Una vida multicolor
In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900-1910 review –
'you might need sunglasses'
The 1900s Paris art scene blazes into multicoloured life in Sue Roe's vividly high-pitched group biography
Pablo Picasso in his Montmartre studio, 1908. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.
Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality. But for Matisse, after a childhood spent in grey northern France, colour is a scorching glare that hurts the eyes. On a trip to Corsica he was amazed by "the strong deep-blue and coral-toned light", just as André Derain, during a summer in the south at Collioure, marvelled at the bronze sun, the hillsides of burnt orange, and the scintillating white of sails out to sea.
For Derain, colour discharged light and erupted like dynamite, although his landlady was unconvinced when he painted "a yellow moon in a green sky!" His colleague Maurice de Vlaminck was even more strident: he painted red landscapes streaked with crimson, as if the earth were spontaneously combusting, and one of his sunsets, according to the dealer Vollard, was "squeezed out of tubes of paint in a fit of rage".
These artists were theorists of colour, who subscribed to Cézanne's notion that there were no lines in nature, only overlapping zones of brightness or shadow. Believing in what Roe calls "a democracy of tonal relations", they also democratised the pigments they used by making art out of life's residue. Braque mixed his paints with soil, sawdust, pipe tobacco and coffee grounds, and Utrillo roughened the texture of his colours by grinding lime, cement, sand or glue.
Roe attributes this blazing palette to the liberties of Parisian life. When they arrived in the city in 1900, Picasso and his gang of Catalan cronies were scandalised by its gaudy carnality. Back in Barcelona, prostitutes discreetly received clients behind closed doors, but on the hill of Montmartre – traditionally regarded as the mons veneris of Paris, despite the presence of nunneries and the bleached basilica of Sacré Coeur – hookers circulated freely as they flaunted painted bodies, "their hair dyed black as coal, their cheeks rouged the colour of poppies".
In the sooty murk of the cabarets Picasso and his friends frequented, paint was the only source of light. The filthiest of these dens was the Lapin Agile, "so dirty that people could barely see"; rather than cleaning up, the proprietor commissioned his patrons to paint the walls, and paid them with cocktails concocted from mint-green Pernod, and pomegranate-red grenadine. Colours, served in this form, could make you drunk.
The chromatic vibrancy of their canvases earned the members of Roe's group the derogatory nickname of "fauves", meaning wild beasts, and their fauvism was a matter of temperament as well as a pictorial style. Vlaminck called himself "a tender barbarian, filled with violence", while Braque affected a coarse, brash manner modelled on the boxers and cinematic gangsters he admired. Gertrude Stein's partner Alice B Toklas, arriving from genteel San Francisco where her family owned a goldmine, shuddered at the "brutal-looking thumbs" of Alice Pincet, a friend of Picasso's current mistress, and blamed her "wild quality" on her proletarian origins. Before long, Toklas loosened up: feeling stuffy on the train to Milan, she unlaced her cherry-coloured corset and hurled it out the window as a gesture of liberation. Derain dressed like an iridescent painting on legs, sporting a green suit or a red coat accessorised with yellow shoes. For the summer he had a white jacket "with chocolate and coffee-coloured quadrilles".
Roe's style is as avidly sensory as the behaviour of her subjects. She smells the "scents of musk and patchouli" exuded by Picasso's first paintings of Montmartre, and overhears the polyphonic chants of traders hawking their wares in the streets of the district. The visual distractions and the circumambient uproar make it hard for her to keep her story on track: perhaps she too follows Cézanne's theory about the irrelevance of straight lines. Her narrative scampers off on detours about fashion, ballet, film and aviation, and in doing so strays far from Montmartre. Although she tries to concentrate on the rivalry between Picasso and Matisse, she is understandably reluctant to exclude a subsidiary cast of eccentric hangers-on; as a result, the group of like-minded artists turns into an unruly mob.
This bright, high-pitched chaos catches the spirit of the times, although by the end the succession of banquets, balls and alcoholic blasts exhausted me, and I was relieved when Roe described the closure of bohemia. The remaining windmills of Montmartre were demolished in 1911, and the shanty town on the northern slope was cleared away; Picasso moved to Montparnasse, where he continued to live "like a pauper, but with plenty of money". Roe's version of the decade is fun, but perhaps a little too lurid.Modernism, after all, was about revolt not revelry – or is an orgy a revolution by other means?
In Montmartre is published by Fig Tree (£20). Click here to buy it for £14.99 with free UK p&p
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