The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (26 page)

Among the first of those searching for an artistic style that would reveal more than photographs were the impressionists, beginning around 1880. Much of their work is concerned with light, especially in landscapes, creating effects that earlier artists would have regarded as distortions. One of the impressionists’ artistic successors was Paul Cézanne. (He originally exhibited with them.) Not well known until later in his life, his work received major exhibitions in Paris from 1905 through 1907, the year after his death. Cézanne believed that all objects could be expressed as spheres, cubes, or cylinders, and this can be seen in his later work, though the objects are still represented in a recognizable way. Cézanne also took the first steps toward painting objects from different perspectives in the same picture. All of these techniques made their impression on Picasso, who was still searching for a new path of his own.

Picasso offered, or was asked, to paint the portraits of Leo and Gertrude Stein. The one of Leo was quickly completed, but Gertrude’s seemed more of a problem. She must have been unusually patient, for after she had come to his studio for eighty sittings, he still pronounced it unfinished. Usually a fast worker, he painted the head out entirely, leaving a blank space. “I can’t see you any longer when I look,” he told Gertrude.
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Perhaps feeling for the first time that Paris did not provide enough inspiration, perhaps unhappy that Matisse seemed more successful, Picasso thought about going away. Apollinaire suddenly came to the rescue, bringing the prominent art dealer Ambroise Vollard to the Bateau-Lavoir studio. Vollard had previously rejected one of Picasso’s works when Max Jacob tried to sell it to him, and had even called Picasso mad. Now, however, he seemed eager to purchase almost everything he saw. He went off in a taxi with thirty paintings stuffed into the backseat, for which he gave Picasso two thousand francs. Though this was actually one of the great art bargains of all time, it was a windfall to Picasso, who had been scraping by on far less than one thousand francs a year.

To celebrate, Picasso took Fernande to Barcelona to meet his parents, showing off not only the beautiful woman he had acquired but some of his sudden wealth as well. He decided to spend the summer in Gosol, a tiny village in the Pyrenees that could be reached only on the back of a mule. It was a wild place, nestled between Spain and France, yet seeming to belong to neither. Fernande recalled, “In that vast, empty, magnificent countryside… he no longer seemed, as he did in Paris, to be outside society.”
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There, that summer, he found the inspiration he had been seeking: the Iberian heads he recalled from the Louvre came to life in this desolate, ageless locale. When he returned to Paris, Picasso took out the unfinished portrait of Gertrude Stein and painted in a masklike face with almond-shaped eyes and a stern mouth. With the hands of the sitter in the foreground the only other visible parts of the body, it is Picasso’s
Mona Lisa.
When he showed the painting to Gertrude, she was delighted and put it on her wall. When others complained that she didn’t look like that, Picasso replied calmly, “She will.”
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Later that same year, he made a self-portrait with a face clearly inspired by the same source. “I did not use models again after Gosol,” he explained. “Because just then I was working apart from any model. What I was looking for was something else.”
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Picasso became interested not just in the Iberian heads that had inspired Gertrude Stein’s portrait, but in African art as well, particularly angular masks. The Bande à Picasso, perhaps inspired by their leader, began to look for and even purchase examples of “primitive” masks and statuettes in small shops. André Derain, a painter who frequently visited the Bateau-Lavoir studio, recalled, “On the rue de Rennes, I often passed the shop of Père Sauvage. There were Negro statuettes in his window. I was struck by their character, their purity of line.… So I bought one and showed it to Gertrude Stein, whom I was visiting that day. And then Picasso arrived. He took to it immediately.”
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Years later, on one of the few occasions Picasso talked about his influences, he recalled those days. He had gone to the Trocadéro Palace, where an exhibition of African masks was on view. “I understood that it was very important: something was happening to me, right? The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things.… The Negro pieces were
intercesseurs,
mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything — against unknown, threatening spirits.… I understood; I too am against every-thing. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! Everything!… I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for.… They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent.… If we give spirits a form, we become independent.… I understood why I was a painter.”
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iv

At the beginning of 1907, Apollinaire met a young Belgian named Géry Pieret; they were working as writers for a magazine that offered advice to investors. (Evidently, the advice was not entirely objective, for the police appeared one day and shut down the publication.) The year before, Apollinaire had moved into his own apartment on the rue Henner, near the base of Montmartre. Picasso had introduced him to Marie Laurencin, a young woman who aspired to be a painter, and she had moved in with him. Marie recalled that they would make love in an armchair because Apollinaire did not like to muss the bed.

Pieret needed a place to stay, and Apollinaire unwisely let him use the couch to sleep on. Marie Laurencin recalled that he tried to make himself useful. One day, Pieret said to her, “Marie, this afternoon I am going to the Louvre: can I bring you anything you need?”
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She assumed he meant the Magasins du Louvre, a department store. Instead he returned with the stone statuette that four years later, in his letter to the
Paris-Journal,
he admitted stealing from the “real” Louvre, the museum. The person he sold it to was Picasso, who purchased a second when Pieret pilfered that from the museum the following day. The theft of those two statuettes was to have a greater impact on the history of art than the disappearance of the
Mona Lisa
itself.

The previous winter, Picasso had ordered a large canvas stretched and mounted. He was preparing to paint a major work with several figures, something that would rival Matisse’s
Le bonheur de vivre
and even Cézanne’s unfinished painting
Baigneuses.
Both of these works had depicted nudes in a landscape. Picasso almost never worked outdoors, so he chose a setting for his nudes that would, by itself, guarantee to shock: a brothel.

Picasso had patronized brothels in the prostitutes’ quarter in Barcelona before he reached his fifteenth birthday,
³³
and he painted this picture entirely from memory. His first sketches for the planned painting showed four prostitutes with two customers, a sailor and another man carrying a skull. Eventually Picasso dropped the crude symbolism of the skull and then eliminated the men altogether, adding a fifth prostitute. The viewers of the painting would now be the “customers.”

Picasso continued to draw studies for the work, experimenting, trying new forms. No one is sure how long it took him, but finally he applied paint to his huge canvas, finishing the work, by some accounts, in May 1907. There are five figures in it, all apparently nude women covered only by a few scraps of white cloth. The faces of the three on the left reflect the Iberian sculpture that had already contributed to the portrait of Gertrude Stein and to Picasso’s 1906 self-portrait. The faces of the two figures on the right are more out of the ordinary — grotesque, some would call them. What they most resemble are bronze masks from the French Congo, like those then on display in the ethnological museum at the Trocadéro Palace. The Congolese masks were often covered with striations and incised lines, but Picasso had distorted even those characteristics, twisting and shaping them to his own design so that they are ultimately his own, not African.

The faces were not the only stunningly different element of the painting. Picasso had abandoned perspective altogether, flattening the images and showing the women in contorted poses. One, squatting at the far right, lets the viewer see her back, front, and sides at the same time. These are not the soft, fleshy nudes of earlier painters; they are all jagged edges and triangles, lines and plane surfaces. The only other recognizable object in the painting is a haphazard collection of fruit at the bottom, as if Picasso were thumbing his nose at all the formal still lifes and lovingly painted bowls of fruit of previous artists. Much later, Picasso was to remark, “When the cubist painter thought, ‘I’m going to paint a fruit bowl,’ he set to work knowing that a fruit bowl in art and a fruit bowl in life had nothing in common.’”
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As a work by a serious artist, the painting was a departure of shattering proportions. It was as if Picasso had taken the pistol Jarry
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had given him and fired it at all previous art. He had committed what anarchists called the “propaganda of the deed” — he had put the ideology into action. Though the figures are static, the overall impact was violent.

No one except Fernande had seen the painting while it was in progress. Now, Picasso allowed those closest to him, those he most respected, to view it. No one understood it. Max Jacob thought that the best thing a friend could do was to remain silent. André Derain worried that “one day we shall find Pablo has hanged himself behind his great canvas.”
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Apollinaire, Picasso’s herald and promoter, muttered, “Révolution,” but could not bring himself to express anything at all about this painting in print. Later, writing about the theft of the two statuettes, Apollinaire said that he had tried to persuade Picasso “to give the statues back to the Louvre, but he was absorbed in his esthetic studies, and indeed from them Cubism was born. He told me that he had damaged the statues in an attempt to discover certain secrets of the classic yet barbaric art to which they belonged.”
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But it was not cubism that the statuettes inspired: it was this strange painting, which as yet had no name, so friends dubbed it
The Philosophical Brothel.
Not till later would it be given the title by which it is known today:
Les demoiselles d’Avignon
(
The Young Ladies of Avignon
).

Some viewers were more outspoken. Matisse interpreted it as an attack on modern art, a mockery, and vowed revenge.
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Leo Stein laughed when he saw it, thinking the painting a joke, but came closest of anyone to understanding it when he said, “You’ve been trying to paint the fourth dimension. How amusing!”
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It was indeed a new dimension that Picasso had discovered, blazing a trail that other painters would follow. Just as non-Euclidean geometry posited a realm unfamiliar to those who saw only with their eyes, and quantum physicists dealt with things that could not be seen, so did Picasso, who once said, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
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At first, few were able to see his accomplishment clearly. The dealer Vollard, who had so recently bought up virtually every canvas Picasso had to offer, now pronounced a virtual death sentence on the young Spaniard, saying he had no future as a painter.
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However, at the very moment Vollard was leaving Picasso’s studio, in walked Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a German who had become a banker in London before deciding that his true calling in life was to own an art gallery in Paris. That day at the Bateau-Lavoir, he purchased most of the studies that Picasso had done for the startling new work — a windfall for Picasso because he usually let visitors carry such things away for nothing — and asked to purchase the painting as well. But Picasso must have realized from the reaction of others that it was not yet time for his vision to be displayed, and he refused to sell it. A year later, he removed it from its stretcher, rolled it up, and put it away. Kahnweiler, however, would remain Picasso’s dealer for the rest of his life.

v

One of those who had seen the painting and been awed by it was Georges Braque, a former housepainter from Normandy who had come to Paris and studied art in night classes. His first paintings were in the fauve style, of which Matisse was the master. Matisse, who may have been having second thoughts about
Les demoiselles,
brought him to Picasso’s studio to see it. Timidly, Braque pointed out that the noses were wrong. Picasso insisted, “Noses are like that.” Braque protested that Picasso was asking the viewer to accept something too difficult: “It’s as if you wanted us to… drink kerosene in order to spit fire.”
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However, Braque turned out to be the first to imbibe. That winter he painted a large nude that had the striated features characteristic of the two African-inspired figures in
Les demoiselles.
He spent the following summer, 1908, at L’Estaque, a fishing village in Provence, where Cézanne had worked in his later years. The landscapes and village scenes Braque painted took another step toward simple geometric forms. At the same time, Picasso was working at La Rue des Bois, near Paris.
Les demoiselles
had exhausted him, and now — having actually discovered the body of another painter in the Bateau-Lavoir hanging from a beam, the victim of drugs and despair — he fled the city, searching for inspiration as he had once done in Gosol. He too began to turn everything he saw into geometric forms — not as spectacularly as the nudes of Avignon, but more severely and rigorously. Taking the most radical of the five nudes, the one on the far right, he further developed the ideas that had led him to paint it as if trying to see all sides at once.