On 9 April 1907, Picasso and Fernande made their way through the lanes of Montmartre, past the little restaurant Au Coucou where they lunched out of doors when they had the money, along by the dilapidated houses Utrillo liked to paint, down the steps of the hillside to the orphanage run by the nuns in the rue Caulaincourt. At the orphanage, they were shown the children and invited to take their pick. They selected a girl, said to be nine years old, who was appealing, friendly and ‘d’une beauté grave’.
The adoption of a child had been Fernande’s idea. Picasso was ambivalent – though he loved children, he was under no illusions how disruptive a child’s presence was likely to be. Since the beginning of the year, Fernande had sensed that he had been growing distant. He had been happy in Spain the previous summer but, since he had returned, and completed Gertrude Stein’s portrait with that strange, mask-like head, his work had continued to change. He seemed to be searching for new subjects now that he had exhausted, at least in his work, the acrobats and circus performers he continued to spend time with at the Cirque Medrano and in the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères, where the clowns, trapeze artists, dancers and prostitutes still gathered. Fernande sensed that she, along with the acrobats, was gradually being moved from centre stage. He used to idolize her in his work, but now he seemed obsessed with his mounting collection of photographs of African women. He still sat in the square in the evenings, chatting to Derain and Vlaminck and his Catalan friends, but the talk had become less comprehensible to her. He was working incessantly on his sketches of individual figures, many of which had a carved appearance; he drew the human form over and over again, devoid of mood or setting, always improvising and experimenting.
Among the works of Picasso’s Rose Period that Fernande particularly loved, some of the most affecting were of mothers, some with children in their laps or playing around their skirts; melancholy mothers tending shadowy infants or veiled madonnas with wispy, scaled-down acrobats at their feet. His own childhood, as the only, pampered boy in the family, had given Picasso a deep, even religious sense of the rhythms of life and of the significance of maternity. He took maternal love for granted and saw women as potential mothers. In Spain, Fernande had understood him better, observing that, there, he seemed different from the Picasso she knew in Paris, ‘less wild, more brilliant and lively and able to interest himself in things in a calmer, more balanced fashion; at ease, in fact’. Spain had seemed to transform him: in the vast, empty landscape among the mountains, the paths bordered by cypress trees, he appeared ‘outside society, of a different species’. Since they had returned from Spain, however, Picasso had seemed increasingly introspective, irritable and secretive about his work. These days, he had more to do with Derain, who since his return from Collioure had defected from the ‘North’ to the ‘South Pole’ and, like Picasso, seemed to be searching for a new direction in his work. Derain was intellectual; he had theoretical aspirations and ideas about geometric space. Between them, he and Picasso seemed determined to discover how to paint a future masterpiece. The French painter was pleasant enough, full of charm and bonhomie, but he was not a friend Fernande could share with Picasso, as she had shared van Dongen, the only one of the painters she had seemed able really to talk to.
She could see that Picasso was making significant changes in his work. His figures looked sculptural; the women he depicted had solid arms, thick legs and tiny feet, like the feet of the peasant women they had seen in Spain. When he made sketches of dancers, they were nothing like the dancers in the Hôtel des Deux Hémisphères, with their elaborate chignons and flamboyant costumes. Picasso’s figures now were clearly based on primitive peasant dancers. In Negro Dancer (1907) he wraps the head of the dancer into the folding planes of the picture like leaves around a flower, creating a sculpted figure fashioned from the breaking surface of the painting which renders it almost abstract, elemental. His work perhaps harked back to the wooden bust of Fernande he had carved in Gosol, a work that was impersonal, multifaceted, with broken surfaces that did nothing to enhance her natural beauty. She continued to take an interest in his work, but these new ideas did not interest her as his earlier work had, and she was beginning to feel excluded and rejected.
Picasso had tried to find Fernande a new friend. In Austin’s bar that spring he ran into Guillaume Apollinaire again. Apollinaire was the illegitimate son of a Belarusian countess, born a Russian subject in Rome, a lover of art and literature who had written poetry about the saltimbanques. In 1907, aged twenty-seven, Apollinaire moved from his mother’s home in Le Vésinet to a small, bourgeois apartment of his own at 9, rue Léon, at the foot of the Butte. He was gracious and learned, fascinated by Picasso’s work and, from this point, they began to meet regularly to discuss poetry and painting. At about the same time, Picasso came across Braque’s friend Marie Laurencin in Sagot’s gallery. When he met her a second time that March, she struck him as the perfect fiancée for Apollinaire. Though he turned out to be right in one respect (Apollinaire was besotted), if he had envisaged Marie as a possible distraction for Fernande, Picasso had misjudged. Far from recognizing a potential soulmate, Fernande was horrified by Marie; she thought her silly and self-conscious, with a face like a goat’s. Uncharacteristically, in judging her she looked no further than the surface, seeing only that she ‘took a good deal of trouble to appear to be just as simply naive as she actually was . . . like a rather vicious little girl, or a little girl who wants people to think she’s vicious’.
In fact, Marie was awkward in Picasso’s company and awed by his circle of friends. In his studio, on one occasion her nervousness manifested itself when she was trying to show an interest in his work, rummaging short-sightedly through all his things as Fernande looked on, astonished by her unembarrassed curiosity. All of a sudden, Marie stopped and sat down. She appeared to be taking an interest in the conversation until, just as abruptly, she uttered a shrill, inarticulate shriek. There was an astonished silence. Then, ‘“It’s the cry of the Grand Lama,” she informed us helpfully.’ She then untied her hair, so that it billowed down for all to see.
Marie fascinated Apollinaire, but everyone else was bewildered. Fernande could only assume that Marie was simply unable to stop noticing the effect she had on others – perhaps hardly surprisingly, given the company. Her chief crime seemed to be that, unlike Fernande, she evidently made no attempt to be glamorous. That this jarred so profoundly on Fernande was a pity since, like Lepape and Braque, she had sensed straight away that Marie was unusual; it was just that, in Fernande’s company, Marie seemed to find it impossible to be herself.
For the time being, Marie kept her own counsel. In her private notebooks (Le Carnet des nuits), she made no mention of Fernande. She did reveal that, despite her own considerable talent, she felt very distant from the male painters and their pictorial problems. She felt obliterated by their work and their genius, and wary of them because they were men and always seemed to her to create problems it was difficult to resolve. It was possible to live in their shadow, she felt, so long as she made no attempt to emulate them. The technicalities of cubism, in particular, she felt were beyond her. As a painter, she was essentially poetic. She filled her notebooks with original jottings and observations, including her thoughts on Goya (perhaps she had even discussed him with Picasso), whose work transported her into a world of dance and artifice; she described his figures as ‘thoroughbred marionettes made of steel’. She wrote original poetry, too, whimsical, mythological poems in lyrical free verse expressing her own emotions and describing the natural world in fantastical images; she depicts zebras, in one poem, as cavorting Spaniards. With Apollinaire, she infiltrated Picasso’s world, respected as a painter even though, as a woman, she would never quite be accepted as one of the bande.
As for Fernande, her mind was on other things. On that day in April, the 9th, she and Picasso brought their newly adopted daughter, Raymonde, home to the Bateau-Lavoir, where she settled in among the general muddle and squalor. She was introduced to Picasso’s friends and taken to school every morning. Picasso helped her with her mathematics homework. Fernande was always busy with the little girl’s hair, brushing it and tying it in coloured ribbons before she left for school. Picasso’s friends gathered to compete for the attention of the beautiful child. It emerged that Max Jacob, too, loved children (his only brief flirtation with a member of the opposite sex had been with a girl who made doll’s clothes for a living, but after a while her incessant knitting of tiny garments had allegedly become too much for him, although this was not actually the most plausible reason for their break-up) and seemed particularly suited to the role of kindly godfather or tonton. Picasso painted a portrait of the young girl with Fernande, Mother and Child, the two simply drawn figures with primitive, doll-like masks facing forward, the mother’s arms forming a curved frame around the child. Perhaps he saw in their connection a kind of performance, but they were not clowns but pierrots, and the double act hinted at pathos, not slapstick.
On 27 April, the Steins received an Easter card inviting them to the Bateau-Lavoir the following day, Easter Sunday. If Fernande had intended this as an opportunity to introduce Raymonde to Gertrude, the event went unrecorded. In general, time passed with Raymonde and Fernande amusing each other, trying on clothes and playing with dolls, while Picasso continued working through the night on sketches for the huge canvas he was still keeping out of sight in the studio the Steins had rented for him upstairs. During the spring and summer months of 1907, which covered the gestation of this mysterious work, he filled some sixteen sketchbooks with four to five hundred sketches. The melancholy abjection of the Blue Period was gone and now, as he worked on, so was the romantic lightness of the Rose Period. He continued to draw dynamic, animated figures in striking pinkish reds and oranges, or bright yellows, blues and greens. In among a large number of these figures, expressionist in form, Fauvist in colour, appear pencil and ink sketches of acrobats, dogs and birds – simple line drawings he may have done to amuse Raymonde, or even to teach her to draw. Meanwhile, there was still no sign that the large-scale canvas was anywhere near completion.
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In July, Matisse and Amélie visited Leo and Gertrude Stein in Florence, a trip made possible by a payment of 18,000 francs from the Bernheim-Jeunes, who had just exhibited 79 watercolours by Cézanne, the first show of that artist’s work in Paris since his death. Everyone had crowded into the gallery to see for the first time examples of Cézanne’s extraordinarily delicate draftsmanship. In Florence, by contrast, even the treasures of the Uffizi left Matisse unmoved, perhaps because Leo’s attempts to instruct him drove him crazy. Leo made the mistake of asking him for a candid opinion of his own work, which the artist fatally provided. After their visit to Florence, Leo never bought another of his paintings.
Matisse and Amélie continued on to Venice, where Matisse was similarly unaffected by what he saw, until he discovered the works of primitive painters Piero della Francesca and Giotto (artists passionately admired by both Derain and Modigliani), which renewed his energy and revived his interest. At the end of the trip, he returned with relief to Collioure, where, in August 1907, he began to consolidate his ideas on painting with a view to publishing them. (‘Notes of a Painter’, or ‘A Painter’s Notes’, was published more than a year later.) The focus of the ‘Notes’ was the integrity of composition, driven by the subjective response to both nature and the figure which Cézanne had called ‘sensation’. Matisse explained his understanding of composition as ‘the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter’s disposal for the expression of his feelings’, stressing the importance of harmony and balance that was achieved only by working and reworking a picture to reflect an integrity of understanding way beyond the artist’s first impressions. ‘What I am after, above all,’ he wrote, ‘is expression.’ Like Cézanne, Matisse believed that artistic understanding could be achieved only by copying nature, but that the practice of copying involved a profound emotional response. As Matisse put it, ‘I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. When I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones.’ In selecting colour, he relied on observation, feeling and ‘the very nature of each experience’, rather than on any scientific system. In this, he distinguished himself overtly from his friend Paul Signac, the most keenly intellectual of the generation of painters who followed the Impressionists. Since the late 1880s, Signac had kept an open studio on the boulevard de Clichy, where painters and writers regularly converged. In his ‘Notes’, Matisse referred explicitly to Signac, explaining that while Signac relied on divisionist theory for the selection of tones, Matisse’s own method of selection was intuitive – his colours corresponded with his emotions. He picked an unfortunate metaphor when he tried to describe his intended effect on the viewer: he wrote that he hoped his art of balance and purity would have ‘an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue’ – a comparison almost bound to invite misinterpretation.
That summer, Matisse began work on a new painting, seven feet high, which he called Le Luxe. The setting was Collioure, the figure reminiscent of the figure in Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and the picture was constructed in horizontal bands, like the frescoes he had seen in Italy. In a second version, he emphasized the fresco effect by mixing his paints with glue. By now, his work, like Picasso’s, was becoming truly experimental, pushing the boundaries of formal constraints – but Matisse had the advantage over Picasso of having been exposed to a broader range of influences, including the art of the ancient Egyptians, ancient Greeks and Peruvians, Cambodian stone carving and Algerian textiles as well as African tribal figures.
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In the Bateau-Lavoir, Picasso worked on, alone in his studio night after night, though when Raymonde came home from school in the afternoon he spent time with the child. Though his own childhood had been happy in most respects, he had been a volatile pupil. His parents had removed him from his primary school when all attempts to teach him mathematics resulted only in ear-splitting screams, audible throughout the village. It was decided he would go to a new school. He consented to this only when allowed to take his pigeon; when there, he sat quietly at his desk all day making sketches of his caged bird. With Raymonde, he may have been doing his best to put matters right. He made little drawings of the things that had captivated him as a child: human pyramids of castellers (rural athletes) he had seen at folk festivals, the human tower rising and rising until the enxaneta, the child at the top, was forced to jump off. He did sums in his notebooks to instruct Raymonde in mathematics; he evidently took her seriously.
The one problem was Raymonde’s age. Apollinaire thought she was nine, which may have been the age Picasso and Fernande were told when they selected her. However, it soon became apparent that Raymonde was approaching adolescence. One or two drawings made by Picasso betray the difficulty: adolescence removed her from the sphere of childhood into that of potential muse, even lover; there was, perhaps, too much temptation being put in his way. Some of his most gently beautiful ‘carved’ figures of a young girl combing her hair may have been inspired by Raymonde. The Steins purchased these, along with other paintings of individual figures which demonstrate the extent to which Picasso’s style was undergoing a radical transformation.
Perhaps, as some said, Fernande simply became bored and disenchanted with the responsibilities of motherhood. Or perhaps (as John Richardson suggests) the prospect of Raymonde’s approaching adolescence in the close quarters of the Bateau-Lavoir was too much for either adoptive parent to contemplate. Whatever went wrong, by now it was becoming clear that Raymonde’s days with her new parents were numbered. In July, it was decided she must return to the orphanage. Late that month, Fernande took her back to the Sisters of Mercy. At first, the orphanage refused to accept her. You wanted her, argued the Mother Superior, you take responsibility for her. Fernande had no choice then but to take her back to the Bateau-Lavoir, but that was no solution. Eventually, with Max Jacob leading her by the hand, Raymonde returned to her former home with the nuns.
The fate of the poor, orphaned child, though undeniably sad, can hardly have been unusual for the time and place. Raymonde had already been fostered and returned to the convent once, by an elderly couple who lost interest in her when she seemed unable to learn the violin. Montmartre, in particular, was a district in which illegitimate children abounded. Many were brought up by the matriarchs of the family but, equally, the convent orphanages were always full. It is virtually impossible to imagine a growing adolescent thriving in the cramped and squalid conditions of the Bateau-Lavoir, even without such eccentric adoptive parents as Picasso and Fernande. Although Raymonde’s return to the convent may seem shocking to a modern reader, the nuns would have been used to such comings and goings, and at least in the convent she would have been sure of food, shelter and a decent education. (She was by no means alone; others at around this time suffered similarly peripatetic childhoods; Coco Chanel, for one.) Once Raymonde was back in the convent, Fernande was allowed to visit her on the first Sunday of every month; a postcard signed ‘Raymonde’ dated 22 June 1919 suggests she remained in touch. If, by today’s standards, the story is indisputably miserable, in 1907 it would have shocked few who were familiar with the make-do-and-mend ways of the community of Montmartre.
The return of Raymonde to the convent did little to improve Picasso’s mood. He spent whole days back in the Trocadéro, looking at Egyptian war gods and Negro fetishes. He accumulated a large collection of postcards of semi-naked African women, from which he made figure drawings. His vision of painting as a kind of exorcism clashed uncomfortably with the purpose of art as Fernande had always understood it – as an act of homage, a tribute to the muse – but she had had as yet no opportunity to see the new work in progress. In fact, Picasso had not been working very extensively on the large canvas itself, but the group of women he was creating had nevertheless undergone some significant changes, particularly in the later stages. Only he knew that some of the figures were evolving into grotesques. The head of one now resembled the head of an ape; the painting seemed to have begun to possess him. Then, one day, he put the huge canvas aside. He continued work on his expressive figure drawings, as if his individual figures had been liberated from the herculean work he was still not quite ready to show to prospective purchasers and friends. It stayed shut in the attic a few weeks longer, while the artist allowed himself other distractions.