In Montmartre in 1911, the long-projected clearance of the Maquis for reconstruction finally began to take place. To facilitate works, most of the old windmills up on the Butte were demolished, as the shanty town that had been the Maquis was practically razed to the ground. In Montparnasse, the Café Rotonde opened, marking the definitive removal of artistic café life from Montmartre to Montparnasse. Although Picasso still kept his studios at the Bateau-Lavoir, he knew the days of the intimate community village life of Montmartre were over. In years to come, he always said he had never been so happy as he had been in the old days there. One day, Frédé’s son was seen in heated argument with a young girl. Soon afterwards, though no one knew whether the two events were connected, he was shot and fatally wounded at the bar of the Lapin Agile. After that, the place was never the same again. Already, by 1911, the district had become a tourist attraction, the funicular bringing increasing numbers up the hillside to the cafés in the place du Tertre. Amateurs sat at their easels in the lanes painting portraits of passers-by, but the serious artists had moved across the river. In the early days, Frédé’s cabaret artistique had been full of painters – Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, van Dongen, Modigliani – as well as actors, musicians and writers, all sitting together on the little terrace in the shade of the old plane tree. On the wall of the Lapin Agile, a plaster figure of Christ had seemed to watch over them all. On the same wall, for a long time, a painting by Picasso hung by a nail. It lit up the place, painted in vivid reds and yellows. One day it vanished, discreetly spirited away by a canny collector, its disappearance a sign of loss, change, good times and prosperity to come.
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In November 1911, Matisse made his first visit to Moscow, where he visited Shchukin in his grand home, the Trubetskoy Palace, which was regularly open to the public and by now hung throughout with Matisse’s work. La Danse and La Musique (the latter bearing a fresh daub of red paint acting as a fig leaf) were displayed on the staircase for all to see. (By 1914, Shchukin’s collection as a whole included over two hundred and fifty paintings, including thirty-eight by Matisse, sixteen by Derain, sixteen by Gauguin and eight by Cézanne – by which time his ‘Picasso gallery’, which Matisse may not have seen in 1911, as it was always kept separate from the rest of Shchukin’s collection, contained over fifty works.) The morning after his arrival, Matisse won the hearts of the Russian people when he told a reporter from the Moscow Times that he had fallen in love with Russia’s icons. He became an overnight sensation, the whole of Moscow’s art world gathering to see him. He was taken to the most sought after venues, including The Bat, Moscow’s smartest cabaret, where he was presented with a painting showing himself on a pedestal surrounded by a ring of half-naked ladies. The caption read ‘Adoration du grand Henri’. Shchukin proposed a commission, on an unprecedented scale, for a row of decorative panels to be displayed above the still lifes in his drawing room. Only in Moscow, Matisse told his captive audience, had he found true connoisseurs of modern art, able to understand the future because of the richness of their artistic heritage. Presumably, he omitted to mention that Diaghilev had painstakingly introduced that very heritage, those very icons, to Paris when he exhibited Russian art in the Grand Palais back in 1906.
Matisse’s stay in Russia brought about the disintegration of his marriage, after he wrote home to both Amélie and Olga. When the former intercepted a message intended for the latter, life in Issy was thrown into turmoil. Amélie immediately fell ill; Olga was admitted to a clinic to treat her drug addiction. Meanwhile, ‘le grand Henri’ was preparing a retrospective, to be held on his last night in Moscow, in Shchukin’s drawing room. There, for the next two years, his works hung, floor to ceiling, in gold and silver cases like the tiers of Russian icons Matisse was seeing in the churches, ‘the true source’, he announced, ‘of all creative search’.
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It would be another eight years (following Eve’s untimely death from cancer, in December 1915) before Picasso met and fell in love with one of Diaghilev’s dancers, Olga Khokhlova, whom he married in Paris, in the Russian Orthodox Church in the rue Daru, in 1918. The previous year, through Cocteau, Diaghilev had commissioned set designs from Picasso for his new ballet, Parade, a word Larousse defines as ‘a comic act, put on at the entrance of a travelling theatre to attract a crowd’. The plan for Parade was to produce an entirely contemporary spectacle, a ballet every bit as avant-garde as Diaghilev’s earlier triumph of 1911, Petrushka; and, this time, it would overtly incorporate the sights and sounds of the modern urban world. The title suggested the worlds of circus and music hall, and the performance was intended to be noticeably democratic, bringing everyday life, and the theatre of the people, before the cream of Parisian society. To Satie’s music (against Satie’s better judgement), Cocteau added the sounds of cars backfiring, typewriters clacking and the whirring of machinery. Picasso went to Rome with him to work on the ballet, designing the drop-curtain, costumes and scenery. It was to be the beginning of an ongoing working relationship with Diaghilev.
By the time Picasso met his Russian dancer, the seeds of change had been sown, beginning back in 1900. By the end of the decade, the art world already encompassed dynamic new forms of expression and a heady sense of interconnectedness. From now on, painters, dancers, musicians, designers, photographers, film-makers and writers were all set to share similar and overlapping concerns. The struggles of a few dedicated, near-destitute artists working in the broken-down shacks and hovels of rural Montmartre seemed to have created the foundations for the wider arena of modern art. In retrospect, the bohemian world of the artists in Montmartre in the first decade of the century may be seen as a kind of living parade, a brief, dynamic, entertaining drama containing all the seeds of the main, twentieth-century show – and all the fun of the fair.