In Montmartre that November, Leo Stein made another exciting discovery, this time in Sagot’s old pharmacy gallery. Presumably aware that the Steins had just purchased a painting by Matisse, Sagot asked the American if he had yet seen anything by a young Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso. Leo said he had seen the works of one young Catalan painter (he did not reveal which one) – was Picasso like him? ‘No,’ replied Sagot. ‘This is the real thing.’ The painting he brought out to show Leo was Picasso’s depiction of a family of itinerant travellers seated on the ground with their chimpanzee. Sagot helpfully pointed out that the ape was looking at the child in the picture so lovingly that the animal must surely have been painted from life. Leo, who by his own account knew more about not only paintings but apes than anyone else, thought it unlikely. (Picasso later confirmed that Leo was right: he had drawn the ape from imagination.) Leo purchased the picture and shortly afterwards returned to Sagot’s, where Sagot showed him another, Girl with a Basket of Flowers, Picasso’s nude portrait of the little Montmartroise who sold flowers outside the Moulin Rouge. This time, Leo decided to take Gertrude to see the picture. They made their way up to the rue Laffitte and found Sagot in his shop, sucking on Zan, his favourite brand of licorice. When she saw the painting, Gertrude was not keen. The head and torso were pretty enough, she said, but the girl’s little ‘monkey’s’ feet she found ugly. Very good, replied Sagot, we’ll cut off the feet. After some discussion, all agreed that that would be no solution. They prevaricated, then Leo returned by himself and bought it. Back in the rue de Fleurus, he delivered the news to Gertrude, who was eating her lunch. Now he had ruined her appetite, she told him.
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On Tuesday evenings, Picasso and his friends habitually walked all the way from Montmartre, across the river to the Closerie des Lilas at the top of the boulevard Saint Michel. Weekly gatherings were run by Symbolist poet Paul Fort, who had left Montmartre that year to edit and manage (with André Salmon as secretary) the literary magazine Vers et prose. These events were always crowded with poets, painters, sculptors, journalists, musicians and artists young and old, from the most well-known figures to the most eccentric bohemians. Leo Stein had been going there since his days as a student at the Académie Julian. The talk ranged widely, from politics to banter. Fernande once overheard the wife of a poet tell Manolo’s hero, poet Jean Moréas, a regular habitué of salon and café life, that she had no intention of living beyond forty; she had much rather die before she got old. ‘But my dear lady,’ replied Moréas, the investigator whom nothing escapes’. (When, some years later, she published her memoirs, he had no trouble identifying himself as ‘‘your last day is imminent.’ The supply of drink was unlimited, and by midnight everybody was usually in a state of high excitement. Paul Fort, perpetually restless and agitated, would try to make himself heard above the noise; occasionally, his shrill voice would penetrate the din. Some nights, the talk ended only when the proprietor threw them out on to the street.
At the Closerie des Lilas one evening, Leo Stein finally met Picasso, through journalist, art critic and dealer Henri-Pierre Roché. He was a friend of Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, in Paris since 1900, whom the Steins, coincidentally, knew from their San Francisco days, when they had been neighbours as children. Roché, as Gertrude Stein remarked, was ‘one of those characters that are always to be found in Paris’ – an ‘introducer’ with a reputation for knowing foreigners. ‘He had . . . gone to Germany with the Germans and . . . to Hungary with the Hungarians and . . . to England with the English. He had not gone to Russia although he had been in Paris with Russians. As Picasso always said of him, “Roché is very nice but he is only a translation.”’ He was also a keen collector of contemporary art, and later became a successful writer (his works include Jules et Jim, later made into a film starring Jeanne Moreau). Sometime in late 1905, he met Marie Laurencin, adding her to the not inconsiderable number of women with whom he maintained amorous liaisons; for her, it must have been a challenging first romance.
Roché it was, then, who took the Steins up through the lanes of Montmartre to the Bateau-Lavoir to meet Picasso, where, amidst the usual disorder of tubes of paint, dogs, his pet mouse, bowls of unemptied liquid of varying description and piles of Fernande’s clothes, they found Picasso himself, ready and waiting for his visitors. He brought out some drawings to show them, and Leo noticed how closely he scrutinized his own work; he was ‘surprised that there was anything left on the paper, so absorbing was his gaze’. The artist seemed vividly alive; somehow (in Leo’s words) ‘just completely there . . . more real than most people while doing nothing about it’. Gertrude thought he looked like a boot-black. Shortly afterwards, they invited him to dinner at the rue de Fleurus, where Gertrude observed him more closely. She found him oddly seductive, ‘thin, dark, alive with big pools of eyes and a violent but not a rough way’. At dinner, he picked up her bread, mistaking it for his. When she retrieved it and he protested, her laughter broke the ice. After dinner, Leo showed the guests his fine collection of Japanese prints, ‘beautiful masterpieces’, according to Fernande, which she admired, lost in contemplation. As for Picasso, he ‘solemnly and obediently looked at print after print’, then said ‘under his breath to Gertrude Stein, “he is very nice, your brother, but like all Americans . . . he shows you Japanese prints. Moi, j’aime pas ça, no, I don’t care for it,”’ whereupon ‘Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso immediately understood each other.’ Picasso and Fernande now became regular guests at the Steins’ Saturday soirées at 27, rue de Fleurus, bringing with them various members of the motley crowd from the Bateau-Lavoir.
Ambroise Vollard also managed to secure an invitation, through one of his mysterious high-society friends (the Marquise de S— ). He remarked that ‘outsiders might easily have imagined themselves in a public gallery; no one paid any attention to them’. But the inner circle was routinely treated to a detailed recitation of the artistic opinions of Leo, who barely moved from the armchair on which he lay, half reclining, his feet resting on a bookshelf, a position he considered ‘excellent for the digestion’ – and for orating. As for Gertrude, Vollard got the point of her immediately, seeing eyes that sparkled with intelligence and finding her attractive and observant, ‘the investigator whom nothing escapes’. (When, some years later, she published her memoirs, he had no trouble identifying himself as ‘the fellow leaning with both hands on the doorposts, glaring at the passers-by as though he were calling down curses on them’, making him wish, for once, he had been endowed with a more naturally benevolent nature.) He also noted that the Steins were becoming serious collectors of modern art.
On 23 November, Vollard paid another visit to Derain in Chatou. This time, he left with eighty-nine paintings and eighty watercolours, the bulk of Derain’s output, presumably, since his last visit in February, including the results of the artist’s productive summer in Collioure and his subsequent trip to London. The rumour in Montmartre was that he had piled the works into his carriage without even opening the crates, paying Derain in wads of banknotes (3,300 francs in total) secured with an old elastic band, which he peeled from his pocket. It was at around this time that Picasso had a brainwave: he asked Gertrude Stein if she would be willing to sit for her portrait.