In 1902, developers sent construction workers to Montmartre, where they began to cut into the Maquis. As buildings were demolished, large areas of dusty waste ground appeared up on the northern flank of the Butte, between the Moulin de la Galette and the rue Caulaincourt. Each time another building was condemned for demolition, Frédé joked that he hoped the job would be carried out without disturbing the artist in the garret. In any case, work soon ceased, when the terrain beneath the surface proved unsuitable for laying proper foundations, leaving desolate empty spaces across which the very poor wandered, looking for shelter.
In late spring, Berthe Weill sold a still life by Matisse and a smaller study, his first sales since he had begun working with strong colours and more simplified forms. She proposed to include more of his work in a mixed exhibition she was planning for June. In the meantime, Vollard had paid a thousand francs for five canvases, among which he had spotted three large ones that particularly appealed to him. Throughout 1902, Matisse continued to develop his new style, working on through significant stresses and strains in his domestic life (worries about his children’s health, disasters in the professional lives of his parents-in-law), painting in vibrant turquoises, violets, greens and crimson pinks, inspired by van Gogh and perhaps also by Vlaminck. At the same time, he began to pay attention to the work of Paul Signac and his friends Paul Seurat and Lucien Pissarro, who had been searching for a way of developing the discoveries of the Impressionists into a more scientific system. In 1899, Signac had brought out a collection of articles, previously published in La Revue blanche, which now appeared in book form as From Eugène Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism. The book effectively laid out the method of painting the three friends had together discovered, a system of creating images through juxtaposition using only pure colours – a kind of democracy of tonal relations which at the time appealed strongly, both theoretically and as a practice, to Matisse. Signac’s critics were disparaging, calling the new method pointillisme (‘painting by dots’), but he did have followers. He was popular with young students in the academies and he regularly opened his studio in the boulevard de Clichy to them. Matisse, too, now began to spend more time in Signac’s company.
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Back in Barcelona, Picasso was soon yearning for Paris. By contrast with Montmartre, the world of Els Quatre Gats now seemed frustratingly provincial, especially since its starriest artists all seemed to have moved to the French capital. The misty hillside, the proximity of the boîtes at the foot of the hillside, the world of cafés open until dawn – the ambience of Montmartre soon seemed alluring again. But the prospect of military service loomed; and, anyway, there seemed to be no way of resuming an independent life in Paris. Under the terms of the agreement, which still stood, any desultory income forthcoming from sales of his work was Mañach’s. While he was in Barcelona, Picasso had missed an exhibition of his work. Mañach had followed up the one at Vollard’s by showing Picasso’s work together with that of other artists at Berthe Weill’s gallery in the first two weeks of April. Included among Picasso’s works were his paintings of a glittering yellow clown, a fanciful pierrot (both, according to the catalogue preface, displaying the artist’s ‘facility in capturing attitudes’) and his ‘brilliant, clamorous’ Fourteenth of July, in which he brings the streets of Paris alive with movement and festivity, the scene vibrantly evoked in reds and yellows. The catalogue preface hailed the talent of the young newcomer: ‘all nerve, all verve, all impetuosity’. Meanwhile, Picasso himself, stranded in Barcelona, had resumed his old routine of painting and sketching portraits of his friends. He received a number of commissions and several of his drawings appeared in Barcelona’s major newspaper, El Liberal, but life was dull. In Paris, Mañach’s attempts to promote him had evidently come to nothing. By the autumn, Mañach himself was back in Barcelona.
In late October 1902, help came when Picasso’s uncle Salvador bought him out of military service. Picasso was free to return to Paris. Released from his commitment to Mañach, the artist reasoned that he could look for someone else to represent his work – at least, in theory. He put up at a couple of cheap hostels in Montparnasse, going up to Montmartre only to visit Paul Durand-Ruel; although he handled the work of another of the Catalan painters, Picasso’s friend Ricard Canals, the meeting with Picasso came to nothing. Otherwise, he stayed away from Montmartre, hoping to avoid running into old friends, embarrassed by what he felt was his failure to develop his work or make his way in Paris. In November, Berthe Weill included his work in another of her group shows. This time, the catalogue essay was positively off-putting. Picasso’s works were described as ‘cameos showing painful reality, dedicated to misery, loneliness and exhaustion’. He did have one new supporter, Symbolist poet and critic Charles Morice, who had promoted Gauguin. He was editor of the revised 1901 Louvre edition of Noa Noa, Gauguin’s published writings about his life in the South Seas, and may have become aware of Picasso’s work through Paco Durrio, the Catalan ceramicist who had known Gauguin in Montmartre. Morice gave Picasso a copy of Noa Noa and reviewed Berthe Weill’s show, albeit somewhat equivocally, acknowledging Picasso as a born painter – ‘What drawing! . . . What composition! . . . as disturbing and provocative as one of theFleurs du Mal . . .’ Even that (perhaps unsurprisingly) did not lead to sales.
It may have been reading about Gauguin’s earthly paradise in Tahiti that encouraged Picasso to make a break with the Saint-Lazare prison and his melancholy Blue Period. He now began to spend his days, instead, at the Louvre, producing gloomy old master-style drawings on scraps of paper which he hoped to sell for a few sous. He could no longer afford his rent and had been reduced to stealing bread and coins by the time he ran into Max Jacob, now working in a department store to make ends meet and living onthe fifth floor of a house at 137, rue Voltaire, in what was then an unprepossessing industrial area of Paris; he offered Picasso a share of his lodgings. Since there was only one bed, Picasso painted all night while Max slept, going to bed himself in the daytime while Max was out at work. But such a way of life was not to be endured for long. By mid-January, Picasso was once again back in Barcelona, beneath the blue-black skies of Spain.
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By February 1903, Matisse was also living in his parents’ home, in Bohain, northern France. The past year had been almost absurdly traumatic for his wife, Amélie, and her family. Her parents had been implicated in a devastating court case, ‘the greatest swindle of the century’, which had exposed their employers as crooks who had reduced their investors to penury. Though Amélie’s parents were proved innocent, they underwent humiliating public exposure and the loss of their professional positions before finally being reduced to destitution after the saga, exhaustively covered by the press, had dragged on for several months. By the time it was resolved, Matisse himself was overcome with exhaustion. The scandal meant that he and Amélie also suffered – Matisse’s studio was searched, they were forced to abandon their lodgings in Montmartre and Amélie’s millinery business went to the wall. Her premises were also searched, then closed. Matisse returned briefly to Paris, only to move out of the rue de Châteaudun and close up his wife’s shop. In spring, he moved within Bohain, into a vacant property owned by his father, where he set up his studio in a poky attic, lit only by tiny skylights. Not until July did his spirits begin to lift, when he and Amélie took a house eight miles away in Lesquielles-St-Germain, a quiet town, home to textile workers, where he was able to live calmly with his family for a while, painting domestic scenes and still lifes while he attempted to recover his equilibrium. When he returned to Paris, he and Amélie left their boys with their grandparents while they set up home with Marguerite in what had been Matisse’s studio, at 19, quai Saint Michel. Amélie returned to work as a modiste in her aunt Nine’s hat shop. Matisse resumed work on his views of the Seine and Notre Dame. Cézanne’s Three Bathers, one of the few possessions to have survived the family’s financial ordeals, hung for inspiration above his easel.