At the foot of the Butte de Montmartre, the women came and went, their hair dyed black as coal, their mouths and cheeks rouged the colour of poppies. In the cafés they sat hunched over glasses of blue-green absinthe. A few doors along from the Moulin Rouge, at 104, boulevard de Clichy, art students carrying portfolios could be seen wandering in and out of the Académie Humbert. Like Julian’s and Camillo’s, it was loosely affiliated to the École des Beaux-Arts, and provided sporadic or indifferent tuition. The Salon des Beaux-Arts was still (as in the Impressionists’ student days) the only real hope of exhibiting work. Back in 1884, the Salon des Indépendants had been founded with a view to showing more contemporary art, selected without the academic criteria (and retrograde prejudices) of the École des Beaux-Arts, but still by jury. Despite the fact that its members included Paul Signac, it had not so far succeeded in bringing anything particularly sensational to the public’s attention.
There were, however, plans afoot for the creation of a new Salon. A group of liberal critics and painters, drawn by lot, had already formed to instigate a more radical annual autumn exhibition of work, which, like the Salon des Indépendants, would be selected by an unbiased jury whose mission was to champion new work by young artists. This time, the selection of artists would cover a broader range of styles, reflecting democracy of taste in practice rather than merely in theory. Despite attempts by the École des Beaux-Arts to stymie it, preparations were underway and the new Salon – to be called, simply, the Salon d’Automne – was due to mount the first exhibition that year. Meanwhile, progressive art was confined to the galleries of Montmartre. In the academies, tuition was still farmed out to lesser known academicians, and the students, who from autumn 1903 included Georges Braque, were left more or less to their own devices.
Braque cut a stylish figure. A fashion trend-setter and natty dresser, he stood out among the students in his tweed suits, shiny white collars, heavy black silk cravats and black bowler hat. (He even carried a cane, of Javanese bamboo, which a decade or so later would again be all the rage when Charlie Chaplin made his appearance on the cinema screen.) He attracted the attention of the other students, particularly that of another recruit, Georges Lepape, then aged only sixteen but who later became a leading fashion illustrator for Vogue. Lepape’s schooling had been interrupted by a leg injury. When he showed a talent for drawing and a keen interest in illustration, his parents had sent him to the Académie Humbert in the hope that, despite his lack of formal education, he might become a draughtsman. On the Monday of his second week he noticed Georges Braque in the life class and engaged him in conversation.
Unlike Lepape, Braque was athletic, with a strong physique, thick-set, with tight-curly hair, a broad face and solid shoulders, and he could swim, box and even tap-dance. In his native Le Havre, the sailors had taught him to dance the jig, to which he whistled his own accompaniment. ‘And what a teacher he was too,’ Lepape observed. ‘If only he’d been willing to pass on his tips about painting. But he never did anything but draw.’ Braque had enrolled at the academy after finishing his military service, reduced from three years to one because he had served an apprenticeship; he had begun his training as a painter and decorator in Le Havre with his father and completed it in Paris, under one of his father’s friends. In 1900, while Picasso had been living in Nonell’s studio in the rue Gabrielle, Braque lived just two streets away, in lodgings in the rue des Trois Frères – another significant encounter still, as yet, to take place.
Born in 1882 in Argenteuil (home to Monet in the 1870s and the scene of many of his riverside paintings), at the age of eight Braque moved with his family to Le Havre. His father was a good semi-professional painter in the traditional style, respected in the art world of Le Havre, and had at least once exhibited in Paris. At weekends, he took his son, Georges, in the family horse-drawn cart to the countryside of Normandy to paint landscapes, where Corot was their great inspiration, though Braque (fils) always said his real education as an artist actually came from reading Gil Blas, the literary periodical, advertised by Steinlen’s posters, to which his father subscribed. As a schoolboy, Georges had visited Paris and seen the Impressionists’ work in the Musée du Luxembourg, where he had been particularly struck by a small landscape of L’Estaque by Cézanne. Like Monet before him (also a native of Le Havre), he had bunked off school to explore the port of Le Havre – the chandlers’ shops, the boats, the seashore – where he wandered about on his own, ruminating on the mystery of infinity. He was a natural solitary only in the sense that he kept his thoughts to himself; he was never melancholy or lonely, always effortlessly sociable.
When he first arrived in Paris to serve his apprenticeship, his inspirations, like Picasso’s, had been mainly Steinlen and Toulouse-Lautrec. He, too, loved poster art; he hung about in the streets sometimes after dark, peeling posters from the walls when no one was looking; he had one by Toulouse-Lautrec on the wall of his lodgings. As an apprentice, he had learned how to prepare colours, grind pigments and mix tones, and discovered that paint could be mixed with other materials: soil, sand, sawdust, ash, iron filings, pipe tobacco or coffee grounds. At the Académie Humbert he shared his knowledge with Lepape, explaining that ‘the oil to use as an additive is linseed or sacatif de Courtrai, brown or clear, exposed first to the light in order to fade; that there must be over forty shades of blue, and that he could make at least one of them appear like a puff of smoke . . . that black, too, is a spectrum, a case study in “the behaviour of colour” . . . that the grinding and mixing of colours is an art in itself, a question of temperament and “feel” as much as pigment and properties.’
All this was unusual. Braque seemed quite uninterested in aesthetics, Lepape noted, maintaining a healthy nonchalance whenever the discussions turned to theoretical matters. He would draw studiously for the designated three quarters of an hour, then relax and chat for fifteen minutes about nothing in particular, with an instinctive, easy modesty. Though Lepape’s talent for drawing was evident, he had no real knowledge of oil painting. He was fascinated to know how Braque had learned all he knew. Braque explained that he had been painting since childhood. Then he must have acquired plenty of experience already? Yes, said Braque, he had a lot of experience. What was his preferred medium? ‘I’m quite good at marbling, wood-grain, ornamental mouldings,’ Braque replied. Was he joking? ‘It’s quite tricky, you know. There are all colours of marble, and the veins and little threads are all different shapes; it’s the same with wood. It’s very difficult, but you can learn. It’s actually quite fascinating.’ The interrogation continued, until Lepape asked him when he intended to begin painting at the academy. ‘Here? Never. I’m just here to draw, do composition; exercises. Painting – that’s another story. For that you need to be alone at home in peace and quiet, or out in the countryside. You need solitude to paint. Here, believe me, it’s just exercises, exercises . . . then more exercises.’
At the Académie Humbert, there were two sessions a day. Braque attended only in the mornings, but Lepape went back for the evening sessions, when the students included women. The semi-clad model would be lit by large, shaded lamps, leaving the rest of the room in partial darkness, which must have made drawing a challenge. In the gloom one evening Lepape noticed a student who had not been there before, a girl with frizzy hair plaited into a bun at the nape of her neck, simple clothes and no make-up. When she drew she wore a pince-nez suspended from a cord behind her ear. She worked with intense concentration, standing quite still even when the model changed her pose, drawing skilfully and apparently effortlessly, with a boldness and assurance Lepape had never seen before. He persuaded Braque to go along with him one evening to see the girl’s work. They discovered her name was Marie Laurencin, though she told them everyone called her Coco. She had a Creole appearance – as, coincidentally, did Braque – though her ancestry was a mystery. She claimed her grandmother was Creole, but that was invention; in fact, her Creole blood probably dated back centuries, to when her mother’s family lived in Cherbourg, from where the fishermen regularly made sea voyages to Africa and the Antilles. She was quirky and offbeat and something about her appealed to the poetic side of Braque. His appreciation of her indirectly earned her a place in Picasso’s circle, the patronage of Gertrude Stein and later commissions to design sets and costumes for Diaghilev. Over the following two decades she became established as one of the few prominent women painters of her time.
Marie had progressed to the Académie Humbert from the École des Dessins de la Ville de Paris, where she had trained in porcelain painting, studying Persian miniatures and rococo art. Her career as a painter had been decided on the top deck of a horse-drawn omnibus one Sunday afternoon on the way home from a visit to the Louvre with her mother. ‘I’ll never be a painter,’ she complained, whereupon her mother, Pauline, replied that it was indeed unlikely; she had never been able to draw. That was not true, but Pauline’s idea had been that Marie would become a teacher. They compromised when Marie agreed to study porcelain painting, since in those days it was still (as in Renoir’s day) a fashionable and reasonably lucrative skill. At the École des Dessins she was taught by Guignolot, who, according to Marie, had also at some stage taught Braque. When she started at the academy she was already a proficient and expressive artist, but she painted only in black and white – ‘colours terrified me. Red terrified me.’ She made merciless self-portraits in brown, grey and black. At twenty, still living at home with her mother and their cat, Pousiquette, she felt ugly, sad and hopeless.
Marie and Pauline Laurencin lived the reclusive lifestyle then typical for a woman with a child born out of wedlock, at 51, boulevard de la Chapelle, an extension of the boulevard Rochechouart, at the foot of the hillside of Montmartre. Mother and daughter enthralled and exasperated each other, Marie idolizing Pauline’s beauty but convinced that her mother did not love her enough. She loved to hear Pauline sing, which she did often. In her notebooks, Marie recorded that ‘Our lonely Sundays resonated with the Dies Irae sung by my mother.’ She sang popular songs, too, and sailors’ songs. Many years later, Marie reflected that ‘without the music and the airs my mother used to sing to me, I would never have touched a paintbrush’. When she was not singing, Pauline liked everything to be quiet. The two of them passed their cloistered evenings, Pauline silently reading Latin texts while Marie patiently read her way through Lewis Carroll and her large collection of illustrated journals.
Pauline’s instruction was severe. She taught her daughter that sadness was a mortal sin, as was envy; Marie should strive for self-improvement, but she must never be jealous. When she once complained of boredom, she was severely punished. They held each other in complex thrall, driven by a mixture of religious instruction and fantasy, their days punctuated by the regular arrival of a monsieur in smart jacket and top hat whom Pauline told Marie was her father. This was true, but Marie did not believe her. (The facts came to light only some two decades later.) She never, then or later, mentioned him to any of her friends. She later said that, between the ages of thirteen and twenty, with the exception of one schoolteacher who taught her elocution, needlework and deportment, she got to know nobody and experienced ‘nothing else at all; a complete vacuum’ until she entered first the École des Dessins, then the Académie Humbert.
Though for the time being she kept her mother’s secrets, Lepape and Braque brought her out of herself; despite her apparently inhibited manner she was actually a quirky and entertaining character, poetic and imaginative. When they asked to see more of her work she brought them portfolios and notebooks full of drawings, watercolours, notes and drafts; and imaginary compositions of strange, mythological animals. Braque, particularly, was very fond of her; he found her diverting and admired her work. She was also discerning; keen to take their advice on her work, she also gave them good advice on theirs. She and Braque developed a casual, teasing intimacy that never became a romantic or sexual attachment; they hung around happily together, not doing very much. ‘Yesterday Braque and I were being lazy together – too lazy to do anything but fight. We didn’t though. Very silly, just sitting there, each in his armchair. To amuse me he put on blue glasses . . .’ In the summer evenings of autumn 1903, when they left the academy at the end of the day, the three of them – Braque, Marie and Lepape – made their way past the Moulin Rouge, along the boulevard Rochechouart and all the way up the hillside, where Braque introduced them to the Moulin de la Galette.
The old windmill-turned-dance hall was nowhere near as decadent as the Moulin Rouge. In fact, by the standards of Montmartre, the Moulin de la Galette was really quite proper. Since its refurbishment in the 1890s, the pink and green outer door of the building at the foot of the old windmill was surmounted in a circle of white globes by the words ‘Bal Dubray’. At night, the place was festooned with coloured lights, rivalling the cabarets at the bottom of the hillside which flashed their neon strips and flashy new electric lighting. The walls of the immense salle of the Moulin de la Galette reflected the room like mirrors as gas-powered projectors trained a torrent of darts of light on to the surging crowd of dancers. There was a palm tree at each corner and a raised platform for the orchestra, and the evening was still presided over by a Dubray – Monsieur Auguste Dubray, who cut a formal figure in tail coat and top hat. He kept a table for his artist friends, who, to avoid resentment among the other clients, entered through a secret door at the rear. Entry for everyone else was through a corridor which ascended into a vast lit room scattered with tables and benches, the dance floor surrounded by a balustrade in red wood. At the centre of the hall stood the bouncer, Monsieur Henri, over six feet tall, with ‘the shoulders of a gorilla and the neck of a bull’, as Georges Lepape once remarked. Monsieur Henri was arresting in every way, his broad face accentuated by his crew cut, thick black eyebrows and little moustache waxed with kiss-curls. For maintaining orderly standards in the dance hall, he dressed the part in frock coat and smart black trousers, shiny white starched collar and cuffs; a cravat in white piqué secured with a tiger’s-tooth tiepin a pale waistcoat embroidered with flowers. Neither the java nor the cancan was allowed in his establishment, both dances considered too rowdy. ‘If a couple indulged in wayward behaviour, or dared move the wrong way, with a single rapid butt of his copious stomach [he] would propel the offenders to the exact spot where they went wrong.’ One of the most popular dances was the farandole, danced in an open chain. It was this ring of dancers that had first caught the attention of Matisse when he sat sketching there in the early days; it was to reappear, transformed into a circle of pared-down nude figures, in two of his major works of the end of the decade, La Danse and La Musique.
The orchestra, conducted by Mabille (descended from the owner of the famous Bal Mabille) and formed mainly of brass, created an infernal din, especially on Sundays, when the dancing went on from three until eleven, the dancers kicking up acrid dust from the wooden floorboards as they danced on for hours without interruption. Since its refurbishment, the place attracted a better class of clientele than in Renoir’s day, when its customers had been the jobless poor. Now, seamstresses, factory workers and their cavaliers regularly came up from the bottom of the hillside to the place where the drinks, at fifteen centimes a demi de bière, were still the cheapest anywhere and they could dance quadrilles, polkas and waltzes all afternoon for just four sous. The girls of Montmartre would peel off from the crowd when they found someone handsome enough to lose their virtue with; young men hung around looking for a girl to dance with before moving her on to the next bar, at the foot of the rue Ravignan. Marie Laurencin adored it all, especially when Braque expertly led her round the dance hall in a waltz – yet another of his accomplishments. Lepape sat in a corner making stylish sketches of them, Braque in his bowler hat and checked ‘English’ suit, Marie in leg-of-mutton-sleeved blouse and tiny-waisted skirt – early precursors of the illustrations for fashion plates he would later supply for Poiret and contribute to La Gazette du bon ton and Vogue.