In the vast, glass, light-filled pavilion of the 1908 Salon des Indépendants, Gertrude Stein found Alice and Harriet seated on a bench before two paintings. ‘You have seated yourselves admirably,’ she said. But why? ‘Because right here in front of you is the whole story.’ She explained that the paintings were by Derain and Braque. Alice had noticed only two large, similar pictures. She now saw that both were of roughly modelled, strange-looking figures, like wooden carvings, one depicting ‘a sort of man and woman’, the other, three women. The latter was surely Derain’s Bathers, a painting of three female figures who look like articulated puppets, faceted from their joints as if suspended on strings. The painting by Braque was surely Grand Nu, depicting a chunky, sculptural figure shown in profile against a fragmented, unfolding background. (It’s as if the figure is in the process of being unwrapped by the ground.)
When Picasso saw Derain’s painting, he was indignant, since it was clear that, despite his scathing dismissal of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he had been influenced by the new developments in Picasso’s work (though it is possible – even likely – that Derain had begun, or even completed, the Bathers before seeing the Demoiselles; in any case, by now such ideas were in the air). Tensions were rising. According to Gertrude Stein (who may have been mischievously – or unwittingly – helping the feud along), at the 1908 Salon, ‘the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisseites became bitter’.
For Matisse, the exhibition provided a second opportunity to meet Sergei Shchukin, whose life since he first met the artist had been devastated by recent events in Russia. After the violent revolution of 1905, one of his twin sons had disappeared, eventually to be found drowned in the River Moscow; he had committed suicide. Further tragedies had followed. In 1907, Shchukin’s wife died suddenly; in 1908, his brother committed suicide. In the wake of these tragedies, Shchukin spent his days in the Louvre, looking at Egyptian funerary art. He also found solace in Ma-tisse’s work, especially his paintings of nude figures, which for Shchukin evoked extreme emotions. Increasingly, he had begun to collect these, and he now formed a strong bond with Matisse, giving him encouragement, sharing his artistic opinions and taking an active interest in the development of his work. Following the Salon des Indépendants, he commissioned three new works, including a huge decorative panel for his dining room in the Palais Trubetskoy, where the walls were already covered with works by van Gogh, Monet, Gauguin and Cézanne. His increasing patronage came at a time when other opportunities were also finally coming Matisse’s way; his work was being shown for the first time in New York, Moscow, London and Berlin. Though Shchukin also purchased several of Picasso’s Blue Period works during 1908, in the Matisse versus Picasso race, Matisse was way ahead in terms of his arrival on the international scene.
During the previous couple of years, the make-up of the Picasso bande had gradually changed, having altered from the earlier gang of Catalan painters and hangers-on. Though the bande that regularly met in Azon’s included Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Salmon (the latter, as of 1908, now living in a basement studio in the Bateau-Lavoir), the inner circle, once Derain had moved to the rue Tourlaque – at least, by Fernande’s account – had re-formed into a gang of four consisting of Picasso, Derain, Vlaminck and Braque. This was the group that now regularly turned up together at the Steins’.
The relationship between Picasso and Derain seemed to have developed since Derain moved to the rue Tourlaque. When Derain had first arrived in Montmartre, André Salmon had noticed him making his way down the hillside in the mornings, always affable, always willing to surface from his reveries to give a friendly smile and bid whoever he passed good day, but he was surprised how little Derain seemed to have to do with Picasso. Since then, some said Apollinaire had engineered a renewal of their earlier acquaintance; or perhaps Fernande had done so, hoping to encourage a stronger friendship between Picasso and her friend Alice’s new lover. Or perhaps the four appeared to be a more intimate group than they actually were.
Whatever the truth, the new gang that surrounded Picasso (Derain, Vlaminck and Braque) made an impact in the streets of Montmartre, where people would turn round to look at them. Derain was still working on his (quasi-) English image, though even Fernande considered his elaborate waistcoats and green and red ties somewhat overdone.
Vlaminck struck her as the most confident of the four – with good reason. In February, Vollard had given him an exhibition of landscapes, seascapes and figures. His paintings had rendered the window of the gallery vivid with colour in the lilac-grey, early-evening light of Montmartre, turning the heads of those who wandered along the rue Laffitte. And where Vollard went, Kahnweiler followed; throughout March 1908, he had shown twenty-seven paintings by Vlaminck. None of this seemed to interest Vlaminck particularly; his apparent nonchalance puzzled Fernande, to whom he seemed (perhaps intentionally) inscrutable. She was unaware that the apparent social solidity of the gang did not necessarily signal consensus on artistic ideas and developments. In that respect, the gang of four was about to split down the middle.
As for Braque, Fernande distrusted him implicitly, seeing only his ‘powerful head which made him look like a white negro’, curly black hair and boxer’s shoulders. She thought him studiedly casual in his ready-made department-store clothes and narrow black ties worn in a loose knot in the Norman style, believing him to be ‘suspicious, able and clever’, in her view, a typical (French) Northerner. She also notes a hint of affectation in his casual gestures, coarse voice and brash expressions – the influence of the movies?
Among the most popular forms of entertainment in Montmartre was boxing. The Picasso gang were enthusiasts – all, that is, except Vlaminck, who was not above using brute force to make a point and was strongly of the opinion that it was more effective than any boxing manoeuvre – until, that is, Derain and Braque both challenged him to a fight. Picasso and Fernande met Vlaminck as he was leaving Derain’s studio, ‘his nose swollen like a potato and in a pretty sad state, though totally convinced’. Picasso’s passion for the sport was as a spectator; one lesson with Derain had been enough to last him a lifetime. However, he liked to think that, given his thick-set build, when they went about as a gang of four he would surely be mistaken for a boxer (much as, in the early years, he always hoped to be taken for a clown). Braque, on the other hand, was not all machismo; his friends still included Marie Laurencin and Georges Lepape, now an illustrator for the fashion journal La Gazette du bon ton. (Within three years, he would be designing fashion plates for Poiret.) On Sunday afternoons, Braque still went waltzing at the Moulin de la Galette; on visits to the Bateau-Lavoir, he sat calmly smoking his pipe and playing his accordion.
However he fitted into the bande, Braque quickly became an indispensable companion for Picasso. Temperamentally, though, they were quite different: Picasso was volatile and expressive; Braque, friendly yet inscrutable, exuded sangfroid. Since his visit to the Bateau-Lavoir to see Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, however, Braque had begun to show a serious interest in Picasso’s work and, as artists, they were almost uncannily complementary. Still only twenty-six and twenty-five respectively, they quickly became inseparable allies. (Matisse, at thirty-seven, with his increasing commissions, his family life, his idyllic vision of Arcadia, suddenly seemed to belong to another generation.) Both Picasso and Braque relished the street life and popular culture of Paris and followed the new urban heroes of popular literature and the screen. They loved cowboy and adventure stories and were avid fans of the ‘Nick Carter Library’ of cheap, bi-weekly paperbacks, booklets with trendy, full-colour covers like movie posters. Nick Carter was the quintessential urban hero, swaggering, knowing, always able to outwit his enemies; the epitome of urban cool. The two exchanged paperbacks and went regularly to the movies together. And they were on a shared quest to discover in painting new ways of depicting the modern world. Despite his comments about eating tow and swallowing kerosene, Braque had in fact quickly realized that, with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso was breaking new ground. From now on, they began to develop similar ideas and Braque introduced Picasso to aspects of his technical repertoire. Braque understood, too, the significance of the ethnic art Picasso had seen in the Trocadéro; l’art nègre had been displayed in the museum at Le Havre since at least 1904 and, in 1905, he had bought his first tribal mask, from a sailor or a friend of his father. Fernande distrusted Braque from the start, understandably, since in many respects he had already begun to replace her. Picasso sometimes even referred to him as ‘ma femme’ (a safe tag since, like Picasso, Braque obviously loved women); Max Jacob waspishly referred to him as the ‘disciple’.
Picasso now began the process of trying to transform Braque’s love life, with a view to finding him someone more suitable than the woman he seemed to be involved with, Paulette Philippi, a notorious femme galante who ran a sophisticated opium salon patronized by the literati. The extent to which Braque enjoyed her favours as a courtesan was never really known but, according to Henri-Pierre Roché (one of her coterie), Braque was regularly invited to her parties and was one of her special favourites: ‘She set Braque apart, because he worked by inclination – enough but not too much’ – which seems to have been how he went about most things.
It was decided among the bande that the daughter of Max Jacob’s cousin, who owned the hideously tasteless Cabaret du Néant, might prove a more appropriate choice. The introduction was planned and the Picasso gang hired formal evening clothes for the occasion. After an evening in the Néant of such uninhibited pleasure that nobody was in a fit state to identify their own discarded finery, they were asked by the management to leave. They obliged, helping themselves to whatever garments they found in the cloakroom. Eventually, Picasso and Fernande came up with someone more suitable, Marcelle Lapré, a friend of Fernande. She lacked the more overtly decorative appeal of Jacob’s cousin, being short and plump with unusually protuberant eyes; Jacob referred to her as the little sea-monster. But Picasso and Fernande thought her charming, witty and discreet, so much so that it took Kahnweiler to reveal that she also went by the name of Madame Vorvanne and was probably thus living with, or even married to, a Monsieur Vorvanne. Picasso’s matchmaking skills had once more been put to the test. Eventually, because (or in spite) of Picasso’s intervention, Marcelle did indeed become Madame Braque, but not for some years. For the time being, Braque kept his own counsel – and Paulette.
Throughout the early months of 1908, nevertheless, he and Picasso were constantly in each other’s company, exploring rather than denying the similarities in their work. Both were striving for a new kind of pictorial synthesis, moving away from mimesis and aiming for the creation rather than simply the illustration of an experience on canvas; they were creating formations that were three-dimensional, sculptural and poetic and challenging the relationships between surface and depth. Though in a sense Picasso had begun that endeavour in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in terms of subject matter the painting had been a one-off. Having gone as far as he could with the need to explore a particular kind of pictorial brutality, it was as if Picasso had freed himself to absorb other influences. Alongside him, Braque calmly developed his own ideas along similar lines, introducing a new geometry into both his figure studies and his landscapes. He saw Picasso frequently throughout the spring, but left Paris on 2 May for a brief trip to Le Havre to help organize an exhibition (mounted by the Cercle d’Art Moderne) of works by artists including himself, van Dongen, Derain and Matisse. In the middle of the month, he left again for L’Estaque.