Matisse and Picasso

1
BEFORE MATISSE AND PICASSO

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, ECCE HOMO

On the fourteenth day of April 1900, the Paris World’s Fair opened to an excited public. The fairgrounds covered some 547 acres, making it the largest ever in Europe. Two of the most popular exhibitions, at the Château d’Eau and the Hall of Illusions, involved spectacular displays of electricity. There were also elaborate presentations of colonial cultures, most notably from Africa and the South Seas, and a panorama that re-created part of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The various nations had their pavilions along the quai d’Orsay on the left bank of the Seine, and a bridge named for Alexander III of Russia was built to join the pavilions on the Left Bank with those on the Right Bank, which included two newly built “palaces” for art, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, just off the Champs-Elysées.

At that fair, a talented eighteen-year-old Spanish artist named Pablo Ruiz exhibited a painting called Last Moments, an accomplished narrative in an academic realist style, which portrayed a dying girl surrounded by a priest, a nun, and her family. Ruiz had never been to Paris, but before the year was out he planned to go there to see his painting in the company of his close friend Carles Casagemas, with whom he shared a studio in Barcelona. In Paris, as Vicente Huidobro would later write, “You are at the door of the century. You have the key to the door in your hands.”

Just a few months earlier, while the stone and cast-iron Grand Palais was being built, a thirty-year-old artist named Henri Matisse had been hired to paint garlands for the scenery on the Trans-Siberian Railway exposition. The work was backbreaking and tedious, and after a few weeks he took ill and was fired. He, too, had submitted a painting to the fine arts section, but it was refused. Matisse at the time was married and had two children. His six-year-old daughter Marguerite had been born to another woman five years before Matisse married his wife, Amélie, who generously adopted and lovingly cared for her. Their son Jean was just a year old. By the time the World’s Fair closed at the end of the year, the Matisses had a second son, Pierre. Dirt poor, they were supported partly by Matisse’s father and partly by the hats that Amélie Matisse made and sold.

Whereas Ruiz was considered one of the most talented artists in Barcelona, the gifts of his friend Casagemas were of a decidedly limited nature. But in Paris, this distinction didn’t count for much, and neither man made much of an impression. Ruiz and his friend did, however, meet some interesting women, and Casagemas fell madly in love with Germaine Gargallo (née Florentin), who though born in Montmartre was part Spanish and spoke the language. She liked Casagemas well enough, but although they slept in the same bed, it was with a good deal of frustration, as the poor man’s sexual potency was even weaker than his artistic talent. When he and Ruiz returned to Barcelona, they still shared a studio. Casagemas was writing frenzied love letters to Germaine and drinking so much that Ruiz was glad to see him leave for Paris the following February.

But when Casagemas saw Germaine, she explained to him that they had no future together. Casagemas decided to return to Spain and invited his small circle of mostly Spanish friends to a farewell dinner at a local restaurant. There, after everyone had drunk a good deal of wine, he pulled out a revolver, aimed it at Germaine, and fired. He missed. Then he put the revolver to his temple and blew his brains out.

The sudden death of Casagemas deeply affected Ruiz, who by the middle of the year had begun to sign his work with the name of his mother rather than his father: Pablo Picasso. During the next year or so, Picasso painted several pictures that touched on the death of Casagemas, including a large pseudo-religious painting called Evocation, in which Casagemas is represented with his arms stretched out in a Christ-like gesture, ascending to Heaven on a white horse. There he is greeted by a trio of prostitutes dressed only in colored stockings—mocking both the Christian Trinity and the pagan Three Graces. This is when Picasso began to paint primarily in melancholic, deep blue tonalities. His paintings often depicted human suffering in a tender, even sentimental way, although they sometimes had a very sharp edge.

Many of Picasso’s paintings from this period are autobiographical in that they record the ongoing discovery of the world by a talented and alert young man who is especially sensitive to themes dealing with sex, friendship, and poverty. Later, when he became the most famous artist alive, this autobiographical aspect of his work would come under microscopic scrutiny, and a number of his works would be revealed to have quite specifically private meanings. In some cases, such as La Vie of 1903 (Fig. 1.1), the public and private meanings have become so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to separate them.

In La Vie the young man at the left resembles Casagemas, and the woman next to him bears the likeness of Germaine, the woman for whom he committed suicide. A number of studies for the painting have survived, and in these—as well as in the first sketches on the canvas itself—Picasso represented himself as the nude young man, standing in what is clearly an artist’s studio, and the space where the woman and child appear was occupied instead by an elderly bearded man. Picasso seems to have associated Casagemas’s sexual impotence with his friend’s failure as an artist, and in the original conception for the painting he appears to have been wrestling with his sense of guilt, not only in relation to the dead Casagemas—Picasso was Germaine’s lover both before and after Casagemas’s suicide—but also in relation to his own father. Don Jose Ruiz, also an unsuccessful artist, is evoked by the person of the bearded old man. The drama of guilt and redemption that seems to underlie this painting is thus suggested both publicly, in the clear allusions to Adam and Eve and to the Madonna and Child, and privately, in relation to the traumatic instances represented by Casagemas’s suicide and Don Jose’s “death” as an artist.

Another level of biographical meaning is suggested by x-rays of the painting, which reveal that it was painted atop Last Moments of 1899, the deathbed scene Picasso had exhibited at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1900 World’s Fair. Although it has been said that Picasso overpainted the earlier large picture simply because he could not afford canvas at this time, it seems more likely that painting over Last Moments had important personal significance for him. That painting, done in an academic narrative style, was meant to commemorate the death of Picasso’s sister María de la Concepción—called Conchita—in 1895. At the time of Conchita’s illness, the thirteen-year-old Picasso swore that if she were to live, he would give up painting forever. So even though her death was a terrible emotional blow to him, it also gave him permission to continue as a painter. Picasso was deeply superstitious, and this sanction must have produced an enormous feeling of guilt. Painting over Last Moments seems to have been part of a complex act of obliteration and conciliation, in which he attempted to exorcise his lingering sense of guilt by conflating on a single canvas his feelings of responsibility for the deaths of Conchita and Casagemas. Even at this early stage, painting was a form of magic to him.

In 1903, Picasso’s overpainting La Vie on top of Last Moments was also a way of disavowing his earlier anecdotal, academic style of painting. His later contempt for La Vie, which he characterized as “awful,” reflected not only a rejection of its sentimentality but also his continued uneasiness with the charged and ambivalent feelings involved in its creation.

MATISSE’S EARLY CAREER FOLLOWED a very different trajectory. Less obviously gifted and certainly less precocious than Picasso, he had first studied law and then spent years as an art student. He remained at the academic École des Beaux-Arts for six years, then studied in a series of private studios where he drew from the live model with dogged persistence. In the years immediately following the 1900 World’s Fair, he struggled with poverty, with a financial scandal that almost landed his in-laws in jail (they were unwittingly implicated in their employer’s fraudulent financial scheme), and with a good deal of public indifference toward his work. During that time, he worked his way through the different modes of vision employed in nineteenth-century avantgarde painting, starting with the Impressionists and then moving on to Seurat, van Gogh, Gauguin, and especially Cézanne, who was to remain the greatest and longest-lasting source of inspiration to him. As early as 1899, Matisse made great sacrifices in order to buy a small but powerful Cézanne, Three Bathers, and he was the first of the younger avant-garde artists to absorb the radically new kind of pictorial thought that Cézanne’s painting embodied. Cézanne was, as Matisse said, “a sort of god of painting.”

DURING THE FIRST YEARS OF THE CENTURY, the paths of Matisse and Picasso crossed several times, though the two men apparently never met. They both showed at Berthe Weill’s gallery early in 1902, and their works were hung together for the first time in a group exhibition at Weill’s that June. Both also showed at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, who was Cézanne’s dealer and from whom Matisse had bought his Three Bathers. Picasso participated in a two-person exhibition at Vollard’s in 1901, and Matisse had his first one-man show there in 1904. Both artists had small followings during those years, but until 1905 neither attracted a great deal of attention, and neither could count on loyal or influential collectors for support.

In 1905 this situation began to change. That February, Picasso participated in a three-person show at the Galeries Serrusier on the boulevard Haussmann, for which the influential critic Charles Morice wrote the catalogue essay. A few months later, Picasso’s new friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, published two deeply appreciative review-essays about his work. Referring to the pervasive melancholy associated with Picasso’s Blue Period works, Apollinaire noted that although “It has been said of Picasso that his work bears witness to a precocious disenchantment,” the opposite was true: “Everything enchants him, and his incontestable talent seems to me to be at the service of a fantasy that justly blends the delightful with the horrible, the abject with the refined.”

That same spring, when Matisse exhibited the Neo-Impressionistic Luxe, calme et volupté at the Salon des Indépendants, he was singled out by the critic Louis Vauxcelles as “the leader of a school.” For the summer, Matisse went to Collioure on the Mediterranean coast near the Spanish border, where he was joined by his younger colleague André Derain (who was barely a year older than Picasso). There Matisse began to paint more freely and with brighter colors than he had before. Mixing an emotional intensity inspired by van Gogh with the abstract sense of space that he so admired in Cézanne, he began to formulate the bold kind of chromatic near-abstraction that would be associated with the first avant-garde movement of the new century: Fauvism. (The French word fauve means “wild beast.”)