Browsing in Soulier’s junk shop in the rue des Martyrs one day among all the old clothes and second-hand bric-a-brac, Picasso happened to notice a painting jutting from a pile of canvases. When he pulled it out, he was fascinated by what he saw. In it, a stumpy woman stood stiffly before an ornate curtain, holding a sapling by its root; there was a small bird, apparently in flight, in the background. The picture was a portrait of a Polish schoolteacher, posing against a fantastical backdrop, which suggested an Arcadian scene. Picasso liked the painting’s primitive mood and composition and thought it a penetrating psychological portrait; he admired its clarity and ‘decision’. He also recognized the artist: the painting was by Henri Rousseau (familiarly known as the douanier, since everyone knew him as a customs official rather than a professional painter), whose work Picasso had first seen back in May 1901, probably at the Salon des Indépendants. Soulier let him have this one for a song – five francs. It was practically worthless, he said; he might as well have it for the price of the canvas: he could paint over it.
Henri Rousseau was a familiar figure in the lanes around the place du Tertre, where, when things were quiet, the shopkeepers sometimes sat for their portraits. As far as those who lived and worked in the area were concerned, he was nothing more than a local portraitist, or ‘Sunday’ painter. They paid him in groceries or bits of hardware, an arrangement with which he was perfectly content, thinking it quite wonderful that people would give him between thirty and fifty francs for a picture he was more than happy to sit peacefully working at to while away a sleepy afternoon. Despite his evident talent, it was easy to be dismissive of him; every-one in Montmartre joked about him. Some said he was a hoax invented by Alfred Jarry, creator of the monstrous Père Ubu, others that The Sleeping Gypsy, Rousseau’s picture of a stiff girl in a brightly coloured, striped dress asleep at the feet of a lion, had actually been painted by Picasso. Fernande had heard him tell Picasso, ‘We are the two great painters of the age, you paint in the “Egyptian” style, I in the modern.’ She was unconvinced. ‘Poor, dear douanier, he was so easily “had” . . . so genuine!’ (Today, Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Rousseau did nothing to dispel his reputation around Montmartre. He was sixty-four in 1908; on his retirement as a customs official he had taught himself to paint, and produced wondrous, ‘primitive’ scenes some said were based on photographs in the newspapers. His paintings – of lions and tigers, folkloric maidens with long, stiff hair, and jungly landscapes – seemed to contain echoes of Gauguin, but his colours were far more vivid than Gauguin’s, and Rousseau’s animals were fantastical, quasi-mythological creatures. His appeal lay in his ability to evoke a world that seemed primal, even childlike, liberated from convention and stripped of social constraint. Fernande suspected he did paint from photographs, but that he saw no difference between his paintings and the photographs he copied: ‘he had the natural gift of a primitive painter’ and something more, ‘a unique talent, a sort of genius’. His motifs were partly figurative, partly figments of his imagination. When she asked him to identify the mountains in the background of the painting Picasso had bought, he replied that surely she could see they were the fortifications of Paris.
• • •
That summer of 1908, Picasso decided to spend August in France (like Braque, perhaps) rather than in Spain. The Steins financed his trip, and he modestly chose as his rural retreat the remote, unremarkable location of La Rue des Bois. Barely a hamlet, and surrounded by woods, the place consisted of ten houses, a farm and a few dwellings, with the River Oise on one side and an edge of the Fôret d’Halatte on the other, five miles from the manufacturing town of Creil. He rented a small outbuilding on the farm, where Fernande contentedly did the cooking, buying provisions from the farm, collecting freshly laid eggs from the hens and watching the cow being milked: real country living. She happily took to it all, and wrote to tell Apollinaire how happy they were; they were even thinking of settling there permanently.
Picasso found a new subject in the form of his strapping landlady, widow Putman, who stood over six feet tall and weighed almost three hundred pounds. His portrait of her shows that he was continuing to ‘carve’ figures in paint, and, in its folkloric treatment, it clearly suggests the influence of Rousseau. That summer of 1908, he painted primitive landscapes quite unlike anything he had ever produced before, strongly echoing Rousseau’s work in pictures such as Landscape at La Rue des Bois, in which, with more finesse than Rousseau, he imbued the forest with a recognizably Rousseauian atmosphere of primitive enchantment. Other, similar works followed: La Rue des Bois, in which the viewer is invited to look deeply into the foliage, in close-up; and House at la Rue des Bois. Both of these, in their treatment of geometry and perspective, also closely resembled Braque’s paintings of houses in L’Estaque.
Fernande really did want them to settle in La Rue des Bois. For some reason, she, too, now hankered after the chance to live out the Arcadian rural dream (perhaps because she had Picasso to herself there); she even found an old hunting lodge suitable for rent. But Picasso had soon mined the place for ideas. By the end of the month, he was complaining it was too damp and green, and too far from Paris. After only a few weeks they were back, in time for the arrival of Braque, due in the city on 9 September. On their return, the Steins purchased at least three paintings, including two with the title La Rue des Bois, and a third, Paysage. Shortly afterwards, they also bought a fourth, which he had completed in his studio. In Kahnweiler’s gallery, Modigliani and Paul Alexandre noticed ‘a small, strange watercolour of Picasso’s representing a young fir tree turning green in the middle of transparent blocks of ice’. By now, Kahnweiler was quick to purchase Picasso’s work whenever the opportunity arose. During the course of 1908, he acquired as many as forty of his works. Times were changing for Picasso: he was no longer the struggling artist.
Braque was back in Paris in good time to prepare for his one-man show of recent work at Kahnweiler’s, which was due to take place in November. Included among the pictures were to be new landscapes of L’Estaque, which showed the extent to which Braque had discovered innovative ways, that summer, of building up pictorial structure. Despite his appearance of nonchalance, he was barely more confident than Marie Laurencin about seeing his work on public display. He was so shy that he was cautious about attending his own exhibition; he went ‘only once at sundown when there was nobody around’. In the event, the exhibition would turn out to be auspicious in more ways than one, since it was here that the term ‘cubism’ first entered the artistic vernacular, coined by Louis Vauxcelles, the art critic who, back in 1905, had first called Derain a Fauve.
According to Vauxcelles, however, it was Matisse who had come up with the term ‘cubism’; he had drawn a little sketch of ‘two ascending and converging lines between which small cubes were set depicting a L’Estaque of Georges Braque’ to demonstrate that Braque’s paintings consisted of ‘petites cubes’. Matisse grew so tired of this story that after a while he simply denied it. Several decades later, he confirmed that he had seen Braque’s work of that summer as the first example of cubism. Denouncing Gertrude Stein’s theory that cubism was really a Spanish innovation, he recalled in particular ‘a Mediterranean landscape that represented a sea-side village seen from above’. In Matisse’s account:
In order to give more importance to the roofs, which were few, as they would be in a village, in order to let them stand out in the ensemble of the landscape, and at the same time to develop the idea of humanity which they stood for, [Braque] had continued the signs that represented the roofs in the drawing on into the sky and had painted them throughout it. This is really the first picture constituting the origin of cubism and we considered it as something quite new, about which there were many discussions.
At first only Braque was dubbed ‘cubist’, but the use of the term quickly caught on, to the irritation of Picasso, who complained, ‘When we invented cubism we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism. We simply wanted to express what was in us.’ Braque said the same: ‘Cubism, or rather my cubism, was a means that I created for my own use, whose primary aim was to put painting within the range of my own gifts.’ Neither was prepared to reduce the advances in their work to handy definitions. As Jean Cocteau later noted, ‘Cubism showed cubes where there weren’t any. We should not forget that the spirit of mystification may exist at the beginnings of a discovery.’
In any case, definitions of cubism, then and since, have always varied. The geometry of early cubism, as exemplified by Picasso and Braque, was nuanced and suggestive. In their paintings of this period, the forms of objects no longer obeyed previous pictorial rules. Forms were instead juxtaposed and repeated and light sources obscured or made subject to variation in what appeared to be a kind of double exposure on canvas in which forms were enfolded or concertina’d. This made the fan a particularly conducive – even symbolic – object within cubist painting. Picasso often introduced this item into his cubist portraits; in one of his first of Fernande she is seated with a half-open fan.
For Picasso and Braque, what came to be called cubism fundamentally depended on drastically different ways of thinking about perspective. Since studying the landscape of L’Estaque, Braque had abandoned traditional perspective, which now seemed to him too mechanical: ‘It has its origins in a single viewpoint and never gets away from it.’ A fixed viewpoint assumed that the eye of the viewer was still, whereas cubism acknowledged that the eye moved constantly in the act of looking. Scientific perspective, by this account, was a kind of illusion, which prevented the artist from conveying what Braque called ‘a full experience of space’, since ‘it forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach, as a painting should’. As he also put it, ‘It is as if someone spent his life drawing profiles and believed that man was one-eyed. When we arrived at this conclusion, everything changed, you have no idea how much.’ The fundamental discovery was that through the depiction of solid objects, space as depicted on canvas could be rendered in such a way as to create actual spatial experience: the solid object could be experienced as virtually touchable, a thing with space wrapped around it, which could be seen from all sides. The ability to see ‘around’ things had come about through a combination of influences – the work of Cézanne; the cinema; and the recent appreciation of the power of ethnic sculpture.
If solid objects, and space itself, were now being conveyed differently on canvas, so, too, was the human figure. As Braque had already revealed in Grand Nu, the human form in art could be constructed in facets, the interplay of which seemed to establish a new rhythm with every glimpse. While Matisse achieved a sense of dynamic movement by paring down forms, Picasso and Braque did so by rendering forms more complex – overexposing them, as it were, to the eye. The two last differed from each other in that, for the most part, Braque worked primarily with solid objects, whereas Picasso (after a short period of working with objects) focused primarily on the human figure, working faceted surfaces into his figures as well as the objects, experimenting with similar juxtapositions, resemblances and rapports. David Hockney has since explained the particular significance of cubism for Picasso, that it ‘brought him closer to the human being, to a much more involved and interesting vantage point’; ‘If there are three noses, this is not because the face has three noses, or the nose has three aspects, but rather because it has been seen three times.’ For Fernande, this was precisely the problem, since she did not recognize herself, or anybody else, with three noses. Or, if she did, she was unable to see this novel treatment of people as flattering or beautiful.
She was not alone. Both Derain and Vlaminck found the new ways of seeing similarly disconcerting. Derain resumed his study of the old masters and continued his artistic research in the museums of Europe, finding cubism impossibly disquieting. Vlaminck also remained unconvinced by its ‘strange alchemy’, regarding it as an ‘aesthetic revolution [which] would remain uncontrolled and would allow all sorts of anomalies to qualify as courageous experiments’. Derain’s view was that cubism was merely a form of graphic art. He worried that, in his cubist period, Picasso became less truly a painter than a draughtsman – though a draughtsman of genius. As Cocteau later saw it, ‘Picasso never lectured. He never dissected the doves which flew out from his sleeves. He was satisfied with painting, acquiring an incomparable technique and putting it in the service of chance.’
• • •
Everyone still dined at Vernin’s, Père Bouscarat’s, Mère Adèle’s – all the old, familiar places. At Azon’s, the artists sat smoking their pipes and talking until three in the morning, along with the masons and coachmen who were still the restaurant’s main regular clients. Picasso’s bande was sociable and talkative, but (unlike the Impressionists before them) fundamentally competitive. Looking back on those days, André Salmon remembered that they were ‘terribly individualistic. Were we modest? Not really. But . . . No one dreamed of organizing a school, and we were our own leaders.’ In the company of Max Jacob and Apollinaire, they played to the gallery, amusing everyone, making continual fun of everything and sharing jokes, rituals and expressions quite unintelligible to others. However, that was all on the surface. When Vlaminck visited Derain in his studio in the rue de Tourlaque it was ‘to buck him up and to banish his doubts’, since, though Derain was now personally happy, he felt he was losing his way as an artist. The discoveries that had been called Fauvist were no longer enough for either of them, as Derain had already begun to indicate in his letters of 1905, from Collioure. He was not looking for a definitive method; on the contrary, he was more likely to change styles simply to avoid falling into any one habit. As Vlaminck put it, though it was ‘fun to work in pure colour and tone, a game into which I had thrown myself heart and soul . . . I worried because, confined to the blue and red of colour merchants, I was not able to be more forceful, and I had reached a maximum degree of intensity’.
Since the retrospective exhibition of Cézanne’s work at the 1907 Salon d’Automne, the focus of the group discussions had moved on, from colour to problems of structure. As Vlaminck paraphrased (and simplified) the new challenge, if one colour could be changed (if hair could be green, a face yellow or lilac, a tree pink) without distorting the colour values of the whole, why not apply the same principle to the creation of forms? One line might be elongated or exaggerated without distorting the underlying geometry of the picture; and then . . . Vlaminck’s private opinion was that none of them really knew what they were doing any more. He had a friend, an acrobat, who used to turn, turn, turn, with prodigious speed, then he would suddenly stop . . . ‘Stop! That’s enough!’ he would say. Vlaminck felt as if – more or less since the Fauves exhibition of 1905 – the painters of his acquaintance had been turning head over heels in the air but, suddenly, nobody really knew how to keep turning. It struck him that at times like that an artist – spinning away, thinking he held God in the palm of his hand – could easily fall flat on his face. However, he kept his thoughts to himself.
When Derain left to spend the summer in Martigues, Vlaminck travelled to the Midi to join him. On arrival at Marseilles, he was revitalized, enchanted by the sight of the old harbour, bathed in light: ‘It seemed as though everything was seen through a silken gauze . . . the rosy blue rings, touched with gold, made me think of some immaterial world . . .’ He found the light of Provence so distracting that he was unable to paint – ‘How could I dream of running when I was already out of breath?’ Cubism was the great divider. Artistically, it set Picasso apart from Derain, Vlaminck and others. But, in any case, Braque, rather than anyone else – including Fernande – now directed Picasso’s thoughts.
The two artists continued to work intensively, both separately and together, to develop their perceptions and determine how far it was possible to take them. When they were not working, they still hung around the streets together; in the evenings, they still went to the circus – Gertrude Stein came across them in William Uhde’s gallery one day dressed as (auguste) clowns from the Medrano. Or they went to the movies, where they could now see Nick Carter, hero of their favourite paperback detective stories, on the silver screen. That summer of 1908, the newly established film company Éclair had brought out the first Nick Carter movie, Le Guet-Apens (The Doctor’s Rescue), in which the hero disguises himself as a disreputable beggar to mix with and outwit the local gangsters.
In the streets of Paris, picture houses of varying quality continued to proliferate. The establishment of new cinemas seemed unstoppable; outraged members of the public had been protesting in letters to the newspapers that these dens of iniquity (cinema was dubbed the ‘théâtre des pauvres’) were now no longer confined to the working-class districts. These days, they were everywhere, even on the boulevards, despite the fact that, in some establishments, the entertainment amounted to little more than a curtain serving as a screen, on to which was projected a succession of blurry images. The cinema was still cheap entertainment and, by the end of 1908, the picture houses were invariably full. For twenty-five or fifty centimes, maybe a franc, patrons could spend the whole afternoon or evening in one, and they were becoming ever rowdier.
On 10 August 1908, the head of the police in Paris released a statute, to take effect from 1 September, issuing new regulations designed to introduce a degree of law and order into the theatres and cinemas of Paris. The main problems were risk of fire (the peculiar smell of burning oil or acetylene mingled with waffles, absinthe, incense or horse dung drifted from the cinemas), hygiene, and hats – more irritating in those days than mobile telephones in ours, since someone’s elaborate hat could obscure an entire performance, and people often wore them just for the fun of causing annoyance to those in the rows behind. Under the new rules, the municipality was required to address the risk of fire by forbidding the conversion of certain music halls to cinemas; to demand that the picture houses keep their halls a little cleaner; and to resolve the question of hats (Article 220: ‘It is forbidden to disturb the performance with hats, in whichever manner’). For the audiences, none of these problems detracted from the appeal of films such as those featuring Nick Carter, in which, in keeping with the books, the scene was urban and edgy, the story gripping and the hero the epitome of modern machismo. The Nick Carter films may have had an additional appeal for Picasso, since the French Nick (unlike the young, muscular, white American in the United States version) was played by Jean-Baptiste Bressol, an actor with a compact but agile body and dark Mediterranean features. Perhaps it was not only Fernande who had begun to identify with the new screen celebrities.
• • •
At the Salon d’Automne that October, Modigliani and Paul Alexandre joined the crowds gathered in the Grand Palais around Rousseau’s Tiger in the Jungle. Modigliani steered Alexandre away to show him ‘a painting that enchanted him’: The Wedding, Rousseau’s portrait of two peasants dressed to be married, stiffly and incongruously posed in a jungle setting. Alexandre and Modigliani both knew Rousseau, and sometimes passed a quiet evening with him in his studio. By now, Vollard had also met the douanier, who had arrived in his gallery one day with two or three small canvases under his arm. He told Vollard he had fallen on hard times. He had been supporting himself by giving music lessons, but that had got him into a spot of trouble when one of his pupils had asked him to cash a forged cheque. No sooner had he done so than he was arrested. When he saw Rousseau between the arms of two policemen, the culprit had bolted. When he could not be found, Rousseau was brought before the judges. The case seemed to be a lost cause, until his advocate had the bright idea of showing the magistrate one of the defendant’s paintings, which he happened to have with him, and declaring, ‘Can you still doubt that my client is an “innocent”?’ Rousseau had then, he told Vollard, approached Monsieur Jourdain, president of the Salon d’Automne, to ask him for a position as a guard. Suspecting one of the Fauves of playing a trick on him, Monsieur Jourdain had replied that, if Rousseau were employed as a guard, he would have no credibility as a painter and his paintings would have to be removed from the walls. So now Rousseau went regularly to the Salon d’Automne to make sure his work was still on display.
Sometime later, he arrived outside Vollard’s gallery again, this time with a painting two feet high, battling with the canvas against the wind. When he finally got it through the door, Vollard complimented him on it, remarking that the painting was surely good enough for the Louvre. In that case, said Rousseau, would Monsieur Vollard consider giving him a certificate, just something to prove he was coming along? It would help his case with the father of the woman he wished to marry, since the man, a high official in the customs office where Rousseau had been a lowly clerk, had forbidden the liaison and had since discovered that his daughter had been secretly meeting Rousseau. Vollard advised him to be careful, since, if the girl was under sixteen, he could be prosecuted. ‘Oh! Monsieur Vollard! She is fifty-four . . .’ As if that were not enough, there was the problem of his name; if only it had been not Henri but Léon. Why? asked Vollard. Well, the girl’s name was Leonie. ‘So you see, Léonie . . . Léon . . .’ In later years, Vollard often wondered whether Rousseau’s naivety might have been a mask he hid behind. Whether or not, like everyone else, he could not help but see him as ‘good-nature personified’. Derain and Vlaminck were both fond of him (he was, said Vlaminck, like a concierge who had retained the imagination of a five-year-old) and both admired his work.
After purchasing the portrait of the schoolteacher, Picasso received an invitation to one of Rousseau’s evenings at home with friends. In his minuscule studio, Rousseau regularly entertained, and Picasso and Fernande arrived to find the place crowded with people: the grocer, the milkman, the butcher, the baker, their wives and various others, perhaps the neighbourhood concierges, who stood around looking embarrassed, together with actresses, poets and artists, including Apollinaire, Salmon and Braque. According to Salmon, everyone (perhaps even the tradesmen) had dressed for the occasion – to visit Rousseau, one dressed more carefully than when invited by Poiret, and certainly more flamboyantly than for an evening at the Steins’. Rousseau’s studio was lit with Venetian lanterns and decorated not only with beautiful paintings but also with French flags and yellow banners stamped with the eagle of the tsars. He also owned all manner of military paraphernalia which had been produced (along with memorabilia including cigar cases, glassware and jigsaw puzzles) to celebrate the Franco–Russian alliance, which Rousseau had taken as a sign that universal peace was at hand. He looked after his souvenirs, Salmon remarked, the way maids in the old houses of France took care of the best linen. When Rousseau had guests, at one end of the room a small stool served as a stage. The chairs would be put in rows, one close behind another, the benches against the walls. The soirée would begin with various people singing, then Rousseau would play the violin, and follow up with a vaudeville song, ‘Aie! Aie! Aie! Que j’ai mal au dents!’, miming all the gestures.
Perhaps to return Rousseau’s hospitality, on 21 November 1908 Picasso threw a party for the douanier, which has gone down in history as the culminating banquet of the ‘banquet years’ that characterized life in Paris before the Great War. The story of Picasso’s party for Rousseau is legendary. Fernande, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas have all described it, in marginally differing versions. As the time approached for the guests to arrive, up in the place Ravignan, Fernande was preparing for the party by producing vast quantities of the riz à la valencienne she had learned to make in Spain. To accompany it, she had ordered ready-made dishes from Potin, a local restaurateur who delivered prepared food in his smart, covered van. But her party was already in crisis. Her guests were due and the dishes she had ordered had still not arrived. (They finally turned up, too late, the following day.)
Leo and Gertrude Stein and Alice made their way to a nearby café, where they had arranged to meet Harriet, to find Marie Laurencin, already high on Dutch courage, falling in and out of the arms of Apollinaire. Fernande, as Alice recalled it, ‘burst in upon us filled with the tragedy of Félix Potin not having delivered the dinner she had ordered’, despite his reputation as ‘le “premier” de l’alimentation à Paris’. Alice suggested telephoning, an indication of the scale of the emergency – or perhaps she thought of it because she had just seen Lucien Guitry in a play by Bernstein which featured portable telephones, the first she had seen. Fernande duly telephoned, but Potin’s was already closed, so she prepared to scour the district and pick up whatever she could from wherever was still open. They agreed that, while she did so, Leo would help Apollinaire get Marie Laurencin up the hill; Gertrude, Alice and Harriet would follow. By the time they arrived at the Bateau-Lavoir, Fernande had managed to find enough dishes to supplement the mountain of rice. She was arranging these on trestle tables, warning everyone not to lean on them and decorating them with ivy leaves, when Frédé from the Lapin Agile arrived, uninvited, with Lolo the donkey. They were abruptly ushered out again by the hostess.
In some versions of the story, Marie Laurencin entered the Bateau-Lavoir and fell straight into a plate of jam tarts. By now, she was more or less accepted by the male painters as one of the bande, though not by Fernande. Gertrude and Leo had just purchased Marie’s group portrait Apollinaire et ses amis, in which she appears with Apollinaire, Picasso and Fernande, an endorsement of her talent – and of her place in the bande – which (especially given that Gertrude had already been shown Fernande’s work and made no such investment) could hardly have endeared her to Fernande.
When Rousseau arrived (accompanied by Apollinaire, Picasso or alone, depending on the version of events), he was shown to the seat of honour at the centre of the table. Seated opposite him was his portrait of the Polish schoolteacher, Picasso’s purchase and the reason the party had come about. Picasso opened the proceedings. Monsieur Rousseau, he announced, cher grand maître, we are very honoured by your presence. Braque played a little fanfare on his accordion to welcome the honoured guest to his garlanded throne. Rousseau responded in a formidable tone, and the celebrations began. Apollinaire then stood on the table to read his celebratory rhyming poem ‘À Notre Rousseau’; everyone joined in the chorus. When he had finished, he jumped off the table, whereupon Salmon seemed spontaneously to disappear. In some versions of the story, Rousseau then serenaded the company on his violin; in others, he sat stupefied beneath a lighted candle, unaware that it was slowly dripping cooling wax on to his head. Apollinaire asked Alice and Harriet to sing ‘the national song of the Red Indians’ and was perturbed to be told they did not think the Red Indians had one.
It was late by the time everyone retired to André Salmon’s studio to retrieve their coats. They discovered that Salmon, now apparently comatose, had eaten a telegram, a box of matches and Alice’s best hat with the yellow feather trimming (at least, according to Alice’s version). An open carriage was ordered to take the guests home, Rousseau, Gertrude, Alice and Harriet, with Leo sitting up front with the driver. As they drove down the hill, ‘Salmon came running past us with a wild cry and fled ahead of us in the darkness.’