Chapter 12 I Anarchists on the hills of Montmartre (1) cages

I try to use the purest colors possible, through art and painting, to achieve what even dropping a bomb (and guillotine for doing so) cannot achieve in everyday life. Maurice de Vlaminck One day not long after they met, Max Jacob asked André Salmon: "Have you heard of Racine Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699), a French playwright. He was a court official of Louis XIV., La Fontaine (1621-1695), French allegorical poet. And Boileau Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636-1711), French poet, classicist literary theorist. Served as an official of Louis XIV.?" "Hey, isn't that us!"

When Salmon first came to the Laundry Boat, he found Picasso painting in his studio barefoot.The room was dark, lit only by a single candle.Seeing him coming, Picasso dropped his work and showed his latest works to the visitors.He worked tirelessly, pushing tables and chairs, rummaging through the room, looking for works that he wanted to show among all the paintings, and handing them one by one.And what about Salmon?Like Jacob, Apollinaire, and many others, marveled at the discovery of genius that night. Salmon was a tall, lanky man who also smoked a pipe and wrote poetry as well as a reporter.He founded the magazine Poetry and Prose with Paul Faure (a pillar of the still-nascent Montparnasse art gang).Salmon's apparent seriousness and bluntness belied his great creative genius.His talent makes people in the small world of "Hunter Pavilion" admire and appreciate him.André Delang had a studio on Rue Tourac in Montmartre.De Lang, who was born in a relatively wealthy family, left the comprehensive engineering university that his parents had arranged for him, and also embarked on the winding road of climbing Montmartre-painting.Due to his talent in engineering, he still retains a strong love for manual work despite being engaged in painting.He likes to buy old instruments from the flea market and bring them home for repair or reassembly.One of his favorite ways to pass the time is building small airplanes out of cardboard and finding ways to make them fly.He likes to collect old instruments, take them apart and put them back together again.Realizing that he knew nothing about the literature of his time, he read without sleep or food.His paintings are deep, orderly and solid.From his paintings, people feel a strong rural atmosphere.This can also be felt from his usual attitude towards people and his tall stature.According to his models, while he was working, he would sometimes sit them on his lap, tighten their waists with one hand, and paint with the other.It can be seen from this that when he paints, he not only needs to observe with vision, but also needs to find feeling through touch.

Before coming to settle on Toorak Street, Delang lived in the village where he was born - Satu.It was there that he met his old friend Vlaminck.Vlaminck painted with him for a long time on the banks of the Seine and introduced him to Matisse.An ugly freak-"Fauvism" was officially born from the acquaintance of the three of them. One day, Vlaminck and Delan decided that they must become celebrities in the future.De Lang published a photo of Vlaminck in the newspaper, making him famous all over the world.And the latter will dole out a Pantagruel to his rival, De Lan, the great appetite of the French writer Rabelais.dinner.Vlaminck took the "tabloid" in his hand and sent it to De Lang's house with meals, but what De Lang saw on the third page of the newspaper was a "painter Maurice de Vlaminck" boasting. He was stunned by the advertisement of the special blowing laxative capsule "Pink".

Flemish, Derain, Mangen, Marche, Carmen, and especially Matisse made a big fuss about the "Autumn Art Fair of 1905", which aroused great public outrage in the society.The Fall Art Fair started two years ago as an official art fair to provide opportunities for young artists to exhibit their work.Autumn Art Fair and Seurat (1859-1891), French painter, Impressionist, later split from Impressionism and became Neo-Impressionism.It competed with the "Independent Art Exhibition" founded by Signac and sang against each other.Artists who are dissatisfied with the official academic school and various associations and federations, even if their works are not banned, they also launch such exhibitions.In this way, Courbet Courbet (1819-1877), a French painter. , Degas, Pissarro and Monet all chose the pavilion approved by Napoleon III to hold the "Exhibition of the Rejected".

Matisse, Vlaminck and their cohorts also went to the exhibition grounds during the third "Autumn Art Fair" to engage in some troublesome activities: they brought oil paintings in wood frames that they bought on credit from a carpenter.These oil paintings departed from the rules of painting born of Impressionism and Pointillism.According to Vlaminck, the paintings of the first two genres have entered a stage of stagnation, with no way out.Matisse's view is: "Especially because the oil paintings exhibited in the exhibition belong to the color separation school, so this kind of exhibition completely destroys the art of painting."

These restless good-for-nothings advocate the supremacy of color, and believe that only the power of color is infinite, because it represents light.Matisse from Collioure in the Eastern Pyrenees, a fishing port on the Mediterranean Sea under the Pyrenees.Write to De Lang, urging him to go to the Eastern Pyrenees to see the unique light of his small mountain village.DeLong accepted the invitation.The two painters worked together there for some time.Degas discovered a new concept of light capable of negating shadows in turn.In a letter to Vlaminck, he said: "In order to seek the concept of light, I abandon the existing concepts and obey the new discovery of light." (Fig. 10)

Derain fully embodied his new viewpoint in "Landscape of Collioure" created in 1905.The strange combination of bright red, blue and green in Matisse's "Woman Wearing a Hat" (Fig. 11) created in 1905 aroused the ridicule and anger of many conservative audiences.The skeptic André Gide commented on this painting: a theoretical "reasoning" that is completely divorced from intuition. These painters with new ideas were closer to the Gauguin school and Van Gogh's expressionist school than to the Cézanne school.In the exhibition, their paintings with strong colors, strong contrast between light and dark, and rough pictures were exhibited together in a separate exhibition hall. Louis Vauxell, a well-known painting critic who refused to accept modern art, described these works as As a herd of wild beasts, he dubbed this exhibition hall "beast cage".Fauvism Sauvisme, "Fauvism" or "Fauvism", is one of the modern French schools. In 1905, Matisse and other painters held a painting exhibition in Paris. Because of his painting method surpassing the painting conventions, he was named "the herd of beasts" by critics.Fauvism has a short history, reaching its peak in 1907.They emphasize the expression of subjective feelings in painting, and use large color blocks and lines to form exaggerated and deformed images in order to achieve a "simplified" decorative effect.Thus was born.

Three years later, the above critic and others compared the paintings created by Braque exhibited at the Carnville Gallery to cubes, and Cubism was born.And Louis Vauxell is a visionary in his own way... The appearance of Fauvist paintings caused a lot of discussion among the people, and the President of the Republic refused to cut the ribbon for the opening ceremony of the exhibition.Faced with this incident, the news media was divided. "Le Figaro" said that this is "putting a dung basin that has caused divisions in the painting world to the people's heads."Comments on the works of Fauvism have been published. Here is a passage from an article published by Vlaminck in the "Rouen Journal" on November 20, 1905:

We entered one of the creepiest halls of this colorful exhibition, dumbfounded in astonishment.Here, any description, any presentation and any criticism becomes impossible.Everything in the hall—except the materials used—had nothing to do with painting; there were no figures of any kind, just motley, colorful spots of blue, red, yellow, green, scattered quite randomly on the canvas. side-by-side; it is almost like a child playing a vulgar, innocent and very childish game of patchwork with a box of paint given him as a present. [Excerpt from "Portrait of Death" by Maurice de Vlaminck, published in 1943]

In view of the fact that the art of painting no longer expresses man and nature objectively, for a while, the critics were bewildered, and it was impossible to comment on the works in front of them, and painting criticism could not be launched for a long time.The bad thing is that since the 19th century, artists have become more and more divorced from social reality, reorganizing the world in their own ways.They no longer reflect people or objects in nature on the canvas as in the past, but blindly seek "expression". In their creative life, the pursuit of art occupies a dominant position.In this respect, black African art had a great influence on them.

After temporarily adopting strong light and before completely not paying attention to the form of painting, the painters waved their works that red is not the most dazzling color, and accepted the challenge.Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck were slammed (with a thousand lances).Maurice de Vlaminck, who is poorer than Delang, sometimes needs to smash the paint tubes to make full use of the remaining paint in order to increase the contrast between light and dark.He paints without any theoretical basis, relying entirely on instinct and sudden inspiration.Over time, a certain ferocity and violence appeared in his works, while his partners, on the contrary, began to restrain themselves little by little in this respect.After De Lang gradually embarked on the same or similar path as other official art schools and academic schools, Flemish cut off contact with him. Vlaminck, with reddish-brown hair, has innocent and pure eyes on a stubborn face, and sometimes has a cheerful personality. When he is happy, he shouts and screams, laughs heartily, and devours food voraciously.He was not only very disgusted with various official schools and academic schools, but also had no interest in art in museums, cemeteries and churches.He admitted that it was indeed Anarchism that led him step by step to develop into Fauvism. In this way, my desire to destroy all old routines and discard "blind obedience" in order to recreate a world of sensuality, liveliness and freedom has finally come true. [Excerpt from "Portrait of Death" by Maurice de Vlaminck, published in 1943] However, he concluded that he was only engaged in painting, and that the best representative of Fauvism was Francois Claudius Ravachol (1859-1892), a French anarchist who had committed several murders.After being hanged, he became a symbolic figure of anarchism. . Vlaminck has many insights, this is just one of them.When he expresses his opinion, he is always impassioned.His friends always agree with him.Georges Charenthal said: One day, Vollard was having lunch at his house.When he saw the painter's seven-year-old daughter lighting a cigarette on the dining table, he suddenly lost his appetite.He politely pointed out to her that smoking was not good at this age.This very disobedient little girl turned to the art dealer and said: "You can control it, old guy?" ] Vlaminck didn't really like Montmartre.He goes there now and then, just to have dinner with his mates.At dawn, he walked back to his home in the suburbs of Paris.Around the time he met Picasso, he was trying to find improvised ways to support his wife and three daughters.He played sports such as cycling and rowing, or played the violin in a gypsy band.For a few francs, he had conspired with others to cheat at the market, and fought with rich people.Before the end of the second round, he was knocked to the ground by the opponent.Later, he decided that writing required less material material than painting, and he began to write.After writing novels with evocative titles: From One Bed to Another and Life in Red Shorts, he began writing his memoirs. When he first managed to sell his paintings to independents, he believed that fate was finally smiling on him.After some research, he discovered that his benefactor was from the port city of Le Havre.He bought the two paintings he thought were the ugliest for his son-in-law, the first signed by Vlaminck and the second by Derain. The third representative of Fauvism is the strong and strong Georges Braque.Georges Braque was a Norman, born in Argenteuil.His grandfather and father owned an architectural paint business, and both were amateur painters.Braque studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Le Havre.There he also worked with a decorative painter. In 1900, he came to Montmartre, and then abandoned his father's painting path to devote himself to professional painting.He lives on Three Brothers Street. In 1904, he bought a studio on Auxerre Street not far from the "laundry boat".He didn't meet Picasso until 1907, later than everyone else. Brack, tall, strong, muscular, strong and powerful, with thick hair in natural curls, walked like a big fat bear.Braque was very popular with the girls, and he often danced with them at the Moulin Rouge in Galette.When he crossed the Seine in a carriage to the left bank, he often climbed on the top of the carriage and sang while playing the accordion. Braque is very recognizable.He usually only wears blue overalls, canary yellow shoes, and a hat pushed down on his head.For several months, the Montmartre Fauvists all donned the same hat.He bought a total of more than a hundred of these hats at one time and gave them to friends. In 1905, Dutchman Van Dongen lived in the "Hunter House".He was as stocky as Blake, with red hair and a big beard.He has done everything: selling newspapers on the street, painting houses, handyman, market security... Like many others, he also sold the caricature "The Butter Dish" and other pornography, obscenity or prohibited only. Prints sold hidden in coats.He was one of the few residents of the "laundry boats" who painted life in Montmartre.The characteristic of his creation is that he only finds his models for painting from the sidewalks of Montmartre, the prostitutes in the shops of the Garrett Square, or the dancers of the Garrett Moulin Rouge.While other painters were also residents of the "laundry boat", they dismissed this creative source of Van Dongen, Villette, Utrillo, Boulport, Toulouse Lautrec. (Figure 12) Van Dongen lived with the foreigners in Montmartre, but painted more like the French.Perhaps it was this that kept him away from the great upheavals of the modern painting movement (because he opposed all artistic theory and refused to attend evening parties at Picasso's house), but he often appeared in Paris salons where high-society women gathered.These women all dreamed of being able to have the giant paint a portrait of themselves wearing pearls and earrings.Soon after, he organized some large-scale networking activities at his studio on the rue d'Anfer-Rochereau in Paris. André Salmon was relentless when he criticized others.He commented on the heavy use of color in van Dongen's paintings, and said that van Dongen probably confused his palette with the model's makeup case.Picasso left van Dongen soon after, either because van Dongen found life in his hometown of Deauville more comfortable than anywhere, making him a high-society painter soon, or Picasso could never forgive Dongen for Ferrer. Nand Olivier painted several portraits, and the two of them had sex while they were painting. (Fernand defended herself by saying that Picasso had also painted portraits of many other women, and that she asked Van Dongen to paint her in revenge...) Van Dongen's life on the "laundry boat" was also very poor, which seriously hurt his self-esteem, and he never wanted to go back to that place.At that time, he lived in the studio with his wife and daughter.His wife, Guisi, is a vegetarian, and the family only eats spinach every day; everyone in his family is very hospitable; the room is too small, except for the bed, there are several easels and a table; the noise from the neighboring house; Indoors, the heat was unbearable in summer and frost in winter; the few sous in his pockets were barely enough to feed his children.Pablo Picasso, Max Jacob and André Salmon had joined forces on several occasions to buy talcum powder for his children at the nearest pharmacy.When their infant daughter, Dolly, was fed and finally fell asleep, the Van Dongen couple counted the remaining money to see if they could have something to eat.But the conclusion is often: no. After Volald bought some of his paintings, Van Dongen used the money he paid to move his family to an apartment suite on Lamarque Street, and at the same time rented a house for himself as a studio .Since then, his family has cut off relations with spinach, and people can no longer see his shadow on Montmartre.The place he prefers to go is the direction of the royal palace in downtown Paris, and he has begun to have the habit of eating dishes with sauce and meat with blood in restaurants.The owner of the restaurant took the opportunity to post a large number of promotional advertisements on the walls around the restaurant, proudly playing the signboard of "Painters dine here". Where can van Dongen be seen putting food in his mouth, chewing it up, digesting it, and smoking it? Please hurry to No. 10, Good Boy Street Jourdin Restaurant Juan Gris also took care of his family in Paris.He came to the "laundry boat" in 1906 and lived in the house vacated by van Dongen.Gris is a 19-year-old young man with a dark complexion, black hair and dark eyes.His best friend in Paris, Carnville, later described him as "a lively little dog, kind, affectionate, but a little clumsy." [From Carnville's book Juan, 1946 Gris"] Like everyone else, Gris also lived a very poor life.He had been selling sketches to some pictorial agencies, until one day Clovis Sagot bought a batch of his paintings, which ended the precarious life of the family.On the wall of the studio, he wrote many numbers with charcoal, recording the number of items he bought on credit in various stores on Montmartre Hill.Once he got back a sum of money, he immediately asked Levedi to settle and pay off some debts as soon as possible. Gris lives in the "laundry boat", but he escapes the noisy and chaotic life of "Smart Rabbit".He rarely drinks alcohol, only coffee.People often meet him squatting in the aisle of the "Hunter Pavilion" in a low mood and listless, stroking his compatriot's puppy with his left hand to see if it bites him, while continuing to paint with his right hand. Picasso harbored an inexplicably intense jealousy of Juan Gris.He had no doubts about the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Gris, and between Carnville and Gris.In the 1920s, Diaghilev Diaghilev (1872-1929), a Russian ballet dramatist.Signed a contract with Gris to produce costumes and sets for his new ballet.Then he backtracked, tore up the contract, and gave Picasso the order contract.The incident cast a heavy shadow over the relationship between the two painters. The elder brother (Picasso) has nothing to blame for the younger brother (Gris), other than Gris' independence and the fact that he is also Spanish.This once again proves that Picasso wants to be the boss of his accomplices. Everyone must obey him, only him, and no one should be independent. Gris lived on the "laundry boat" for fifteen years.In his life, two women have been central to him: Josette, whom he met in 1913, and the mother of his son.When the weather is fine and the sun is shining, he hangs his son on the window frame with a swaddling cloth to bask in the sun.Picasso loved Van Dongen's youngest daughter very much, and he also loved Gries's child. Gris died of leukemia at the age of 40.During the course of treatment, doctors misdiagnosed leukemia as tuberculosis.He died a terrible death.At that time he lived in Boulogne, near the Carnville family.Carnville in his garden, often clearly heard his friend's groans and screams of pain. Picasso was saddened to learn of the death of his compatriot.Gertrude Stein was very angry and reprimanded severely: "Please put away your late tears!"... thinking that he shouldn't hate Gris when he was alive, and only show false pain after death. Among the painters who lived in the "laundry boat", Gris was the least close to the Picasso gang.Others eat, live, and move together, and even change clothes. On Sunday, the gang went to the Saint-Pierre market to shop for the same clothes.When they strolled together on the Avenue Montmartre, it became a scene on the street, and pedestrians on the road stopped to watch. Due to the strict implementation of the painting rules of their school, De Lang even changed his clothes into the colors of Fauvism: green suits, red waistcoats, yellow shoes, and white coats with black and brown checks, all of which were imported directly from the UK ; later, their decor is a little more modest, all blue: blue work clothes for work, and a clean set for outings, all blue suits neatly arranged in the closet according to cleanliness. Vlaminck, also a pupil of the Satu School, wears a checked tweed coat, a melon cap with a jasmine feather and a wooden multicolored tie.Guillaume Apollinaire admired the dual purpose of this tie: it can be used as a baton when hit, and in turn, it can be used as a violin by snapping and tightening the cat's intestines on it. When invited to a dinner party, Max Jacobs always dressed deliberately, knowing that he was expected to be different.He dressed himself as a magician: silk cape, folding top hat and monocle. André Varno wore a velvet cape, Francis Calco in snow-white gloves (he had four dozen of them), Marc Orland in a colorful sweater and cyclist socks.Walking along the Rue Montmartre, followed by his Basset Hound. For the zinc workers, Picasso chose blue overalls, espadrilles, a hat, and a scarlet cotton shirt with white spots, also bought at the St. Pierre market.He once tried to grow a beard (in his Self-Portrait in Blue, painted in 1906, he has a beard), and soon shaved it all off.Finally, he was very disgusted with the crazy expressiveness of painters.It is for this reason that when he gave up the mythical blue period, he criticized Modigliani and his bad words and deeds that went to extremes in all aspects.However, during the "laundry boat" period, Italian painters' clothes were known to be well-groomed, in stark contrast to the rest.He has the same clothing habits as Guillaume Apollinaire and never wears fancy clothes. The painters of Lavignon, in these grotesque and varied costumes, engaged in surrealism: they ran down the street, shouting: "Long live Rimbaud! Down with Paul Laforgue" (1842 —1911), French statesman.!" Their behavior sometimes led to incidents, which always ended in brawls.One day, they had crossed the Seine and returned to the Pont des Arts.In order to show his strength, De Lang twisted and bent the guardrail on the steep slope of the river bank.He and his wife then threw themselves into a scuffle of beatings and cursing until the gendarmerie caught him.The whole incident ended with a full police call. Heroes come out of troubled times, and all chaos is a good opportunity to learn.This is especially true for unofficial art.The Surrealists loved these damnable poets.They preferred to dance at the Garrett Moulin Rouge than to sit on the tiers of seats in the theater.For four sous one could dance a whole afternoon of quadruplets and polkas, warming the feet as well as the heart.Before long, they discovered exotic forms of African art.During this period, the artists of the Picasso Gang walked down the Montmartre Hill and went to the streets of Paris to applaud other artists-boxers and street performers.These people, like the artists on Montmartre, are also people who completely abandon traditional consciousness and traditional concepts.