taking their work off their hands for the price of a few tubes of paint. After discovering his work, Bernard visited Cézanne in 1904, and stayed with him for a month (publishing an article on his work in L’Occident that year), after which they exchanged letters (which appeared in Le Mercure de France in October 1907). The posthumous publication of these letters constituted the first public insight into Cézanne’s thinking about art and created the first opportunity for painters of the younger generation to view his paintings in the light of his reflections. For the next few weeks – months – everyone was talking about Cézanne.
Cézanne’s letters to Émile Bernard include the famous advice that there is no line in nature: ‘In an orange, an apple, a ball, a head, there is a culminating point and this point is always – despite the tremendous effect of light and shade and sensation of colour – the closest to our eye.’ Cézanne saw no separation between drawing and colour, since for him the process of harmonizing colour established form. (‘Quand la couleur est à sa richesse, la forme est à sa plenitude.’) To explain this more graphically, he added that the painter should ‘see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, putting everything in proper perspective, so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point’.
In fact, there are no visible cylinders or cones in Cézanne’s work; no parallel or perpendicular lines – line being, for Cézanne, effectively the place where colour planes converge. His advice to Bernard was mainly that of a master to a new student, an attempt, perhaps, to find a way of simplifying or finding metaphors for things he himself understood without needing to analyse them. As he remarked to his son, Paul, it was easy to develop theories with Bernard, given his logician’s temperament. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, back in Paris working on his monograph on Rodin, wrote to his wife, sculptor Clara Westhoff, throughout that October about the impact on him personally of this intensity of Cézanne’s work, in which things seemed more real even than in reality. In the room of the artist’s works at the Salon d’Automne, he marvelled at his ‘dense quilted blue’, ‘shadowless green’ and the intense, reddish black of his wine bottles; ‘the apples are all cooking apples and the wine bottles belong in the roundly bulging pockets of an old coat’.
As did many artists, Rilke returned to the Grand Palais several times, always making straight for the Cézanne room. He reflected deeply on the artist’s working methods, remarking that he had painted throughout the last thirty years of his life in a state of constant rage in the attempt to achieve ‘la réalisation’, as he called it. After studying landscape painting in the open air at Pissarro’s side, Cézanne had recognized what he wanted to achieve in the works of the Venetians whose paintings he had seen and admired many times in the Louvre. For his wife’s benefit, Rilke described Cézanne’s passionate will to achieve in painting: ‘the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility by his experience of the object’; this was arrived at only as the result of a rigorous ongoing interior dialogue. As Rilke understood it, Cézanne approached the object he was studying with complex circumspection, first describing the darkest tones then covering those deep notes with a layer of colour and continuing until he established a contrasting element. Then he would begin again, continuing in the same way. He sensed a conflict within Cézanne between his perception and the struggle to make use of what he perceived; and that for him the process of painting involved a perpetual inner dialogue, which he spent a lifetime struggling to endure. During the last years of his life, Cézanne’s reputation had been steadily growing in Paris. He still kept his studio in the Villa des Arts and he was flattered that young painters had begun to admire his work, but he had no time for celebrity, preferring to return continually to Provence, where the motif that now most occupied him, the Mont Sainte Victoire, rose up before him, presenting a multitude of challenges. Cézanne remained humble in the face of his own work. As Rilke wrote, ‘it’s natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it’. Here, he put his finger on the paradoxical quest for impersonality on which the painters and poets of the early twentieth century, each in their different way, had begun. No serious painter who attended it was unaffected by the 1907 Cézanne exhibition; Picasso was no exception. Cézanne, he told the photographer Brassaï in later years, ‘was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like the father of us all.’
Georges Braque went to the Salon d’Automne in 1907 to see Cézanne’s work, rather than his own, which this year was not being shown. Following his success the previous year, he had submitted eight works to the Committee, which still included among its members Matisse. It rejected all but one. Salon rules would have allowed Braque to re-submit two, but instead he withdrew all eight in disgust. Apollinaire went to visit him shortly after this rejection in his lodgings in the rue d’Orsel, where he found him reading sixteenth-century polygraphs and smoking his pipe, trying to forget his disappointment. Though Braque had a low opinion of the art criticism Apollinaire had begun to publish, he respected him as a poet, acknowledging also that from now on, ‘The poets of that time were our best disseminators.’ In their own medium, poets such as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and, soon afterwards, Pierre Reverdy, would soon be producing concrete poetry based on contingency and juxtaposition, moving away from the Symbolist techniques of comparison and abstraction and bearing out the new maxim: No ideas but in things.
The emphasis in both poetry and painting was now on making, rather than mimesis. Modern poetry insisted on its own reality as a construction, artefact or art object instead of merely reflecting, illustrating or copying the ‘real’ world. Like the painters, the poets were searching for ways to express the inner structure of things. When, some years later, bookseller Adrienne Monnier (business partner of Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Co. and in 1922 published James Joyce’s Ulysses) described cubism as the search for ‘a new classicism based upon inner constraint – no development – the emotion caught at its source’, she was acknowledging the impulse in art that emerged during the first decade of the century, which began in poetry, with Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin, among others; in prose with Gertrude Stein; and in painting with Picasso, Braque and Matisse. As Reverdy was to put it later, what mattered in art were not illustrations or reflections but rapports.
Early in 1907, the year Braque met Picasso, Braque’s paintings still showed the influences of van Gogh and Matisse: paintings such as Le Golfe des lecques (1907), its vivid dash of red reminiscent of van Gogh’s Self-portrait in a Landscape; and Femme nue assise (also 1907), in which a green line connects the female figure, one hand raised to her hair, down through the background to the shadow at her feet. But the landscapes Braque brought back from L’Estaque that autumn were different. They seemed to be variations on landscape compositions – geometric improvisations, or riffs. From now on, his work continued to develop in drastically new directions as he began to turn his back on the influence of Matisse and the Fauves. Nevertheless, the work Matisse produced in 1907, the towering Le Luxe and his dynamic, rhythmical painted sketch La Musique (Esquisse), confirmed that he was still the acknowledged leader of the avant-garde. The Steins purchased both Le Luxe and La Musique (Esquisse). They displayed the latter at 27, rue de Fleurus, where it quickly attracted the attention of Sergei Shchukin.
One surprise exhibitor at the 1907 Salon d’Automne was Modigliani. He showed five watercolours and two paintings, both portraits, one of a friend (Ludwig Meidner), the other of a hauntingly beautiful woman, Maud Abrantes, with fine high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Though his work went unremarked, he triumphantly wrote home to tell his mother, Eugenia, of his success in Paris. He, too, explored the works of Cézanne, and read and absorbed the letters in Le Mercure de France. To his collection of photographs of paintings, which he pinned to his wall or carried around in his pockets, he added one of Cézanne’s paintings in the exhib-ition (lent by Vollard, who had purchased it in 1900), Boy in the Red Vest (or Boy in a Red Waistcoat; 1888–90).
The catalogue listed Modigliani’s address as 7, place Jean-Baptiste Clément, where the artist had lately discovered an old shed made of swollen wood and crumbling brick, no less dilapidated than his old shack in the Maquis but with a small garden plot which had a view across the square and down the rue Ravignan, opening on a vista of Paris which stretched as far as the hillside of Meudon. Still intermittently homeless despite this discovery, Modigliani had been seen sleeping rough on a bench in the waiting room of the Gare Saint-Lazare. When he did find lodgings, he moved so often between them during these early years that no one could keep track of his address (so the addresses he gave galleries or dealers did not always tally with where he was actually living). André Salmon provides an itinerary; by his account, Modigliani lived first on the edge of the Maquis in the rue Lepic, then in the rue Norvins, then in the place Jean-Baptiste Clément. Utrillo’s only other friend, André Utter, a blond, blue-eyed electrician and self-taught painter, helped him find this last. During the next year or so, Modigliani and Utter became close friends, and they and Utrillo were close companions until 1909, when Utter fell in love with Utrillo’s mother, Suzanne Valadon (who was twenty-one years his senior). When her husband retreated, Utter moved with Suzanne and Utrillo to a studio at the foot of the Butte, where their turbulent existence attracted the attention of the neighbours, regularly alerted by the sounds of screams and breaking glass – the locals called them La trinité maudite. From 1908 onwards, Modigliani’s only addresses in Montmartre appear to have been in the rue Delta (where he never actually lived) and an abandoned convent in the rue de Douai; he also lodged for a while on the Left Bank in the Rotonde, an old pavilion with caryatids at the entrance on the plaine Vaugirard left undemolished after the World Fair, and converted now into sordid, unsanitary artists’ dwellings. He still occasionally slept on the floor of someone’s studio in the Bateau-Lavoir, which he sometimes gave as his address. He remained the outsider, although in his own way he was concerned with the same formal challenges and problems as Picasso’s bande, most of whom – despite them keeping him at arm’s length – continued to notice his comings and goings.
The following year, Modigliani was befriended by Dr Paul Alexandre, a young dermatologist native to Paris, who was then twenty-seven, loved Montmartre and had rented a large, near-derelict house at the foot of the Butte, behind the Moulin Rouge. It was set in a courtyard behind a wall plastered with peeling posters, at number 7, rue Delta. There, Alexandre created a colony of artists, who spent their time making life studies modelled by the local seamstresses, staging theatricals, or playing cards bent over flimsy tables (the rickety leg of one propped up by an old spoon) like Cézanne’s card players. On the walls of the ground-floor room that functioned as a gallery, Modigliani displayed his work.
A frequent visitor to the Delta was Romanian sculptor Brâncus¸i, who had been in Paris since July 1904. His ambition was to create huge sculptures which would stand in the open air. He wanted to create a sense of artistic totality in space, the first inspiration for Modigliani’s own dream of producing large sculptures to be exhibited outside. The elongated stone figures he had been carving now metamorphosed in his imagination into a vision of life-size caryatids that would stand at the entrance of a great Temple to Humanity, its weight borne by his ‘columns of tenderness’. Though Modigliani never actually lived at the Delta, finding a room for rent in a disused convent in the nearby rue de Douai, Dr Alexandre put a studio at his disposal, where he worked intermittently for the next six or seven months.
In the evenings, Paul Alexandre and Modigliani also went to the circus, where the latter sketched the circus performers and harlequins, or to the Gaîté-Rochechouart theatre at 15, boulevard de Rochechouart, where he made line drawings from the auditorium. They sometimes had seats in the dress circle, so that he could draw the actors and actresses from above. Alexandre thought that the attraction of the theatre for Modigliani lay in its blend of reality and dream, since, with footlights still in use, stage lighting at that time, with its intense colours and strangely placed sources, was so unnatural that, to an artistic eye, it could seem dreamlike. In the Gaîté-Rochechouart, there were mirrors on the side walls, so from some seats the image of Miss Lawler, star of the Gaîté, was multiplied into a whole succession of small Miss Lawlers, each in the slender, ultra-modern dress that showed off her ankles and high heels. The stage itself was ‘a brilliant rectangle at the end of a long dark corridor with its four walls blazing with colourful humanity’. Alexandre’s description imagines the stage almost as a vehicle of projection, with rapidly changing perspectives, fluctuations between surface and depth, and the breaking surfaces that Picasso was already concerning himself with in his work. The spectacle of moving images seemed to be everywhere – as if the cinema had disrupted all the old ways of seeing. Modigliani took Alexandre to the Egyptian Galleries and ethnographic section of the Louvre, and to the fusty old Trocadéro, where they saw the row upon row of figures, masks and carvings that had made such a deep impression on Picasso. Though the sculptures from the Baoulé state (in what is now the Ivory Coast) were to show their influence on his work only two or three years later in his drawings and sculptures of caryatids, the African art Modigliani saw as early as 1908 impressed him as profoundly as had the works of the Italian primitive painters; the elongated faces of the African statues reminded him of the early Italian works he had seen in Florence, Venice and Rome. ‘What I am searching for,’ he wrote in one of his sketchbooks, ‘is neither the real nor the unreal, but the Subconscious, the mystery of what is Instinctive in the human Race’. The new goal for the modern artist was to find ways of expressing the interior life. In their own way, Picasso and Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, Diaghilev and Poiret, Marie Laurencin and Gertrude Stein were all by now engaged in this quest.