Matisse had spent February 1909 in Cassis, studying the rhythms of sunlight on water as preparation for La Danse, the wall panel he was painting for Shchukin. Although he had begun tentatively, with a pale, dreamlike scene, by mid-April he had produced a second, more dynamic variant, quite different from the first. It showed dynamically charged nudes dancing in a ring against flat bands of abstract green and blue. Its overt, uncanny physicality unsettled even Matisse himself; he suffered months of nervous tension and insomnia as he continued with his work.
Shchukin, back in Moscow, had been disconcerted by the sketch Matisse had sent him in early March, alarmed by the naked dancers and the clearly bacchanalian mood and style of the piece. In fact, Matisse’s influences had been varied – some classical, some personal. The work was inspired partly by Greek vases and also by his happy memories of the dancers at the Moulin de la Galette performing the farandole; he had always admired its ‘fast tempo and beautiful movement’. Shchukin, however, initially saw only that the depiction of stark-naked figures might cause consternation if the painting were a decorative piece in his Moscow mansion. Nevertheless, having expressed his concern, he had swiftly followed up with a telegram and a letter confirming the commission: ‘I have decided to defy our bourgeois opinions and display on my staircase a subject with THE NUDE.’ At the same time, he commissioned a second panel, this on the theme of music.
The retreat to Cassis had been an escape for Matisse from the demands of Paris and his school. Students were still arriving in steadily increasing numbers from all over Europe and America, each hoping to see the wild leader of the Fauves at work and disappointed when the legend turned out to be a reserved, bespectacled gentleman who retreated behind a screen to paint. By the time he moved, that spring, across to Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had his studio, he was already finding his students a source of stress – they seemed to expect spiritual guidance as well as technical instruction, and he was beginning to feel overburdened. With the prospect of funds forthcoming from Shchukin, Matisse began to investigate the possibility of moving his family as far from the centre of Paris as possible while still remaining within reasonable reach of the capital. When he found a house for rent at Issy les Moulineaux, Amélie was ecstatic. She recklessly took a cab all the way there and made the driver wait while she picked spring flowers in the big, rambling garden, where Matisse would paint in a portable studio among the lilac trees. The story astonished even Gertrude Stein, who remarked: ‘In those days only millionaires kept cabs waiting and then only very occasionally.’
In fashionable Paris, the season was already in full swing. Posters in the streets from Montparnasse to Montmartre were advertising the imminent arrival of the Ballets Russes; photographs of the dancers adorned every Morris column in town. Articles appeared in the press even before the first performance, Le Figaro reporting daily on rehearsals and preparations for the opening night, 17 May. By the 10th, tickets were selling so fast that extra performances were announced. Diaghilev had worked hard on pre-performance publicity. In the spring of the previous year, he had followed his 1906 exhibition of Russian art with an entirely different kind of spectacle, realizing an ambition he had harboured since putting on musical concerts for the visitors to the exhibition. He had successfully produced Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov at the Paris Opéra, in the process courting influential figures including Gabriel Astruc, a concert promoter and theatre manager (and Rimsky-Korsakov’s publisher) who was familiar with the financial and bureaucratic infrastructure of Paris. With their support, since the close of the opera, Diaghilev had been working on a new idea – to put before Parisian audiences a novel style of dance drama. Despite the success of Boris Godunov, it had been made clear to him that the Opéra would not this time be at his disposal; the only available venue was the Théâtre du Châtelet, in those days normally home to operetta and variety shows, which sometimes included ballet (danced by the indifferently talented little ‘rats’ of Montmartre) in the interludes. He had spent the weeks leading up to the first performance supervising the refurbishment of the theatre.
Since the events of 1905 the young generation of dancers in Russia had become increasingly restless with the traditions of Theatre Street and hungry for innovative ideas. In St Petersburg, the previous two years or so had been a period of passing fads, including a short-lived attempt to introduce into the traditional repertoire ideas inspired by the cabarets of Paris. In Montmartre, the music halls and variety theatres were full of Russian dancers, including some from the Ballets Russes, since their shows were cheap to produce and the emigrées needed the work. In the Russian capital, such ideas had been tried, tested and abandoned until the arrival on the scene of the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who had studied the theories of Stanislavski. A gifted dancer himself, he had debuted on his eighteenth birthday with the Imperial Ballet School (now the Mariinsky) and taught Nijinsky’s sister, Bronislaw. He believed that virtuoso ballet techniques did not constitute an end in themselves; his genius lay in his ability to reconcile a more liberated style of dance with the techniques of classical ballet. In Moscow, Fokine had seen Isadora Duncan and recognized her as the first serious dancer to perform the art as pure self-expression. He had also discovered and recruited young Vaslav Nijinsky, twenty in 1909 and still completing his training, who seemed to dance by instinct, propelled by some inner force, his leaps apparently defying gravity. He could even dance en pointe, a skill rare among male dancers at the time. Fokine stressed the importance of the ballet as a medium in which all the elements should work together to draw the spectator into an all-encompassing experience and sought original ways of staging the integration of music and gesture, seeing the music as not merely the accompaniment to but an organic part of a dance.
Diaghilev’s production of Boris Godunov had been not only a musical triumph but a visual marvel – the star of the opera, renowned Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin, had worn a resplendent robe encrusted with embroidery and beading; the stage, as one member of the audience had remarked, had ‘streamed with gold’. Diaghilev had spent the previous year in St Petersburg, visiting scene-painting workshops, production studios and sewing-rooms, as well as attending orchestra rehearsals, wanting to be involved at every stage and with every element of the production. His aim was to revolutionize not merely dance but sets and costumes, to create a radical whole. He told Serge Lifar (later his premier dancer and biographer), ‘Artists, who all their lives deal with epochs, styles, plastic forms, colour and line, elements with which no ballet master can hope to be equally familiar, must in the very nature of things be their closest and co-equal collaborators in the process of creating a ballet. Then, in full awareness of the scenic effect of decor and groupings, the ballet master works out his choreography accordingly.’ When he commissioned Léon Bakst to design and paint the scenery for the new production, he boasted that, for the first time in the history of the stage, the sets were to be painted not by the usual hack scene-painters but by an artist of distinction.
The fortnight preceding the first performance was ‘arduous, feverish, hysterical’ for the dancers. Since 1900, the Châtelet had produced little other than operettas, variety shows and, occasionally, films, and Diaghilev had ordered a complete transformation of the theatre. The proscenium arch was to be redecorated, all six floors recarpeted, most of the seats reupholstered and the first five rows of the stalls demolished. The pit was to be removed and boxes installed. At the back of the stage, workmen hammered and sawed at a new trapdoor and, beneath the stage, laid pipes so that water from the Seine could spout from fountains in the final act of the ballet. Works were still under way when the two hundred and fifty dancers, singers and technicians converged on the theatre, together with the eighty-piece orchestra. The stage hands regarded the ballerinas as lunatics: ‘Ces Russes, oh la la, tous un peu maboule’ (‘They’re all a little bit crazy’). Squashed in between workmen, the dancers rehearsed amidst a din that tested everybody’s powers of concentration and drowned out the sound of the piano. ‘For mercy’s sake, I cannot work with this blasted noise,’ yelled Fokine. A voice from the dark kept promising all should soon be quiet . . . and, suddenly, silence descended. It was noon, when everything stopped, as if by magic; the French workmen had disappeared for lunch. The Russians, sustained by dishes ordered in from local restaurants, worked on.
On the opening night, the Parisian audience gathered for the first ever performance by Diaghilev’s newly formed Ballets Russes. The programme included Les Sylphides, Fokine’s plotless, ‘plastic’ ballet, together with Cléopâtre and Le Festin, a Russian medley primarily designed to showcase the talent of Nijinsky. Now, the interior of the huge Théâtre du Châtelet, which ballerina Tamara Karsavina (later principal of the Royal Ballet and a founder member of London’s Royal Academy of Dance) had called ‘a retail shop of cheap emotions, the paradise of concierges’, had been completely refurbished by Diaghilev. In this unlikely venue, the circle shimmered with the diamonds, bare shoulders and head-turning glamour of le gratin pa-risien; the front row was composed of models, blondes alternating with brunettes. Diaghilev’s associates had even ‘designed’ the audience – ‘itself a work of art’ – which included French and Russian ambassadors and their wives, cabinet ministers, fashionable painters, fashion designers, illustrators and sculptors. Rodin was among them, so were Isadora Duncan and the ailing Yvette Guilbert (at forty-four, well past her prime as a chanteuse). So, too, were Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, although Alice, uncharacteristically, recorded their attendance without passing any particular comment. Perhaps what they saw at the Châtelet was as pleasantly incomprehensible to her (or to Gertrude Stein), in its own way, as had been Alice and Harriet’s startling introduction to the Folies Bergère.
The audience watched the leaps, spins and turns of traditional Russian folk dance with quiet absorption until about halfway through, when Nijinsky danced a pas de trois with his sister, Bronislaw Nijinska, and Karsavina. There was an audible murmur of appreciation. A ripple of whispers ran through the auditorium. Then something completely unexpected happened. At the end of the piece, Nijinsky should have walked off the stage, but that night, instead, he spontaneously exited with a leap: ‘He rose up, a few yards off the wings, described a parabola in the air, and disappeared from sight. No one in the audience could see him land; to all eyes he floated up and vanished. A storm of applause broke; the orchestra had to stop . . . all reserve thrown away, the evening worked up into a veritable frenzy of enthusiasm . . . You would have thought their seats were on fire.’
Paris went mad for the ballet; almost nothing else was talked about in fashionable circles, and the press reported the invasion, the explosion, the outburst of the Ballets Russes. Overnight, it had brought exotica to the city, and modern dance now seemed to consist only of Diaghilev’s ballet. At Larue’s restaurant (where Marcel Proust sat quietly at a corner table drinking hot chocolate like a pale-green ghost), Diaghilev, his designers and principal dancers were joined by a clamour of admirers, including a new hanger-on, the young Jean Cocteau, a striking presence in lipstick and rouge, ‘irresistible at twenty’, dancing on the backs of the banquettes. Diaghilev’s company, he said, ‘splashed Paris with colours’. Dance, now, not only painting, fashion and film, had come to the streets.
By 1917, Picasso would be working with Cocteau on sets for Diaghilev’s ballets. For the time being, however, he kept to Montmartre, where the artists still gathered in the cafés and sat talking until dawn. New faces were beginning to appear, young artists and writers who just seemed to want to lark about, among them painter André Warnod and 23-year-old novelist Roland Dorgelès, who wore his hair long and strode about flourishing an ostentatious cloak. André Salmon thought he only went up to the Lapin Agile to challenge everyone’s obvious admiration for Picasso and his friends. Picasso, when he could be bothered, humoured the newcomers. ‘When you paint a landscape,’ he told them, ‘it must first look like a plate.’ There was no answer to that.