7.
At 27, rue de Fleurus, Alice B. Toklas was now living with Gertrude and Leo Stein. Harriet had already written from San Francisco, asking Alice to close the flat and carefully pack the paintings, especially Matisse’s La Femme aux yeux bleus, and send them to her in California, where she was ‘probably remaining’. When their landlady in the rue Notre Dame des Champs objected to Alice’s abrupt termination of her and Harriet’s tenancy, Leo helped her with letters to French lawyers: ‘And with that I moved [sometime during the winter of 1909/1910] over to the rue de Fleurus, where I was given the small room that later we called the salon des refusés.’ In the mornings, she typed Gertrude’s manuscript; in the afternoons, they visited friends, including an old acquaintance of Gertrude from her Johns Hopkins days, Grace Lounsbery, ‘an intimate friend of two of Gertrude’s intimate friends. Gertrude thought that she was a false alarm.’ Nonetheless, she was, as Alice realized, one of the two new ‘infant prodigies of the social world’, the nature of which was rapidly changing. Grace, who ‘considered herself a Greek scholar and wrote Greek plays’, had fallen in with Jean Cocteau, the other infant prodigy. Perhaps it was at the Steins’, then, through Grace Lounsbery, that Picasso first encountered Cocteau (though not until about 1917) and, through him, soon afterwards, Diaghilev. (Cocteau later considered that the real founders of modernism were Picasso, Stravinsky and Modigliani – a story impossible to tell except, in the essential spirit of modernism, through nuance and juxtaposition, since, though their work had much in common, their paths rarely crossed until during and after the First World War.)
On 1 November 1910, Sergei Shchukin arrived in Paris, a week before the close of the Salon d’Automne. His catalogue of personal disasters was extended that year by the death of the second of his twin sons, who took his own life on his deceased mother’s birthday. The ‘darkness’ Shchukin had recognized in Picasso’s work, he now sought almost obsessively. He wanted more of his work, especially paintings with overt references to death; in 1910, he purchased Composition with Skull (1908), as well as Derain’sStill Life with Skull. His interest now extended to Picasso’s early work, which he also began to collect, again choosing paintings that stirred up his own feelings of loss and despair, including the 1901 version of The Absinthe Drinker.
Shchukin had already seen the reviews of Matisse’s La Danse and La Musique, and read them with dismay. Meanwhile, the Bernheim-Jeunes went bustling down to Issy with the news that the Russian collector was considering abandoning Matisse’s panels in favour of a more suitable work by Puvis de Chavannes. In their opinion, the latter’s work was so large that the only way of displaying it properly for Shchukin to make his decision would be to hang it in Matisse’s studio alongside La Danse and La Musique. When he saw Matisse’s panels of naked dancers alongside Puvis’s ascetic The Muses Greeting Genius: The Herald of Light, with its ‘ghostly pallor and elegant, etiolated figures’, Shchukin decided he had no choice but to choose the latter’s work. He returned immediately to Moscow, leaving Matisse devastated. Just as before, no sooner had he made his decision than he immediately wrote to revoke it. But the damage was done; Ma-tisse was traumatized by the whole episode. He felt betrayed, not only by Shchukin, whom he had thought was his friend, but also by the Bernheim-Jeunes. For the next two months, he was in deep despair.
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, Ma-tisse 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, Petrushkacelebrated 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 weretrès à la mode worn with a clochehat. 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 Ma-tisse, 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.