5.
The reappearance of the Ballets Russes in spring 1910 sent Paris into a state of frenzy. Diaghilev and his company returned with a programme that seemed to audiences even more sensational than the one before. With The Firebird, a riot of blazing colour that again combined avant-garde choreography with traditional Russian motifs, he introduced 28-year-old Igor Stravinsky to the Parisian scene. The young Russian arrived solemnly contemplating the grey streets of Paris after the red and ochre splendour of St Petersburg. The tonal dissonance of his music was so startling that even the dancers joked that it sounded as if he hardly cared whether he hit the right notes. The season also included the orientally inspired Scheherazade, an extraordinarily sensuous production danced with fluid, flowing movements and set in a harem, with Nijinsky as the Golden Slave.
The Firebird was an awesome spectacle of colour, sound and moving image: what the French call ‘animation’. To audiences who still marvelled at the sight of coloured stills on screen, for whom the stuttering black and white animation of the motion picture was still captivatingly new, this unprecedented coloured spectacle of raw, sensual emotion was truly mesmerizing. It combined folkloric roots, symbolized by the Russian emblem of the firebird, with Stravinsky’s astonishing music and Fokine’s arresting choreog-raphy. The firebird crackled with staccato movement as she darted across the stage, arms outstretched, her fingers making exaggerated vibrato gestures like scarlet spurts of forked light.
Nevertheless, the real showstopper of 1910 was Scheherazade, with music by Rimsky-Korsakov, exotic sets and sensual dance moves such as had never before been seen on the public stage. The story was minimal (a harem of beautiful women take advantage oftheir master’s absence to indulge in an opulent orgy with a band of muscular Negro slaves), but the visual impact was unforgettable: ‘Bakst’s emphasis on bold, bright, sumptuous colours – vivid greens, blues and reds paired with oranges, purples and yellows – transformed colour into a dominant emotive force, enhanced by complex, swirling patterns and the revealing oriental costumes of the dancers. Colour attained a rhythm of its own . . .’ – opulent, exotic, dramatic – in a spectacle that later commentators would readily identify as the epitome of Diaghilev’s modern aesthetic. Léon Bakst’s main inspiration in designing the set and costumes had been the (then recently deceased) modern Russian painter Mikhail Vrubel, whose work had been prominently displayed in the Russian exhibition at the 1906 Salon d’Automne. Vrubel painted with a vision all his own, applying brilliant colour in lozenge forms and jagged planes which earned him comparisons with Cézanne, as well as with the early cubists. The audiences atScheherazade went wild.
In the wake of the 1910 Ballets Russes season, the celebrity everyone was talking about was not, as might have been predicted, Nijinsky (who was under contractual obligation to return to Russia) but set designer Léon Bakst, who was feted throughout Paris and interviewed in fashionable magazines. His art was shown in galleries and his designs for ballets purchased by the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. French and American actresses asked him to design dresses for them; artists and fashion designers clamoured to meet and to be seen with him; chic Parisian boutiques sold étoffes Scheherazades. Bakst was quick to acknowledge that his reputation as a designer had been preceded by Poiret’s; he hailed Poiret – who commissioned twelve fashion drawings from him, for twelve thousand francs – as le dernier cri. Long after the end of the Ballets Russes season, the impact of Scheherazade went on reverberating, not least throughout the world of fashion. Women appeared at parties dressed in Poiret’s vivid colours and oriental patterns, inspired by Bakst, wearing turbans, jewelled tunics and even harem pants, as if stylishly rushing into the modern age. Deciding to remain in Paris for another six months, on 25 June Bakst put down a deposit on the studio in the Hôtel Biron just vacated by Matisse, who that month finally closed his school to settle definitively in Issy. This was Matisse’s first encounter with the world of the Ballets Russes.
Over the next few years, Diaghilev took the company to Monte Carlo, London and Rome, delighting new audiences – with one notable exception: the first audience of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which in 1913 scandalized even the French. With ever more avant-garde productions and sets, by the end of the First World War, Diaghilev had succeeded in appointing Derain, Picasso and Matisse as costume and set designers, continuing to develop what amounted to a radical modern aesthetics of the stage. Picasso’s cu-bist ‘sculpture-costumes’ and decor appeared in the 1917 production of Parade; in 1919, Derain designed sets for Rossini’s La Boutique fantasque. Derain loved the theatre; it was the medium in which he felt art made its most direct appeal to the emotions of the audience. ‘Painting should inspire like this,’ he remarked, ‘par monstration et non point par démonstration’ (‘by presentation, not representation’).
As far as Diaghilev was concerned, these French artists expressed his vision absolutely and, for the next few years, they continued to work for him on sets and costume designs – Matisse’s graphic robes for Le Chant du rossignol (1920); Marie Laurencin’s fluid, pastel costumes for Les Biches (1924); Picasso’s backdrop for Le Train bleu (1924), which had heavy, carved-looking goddesses running around ecstatically before a vast blue sky (for this, Coco Chanel designed the costumes). In the meantime, he continued his habit of making impossibly ambitious plans for the future, even as he worked on current projects. His notebooks for 1923/4 list the names of artists he initially planned to appoint to contribute to future productions (Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marie Laurencin, Braque, Utrillo and Gris), though not all of these came to fruition. Diaghilev somehow managed to combine meticulous planning with a complete lack of a system. His aim was continual experimentation, and he was determined to incorporate into the ballet ever newer and more avant-garde forms of expression. Even when he returned a ballet to the stage he was determined never to repeat himself. In 1928, a year before his death, he was still hoping to update Scheherazade by introducing new decors by Matisse – though Matisse in fact worked for him only once: he found Diaghilev’s draconian style of management exhausting and the prospect of a long-term working relationship with him unimaginable.
• • •
In the cultural climate of 1910, in which, in the wake of the Futurists’ declaration that ‘a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’ and fashionable women ‘looked as though they had just escaped from Bakst’s harem as they stepped down from the running boards of their Panhards and de Dion-Boutons’, it can be difficult to remember that this was still pre-war Paris and, outside the sphere of the arts, old customs and superstitions prevailed. On 16 May 1910, almost exactly a year after the debut performance by the Ballets Russes, all Paris turned out to watch the sky. Huddled on balconies and terraces in a state of nervous anticipation, everyone was waiting for the appearance the following night of Halley’s Comet, an event which the superstitious – that is, many – believed would mean the end of the world. The return of the comet (which occurs approximately every seventy-six years) was the main story in all the newspapers, upstaging even the magnificent funeral of Edward VII in London’s Westminster Abbey, which was attended by all the crowned heads of Europe. According to Le Figaro, homes throughout Sèvres, Saint-Cloud and Meudon were crowded with people, telescopes poised on balconies to follow the path of the comet from midnight until four in the morning. By the following day, tension was mounting and terror rife, especially in ‘the southern regions of Europe, where the population is convinced that the arrival of the comet will bring about the end of the world . . .’ In Italy, the Pope instructed priests to reassure the faithful, as many prepared to spend the night in church.
On 18 May, the newspapers finally announced the anti-climactic news: ‘We can report quite simply that today the world continues to exist: the comet passed by like a bomb that failed to go off. The end of the world is deferred . . .’ Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic, the crowds stayed gathered, just in case.
That evening, Modigliani walked round to rue Vaugirard and posted a card to Paul Alexandre (it was postmarked 8.15 p.m.): ‘Carissimo. The comet has not yet arrived (by ten to six). Terrible. I’ll definitely see you on Friday – after death of course . . .’ Two days later, the crowds were still anxiously waiting, Le Figaro reporting that, ‘At the summit of the Butte Montmartre two thousand sightseers were stationed, as ironical and raucous as on the dawn of a public execution. A police contingent had to be called in . . . In far-away New York, “comet-parties” were organized on all the terraces of the large hotels. There was drinking, laughter, eating, dancing, but nothing was seen . . .’
• • •
By 1910 or so, the disparate, fragmented social circles that revolved around Picasso, Diaghilev, Poiret and the Steins had begun to overlap. In the arts, overt connections could now be made between painting, music, writing, couture and the ballet. From now on, painters and sculptors would, in their turn, find inspiration in modern dance. Rodin invited Nijinsky to sit for him; Picasso and Braque pursued their experiments, continuing to explore the problems of perspective and the ‘projection’ of objects on canvas. Poiret’s latest fashions consisted of simple tunics and shift dresses worn with elaborate, spun fascinators in the evenings; his fashion advice focused on the individuality of the wearer rather than that of the designer: elegance had become synonymous with chance and circumstance, what Poiret called ‘decorum’. ‘Choose what is suitable, Madame,’ he advised his clients, ‘what is suitable to the hour, the circumstances, the temperature, the setting, the landscape . . . capital, spa, beach resort or country. Choose with taste what is suitable to your mood, what is most appropriate to your character, for a gown, like a faithful portrait, reflects a state of mind . . .’
And the circles were widening. In London on 8 November, Roger Fry, British painter and independent art critic of the Athenaeum, mounted an exhibition of contemporary French art at the Grafton Galleries. Fry had studied art in Paris (he entered the Académie Julian in 1892) and in 1904 had been appointed, largely on the strength of his articles for the Athenaeum, to purchase examples of modern European art for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Following the curtailment of that post, he decided to bring modern French art before a London audience. He called his exhibition ‘The French Post-Impressionists’, a title intended to be non-committal as to genre and indicating simply that this was work that post-dated the introduction of Impressionism. (Manet was included, and was of course painting before – and alongside – the Impressionists, but, displayed in this new context, his work in some respects took on a more ‘modern’ appearance, with its strong colours, pared-down forms and references to the art of the past, than the work of Monet, Pissarro or Sisley.) The exhibition of works by artists including Manet, Cézanne, Matisse, van Gogh and Gauguin provoked the same general incomprehension, derision and ridicule as had the exhibition of the Fauves five years earlier in Paris. When Fry showed the works again in 1912, he defended them in a catalogue introduction (entitled, more simply, ‘The French Group’), providing a lucid description of what they had collectively achieved in their work by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. In Fry’s estimation, the French painters, though clearly influenced by the Italian primitives, were best understood as ‘modern men trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook’. As he saw it:
The difficulty [in the paintings’ reception] springs from a deep-rooted conviction, due to long-established custom, that the aim of painting is the descriptive imitation of natural forms. Now, these artists do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form; not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our practical activities. In fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality.
He was echoing Braque, who by this time believed that ‘The painter aims to construct not an anecdote but a pictorial fact. One must not imitate what one wishes to create. The painter thinks in terms of forms and colours. The aesthetic object is the pictorial fact – a lyrical and poetic object.’
Fry predicted that the logical outcome of such an ambition might be a movement towards abstraction; he could already see in Picasso’s work evidence of ‘a purely abstract language of form – a visual music’. There was no such evidence, however, in the work of Matisse, who was clearly working with recognizable objects, establishing forms ‘by the continuity and flow of his rhythmic line, by the logic of his space relations, and, above all, by an entirely new use of colour’. In any case, Fry insisted it was too soon to make predictions about future directions. His main point was that ridicule might have been expected had any of the artists set out to make an exact copy of the model and found himself incapable of achieving a better likeness. As capable as anyone of copying nature, artists such as Picasso were ‘here attempting to do something quite different’. Common to all was their simplification of forms; ‘the great originator of the whole idea’, in Fry’s opinion, was Cézanne.
If the long lens of twentieth-century modernism thus takes in both London and New York, in real terms the art that later came to be thought of as a movement originated in the studios and cafés of Montmartre. In the book she published three decades later, Paris France (1940), Gertrude Stein put it all more simply, declaring that modernism could only ever have begun in France, where the habits of day-to-day life were paradoxically eternal. French traditions of rural and family life were profound, yet in her attitude to incomers France displayed the detachment of an artist. ‘Foreigners’ would come, go or stay; and through it all France would remain herself – which is why so many came to France to live as artists, when they could not at home. In France, they lived as they pleased, painting, writing or dancing, for what the French really respected were art and letters. ‘And that,’ concludes Stein, ‘is what made Paris and France the natural background of the art and literature of the twentieth century.’ As for the French, ‘their tradition kept them from changing and yet they naturally saw things as they were, and accepted life as it is, and mixed things up without any reason at the same time. Foreigners were not romantic to them, they were just facts, nothing was sentimental they were just there, and strangely enough it did not make them make the art and literature of the twentieth century but it made them the inevitable background for it.’
Throughout 1910 and 1911, Matisse continued to explore new ways of depicting the flow of rhythm on canvas. Following the completion of the Danse and Musique panels, he painted distinctive interiors such as Le Studio rouge and Intérieur aux aubergines, a large decorative piece around which Michael and Sarah Stein rearranged their room to display to best advantage. In Fleurs et céramique (1911), pattern is alert with movement and space enveloped by forms rendered dynamic with vivid colour. In La Fenêtre bleue(1911), solid forms seem massed and crouched, like dancers in a pose on a stage set. In November 1910, Matisse went to Spain, where he painted two versions of Nature morte de Seville (1910/11), an extraordinary work in which pattern, as distinguished painter and art historian Lawrence Gowing has remarked, ‘finally broke loose and sprawled across the pictures’ – like the firebird.