Chapter 17 I The Anarchists on the Hill of Montmartre (2) The Maiden of Avignon

Look, this is the real Tahiti, that is, the Tahiti exactly as imagined. Paul Gauguin and Charles Morris In Montmartre, as on the banks of the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the Seine, there is a pot boiling, all of which no one has really tasted, but which looks hot to the touch.What exactly is cooking in the pot?Answer: Primitivism, African art. Picasso had gone to Gossoles, and Matisse had just returned from Collioure.The border between France and Spain separates the mountain village of Gossole from this fishing port.However, art knows no boundaries.On the mountain, Picasso kept discovering new simplicity and simplicity; on the foot of the mountain, Matisse was fully exploiting the vast creative world around him.

Gertrude Stein knows exactly where and how the conflict between the two artists arises and develops. One day, not Saturday.Matisse was supposed to come to her house that day.But when he came to the window of Reimana (nicknamed "Wild Papa") on Rue de Wren, he stopped decisively.Mr. Reymana, a collector of foreign rarities, has a blackwood African figurine in his window.It was a sculpture by the Congolese sculptor Willy: a seated figure with its head held high but no eyes.The appearance of that statue, and the proportions of its parts, are entirely a matter of imagination.Contrary to traditional Western sculptures, this statue does not pay much attention to the depiction of musculature, which is very peculiar and novel.

Matisse came to the Rue Fleuris, and Picasso had just left.Picasso saw the statue too, after returning from Gossole.He looked at the work for a long time, and then he returned to his residence in Montmartre, and his mind was greatly shocked. The next day, Max Jacob saw him busy painting in the studio.But he painted some strange heads, always drawing eyes, nose and mouth in one stroke, without any interruption or pause in the middle; and correcting the statement of the hostess of Fleuris Street, he said with certainty that once, Picasso When , Matisse, Apollinaire and Salmon had dinner at his home, Matisse introduced the statue of Willy to Picasso.Apollinaire never mentioned it, and Salmon didn't remember it.

The reason why Matisse knows African art is because he often goes to Trocadero, also called Palais de Chaillot, Shire Palace, a very grand underground theater.ethnographic museum.There are a large number of precious items brought back by French colonialists from America, Africa and Oceania.These items were either still stacked in the shipping boxes, or were stacked haphazardly in dusty cabinets.Apollinaire also seemed to have protested against such a wanton treatment of such a precious treasure.He once suggested that these treasures be handed over to the Louvre.At that time, Picasso had not yet set foot in the Trocadéro Museum. In order to study ancient Iberian statues, he often went to the Louvre.

In this two-person game (Matisse and Picasso), a third person was inserted: André Derain, and he played a decisive role. DeLong's keen interest in black African art started earlier than others.He was familiar not only with Tocadero but also with the British Museum, where he discovered New Zealand primitivist painting.When he was studying Fauvism with Matisse, he had already talked about black African art to Matisse, and later he also talked to Vlaminck about the black African art he knew: When I visited the British Museum and the Black African Museum in London, I was so excited, it was unbelievable, and the performances were fascinating.

[Excerpt from André Derain's "Letter to Vlaminck", published in 1906] Under Delang's repeated instigation, Picasso stepped into the threshold of the ethnographic museum.Later, it was also Delang, or mainly Delang took some squares, ethnic groups in Gabon, Guinea, and Cameroon.The main representatives of Fangge art are some Yuanlong statues.The mask was for Picasso.This mask had as much impact on the mind of the Spanish painter Picasso as when he first saw the statue of Vili. This mask has a story.The story happened before the night when Matisse left Mr. Reimana's house and went to Frelis Street again.It is true that Matisse and Picasso would not have met without Gertrude Stein, yet she was not the one who introduced them to black African art.Calco, Dorjeles and Sandras can all testify to this.

So, who was the one who introduced black African art to the two of them?It was Maurice de Vlaminck. One afternoon, after several hours of painting on the banks of the Seine in the Argenteuil district of the northern suburbs of Paris, Flemish left the shore and entered a tavern.He asked for a glass of white wine, and just after taking a sip, he found three strange things sandwiched between two bottles on a bookshelf.He stood up, walked over, and found three black African sculptures, two of which were red, yellow and white, from Dahomey, and the other was black, from the Ivory Coast.Vlaminck was particularly excited, in his own words: "I was shaken from the bottom of my heart." It was these sculptures that revealed black African art to him.

He immediately bought the three sculptures. The tavern owner asked for no money. He bought everyone a drink and took them home. A few days later, he hosted a friend of his father's.He saw the three black African items and gave him three more: two Ivory Coast statues and a square mask.His wife thought they were very ugly and unsightly when placed indoors, but Vlaminck was extremely happy that he owned these art treasures.He hung the square mask on the wall above his bed.When De Lang saw it, he was so excited that he immediately collapsed to the ground.He wanted to buy it, but Vlaminck refused.

"Not even for twenty francs?" "Yes, not for 20 francs." A week later, Delang came again.He offered to buy it for 50 francs, and Vlaminck had to give in.Derain kept the mask in his studio on Toorak Street.It was there that Picasso saw black African art for the first time.De Lang's studio is the real birthplace of Picasso's black African art. It does not matter whether Matisse or Picasso was first exposed to black African art.Of the two of them, one was inspired by Gossole, the other by Collioure, Derain by both, and Gauguin by both of them, because Gauguin was impressed by his meeting at the World's Fair. The exhibits on Africa and Oceania of that era are also mesmerizing. At the Autumn Art Fair in 1906, Matisse, Picasso, and Derain were all simultaneously shaken up by an exhibition dedicated to the Tahitian statues.Since then, they have all begun to collect artistic treasures from other countries, other eras, and other cultures, abandoning traditional art, and raising the subjective initiative of creators to unprecedented heights.Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who still retained Russian-Germanic nationality at that time, was a Russian painter who later became a German and then a French citizen.Primitivists who admit to being "pure artists" also "only love the connotation of their works, and discard all relatively minor things". [Excerpt from Kandinsky's "Spirit in Art", published in 1969]

Matisse and Picasso gradually added black African art elements to their creations.The former embodies black African art in his paintings, while the latter shifts his creative focus to create black African sculptures.The duel between Matisse and Picasso began.Not only in the brush and ink of painting, but also in large-scale famous paintings.This is well known to everyone. Matisse drew his knife out of its sheath first, and assumed a duel posture.At the Independent Art Exhibition in 1906, the only work he exhibited, "The Joy of Life", soon became a well-known masterpiece (Figure 21).No matter in terms of size (175cm×241cm) or novelty, this work can be called the best painting.It is a clever combination of primitivism, civilized brutalism and dream poetry that the painter found in Collioure. "The Joy of Life" completely got rid of the influence of Neo-Impressionism.

Clearly, this presents an opportunity for the critics to do what they can, to make the most of it.The critics, in close cooperation with the ridicule and sarcasm of others, said that this was a "random creation beyond the ancestors", an "empty painting", music art, literary art, but no plastic art.They condemned the juxtaposition of colours, the outer contours were now too thin and now too heavy, their anatomical distortions of the human body, their abandonment of pointillism, their use of toning, and so on.Even Signac, who once bought a "disgraceful work" "Luxury, Peace and Pleasure" (Fig. 22), believed that Matisse had gone astray. (Signac suffered rejection from the Romantic Impressionists along with his friend Seurat, and Pissarro had forced him against Monet and Renoir). In 1906, Matisse became the leader of the cubist vanguard.It was later revealed that he was a serious conservative figure when it became necessary to preserve Cubism.The year before, at the Independence exhibition, Gauguin's friend Charles Maurice had accused his friend of following the "pointillist" clique in relation to "Luxury, Peace and Pleasure".A few months later, the exhibition reopened with "Woman in a Hat".Mattis is the most controversial figure among reformists. Even his most loyal friends were beginning to waver.Facing "The Joy of Living", Leon Stein came and went.He hesitated, squirmed, and bewildered.After repeated thinking, he finally concluded that it was a major event in the painting world and a representative work of the beginning of the new world. It was this painting that made Matisse a master of modern painting.So, he decided to buy that painting. The next year, Matisse repeated his tricks.This time the painting is "Blue Nude: Commemorating Biskra 1907" (Fig. 23), which was created based on his travel experience in Algeria in 1906.The critics once again criticized and criticized the strange outlines of his works, the deformation of the human body, the face like a mask, and the bluish complexion, etc., saying that it was "difficult to understand".Louis Vauxell candidly admits that he doesn't understand anything about the art of painting that he calls "shaky simplicity".It was Matisse and Derain who took the lead in applying this simplistic approach to their creations.Others described the painter Matisse as "slick" and called his paintings "ugly worlds". This time, as usual, the Leon Steins bought the painting again. During this period, Picasso continued to persist in his own research and exploration amidst the noise of the "laundry boat".Under the horrified gaze of Max Jacob, he kept drawing something like a prehistoric man in a cave. After "Portrait of Gertrude Stein" (Fig. 24), he painted "Self-Portrait" and "Self-Portrait with Palette" (Fig. 25) in 1906.Then he began to create busts of women, and in 1907 he painted Bust of Women with Big Ears (Fig. 26). He sharpened his sword and geared up, always ready to give Mattis a severe counterattack.Picasso had seen the work of his rival Matisse at the Stein's house.Like many others, he was shocked and stunned.However, he believes that those who promote Matisse's paintings as "a revolution" are wrong.Matisse's work is indeed a pinnacle of art, but the pinnacle of classical art.He is expressing traditional content in modern language.Kandinsky also held a similar view at the same time. He said: From Matisse, he saw that he was a great painter of modern painting and a genius in using color, but he was the same as Debussy (1862). —1918), French composer. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music at the age of 11, won the Rome Prize in 1884, and was sent to Rome to study. His early works were influenced by Impressionism.Hearing the performance of oriental bands such as Java at the World Expo, he was deeply inspired, and then tried to break through the stereotypes.Later, under the influence of Impressionism and Symbolist poetry, Impressionism in the field of music was created.Most of his works use poems, paintings, and natural scenery as themes, and highlight the subjective impressions in his sensory world.Give full play to the "color" expressiveness of sound, and use the combination of pentatonic scale, diatonic scale, color and sound to create a hazy, erratic, empty and quiet artistic conception.Similarly, he is an Impressionist painter who did not break with "traditional beauty". Don't people say that artists go too far?Deep down in his heart, Picasso thought that Matisse had stopped advancing too early, and he must break with traditional art completely. After months of research and devising sketches that served as a preparatory stage, Picasso brought the tip of his pen to the throat of what he identified as his transcendent target.He began painting his "The Maiden of Avignon".In his mind, this painting is a powerful counterattack to Matisse's "Joy of Living". It can be seen from the sketches that he originally wanted to paint a sailor in a brothel, and a medical student entered a room with a sailor and five women standing in the room.Why choose Avignon?Because when he was painting, Picasso's mind suddenly appeared on Avignon Street, not far from his residence in Barcelona, ​​where he often went to buy paper and paint.As for the sailor, Max Jacobs was on his mind.Because Max also told him that his ancestral home is Avignon, and besides that there are a large number of brothels in this city.In preparation, Picasso wore a seaman's underwear for his poet friends, one of the women was Fernand Olivier, another was Marie Laurence, and the third was Max's in Avignon. grandmother. In 1933, Picasso confirmed this to Carnville. [Excerpt from "Eight Conversations with Picasso" by Carnville, published in 1988] As the work progressed, the seaman disappeared and the medical student was changed to a woman.At the end of the painting, there are five women on the screen, four of whom are standing and nude.Their faces are imprinted with ancient Iberian statues and black masks.Matisse's "Joy of Life" is all expressed with curves and bright colors, at least at present, it seems very harmonious; while Picasso's works are just the opposite, with dark colors and very rough and intense.The body parts of those women are scattered, straight edges and right angles, thick and large hands and feet, some have masks, some have collapsed or twisted noses, breasts are either cut off or do not exist, there is blue on one leg, some movement Very vulgar, wide-open eyes staring at the person looking at them, deep and black eye sockets, left and right asymmetrical, in the style of ancient Iberian statuary on the right side, and black African statuary art on the left, used throughout the work Geometric three-dimensional, showing the painter's application of cubism art.Pierre Dax quite clearly pointed out that the vulgarity and violence shown in "The Girl of Avignon" are the same as those in "A Season in Hell", which Picasso had been studying hard during the painting The works of the French poet Rimbaud. [Excerpt from "The Creator Picasso" by Pierre Dexter, published in 1995] Naturally, what is reflected in the painting is not the poetic, listless and dreamy stories in Mallarme's poems, but brothels, the lowest social reality.Picasso competed with Matisse's "Joy of Life" with this larger painting.Although it cannot be said to be the best, it is at least the most modern, and it is the beginning of a new world. When Picasso let several confidantes living in the "laundry boat" look at his paintings, people were embarrassed, and no one could understand them.Black made a joke, avoiding answering his question directly, saying: "It feels like you want to treat us to hemp rope and gasoline!" Manolu, as usual, threw out: "If you go to the train station Pick up your parents, and you see them like this, how do you feel? You must not be happy!" The Leon Stein brothers and sisters were terrified by the painting in front of them.Everyone else considered the painting unfinished.And Derain worried that Picasso would hang himself on top of his painting. The worst is Apollinaire.Usually he always praises modern art without hesitation, showing boldness and bravery that ordinary people don't have, especially when Picasso took the lead in bold creation, he has always defended it with all his strength.Now facing "The Girl of Avignon", he was speechless and silent.He didn't say a word about it, and didn't even mention it in his critical essay. Only Gertrude defended the painter Picasso.But this time, she didn't buy the painting... The painting hung for a long time in the painter's successively changing studios.The painting was exhibited for the first time in 1916 at the Salon d'Antin organized by André Salmon.Before launching, Salmon suggested to change the original title of the painting "Avignon Brothel" (given by Picasso) to "The Girl of Avignon" for the sake of avoiding censorship and making it easier for people to accept.Picasso accepted against his will, but he said: I don't like this name. After Angtin's exhibition, the painting was put away and has rarely been seen since then. In 1923, Andre Breton (1896-1966), French writer, initiator and organizer of surrealism.Persuaded Jacques Doucet (1853-1929), a French fashion master, a costumer and literary and art patron.buy it. In 1937, a gallery in New York bought the painting, which went on to sell it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. So far, people's debates about "The Maid of Avignon" are still one after another.Art historians are still debating two questions that have been posed since the painting's inception: Where is Black African art represented in this work?Can one see this work as the ancestor of Cubism? The earliest answer to the first question is: the influence of Iberian art is present in the right half of the work, the most "revolutionary" part, in the shadow line and the ears and eyes of two young ladies standing and one lying down Its imprint is clearly visible; the reclining lady is based on a portrait of a peasant that Picasso painted at Gossoles, as the collection of sketches can prove without dispute.On the contrary, the sunken eyes of the lady on the left are influenced by black African art.According to this account, historians have proposed several dates to prove that when Picasso began to work on "The Maiden of Avignon", he had already seen Matisse's statue of Willy in Vlaminck and Derain's square masks, and little or no knowledge of the ethnographic museum of Trocadero.Therefore, his "Girl of Avignon" has no possibility of being influenced by the latter. Indeed, Picasso did not start getting black African art until a little later.But such artworks soon filled his studio on the Laundry Boat. (Apollinaire refers to Picasso as the "Benin Bird" in his work "The Murdered Poet", and this nickname comes from a piece of black African art collected by the painter.) He owns no such works of art as Matisse Much is also true.Matisse is indeed a champion in this field.Someone said: From 1938 to 1939, Picasso often said: If in the era of "laundry boats", everyone has seen the influence of black African art in "The Girl of Avignon", it proves that everyone has discovered it These cultural novelties, that is impossible, in fact, only the influence of Iberian art exists in this work.This statement is equally true. Pierre Dax and Pierre Levedi also took issue with the idea that Picasso's work was influenced by black African art.In contrast to the former, the latter denies that Cézanne had an influence on Cubism, that Ingres had an influence on the 1905 work, and that black African statuary art had any influence on paintings from the period before Cubism.But he was wrong.He apologized, and when he wrote reviews again in the 20s, it was closer to history. John Richardson has tried to bring some freshness to these expert debates.According to some anthropologists and art historians, Richardson was certain that the faces of the girls in The Maiden of Avignon were undisputed replicas of African masks, and that Picasso had visited Trocadero's people After the species museum, their faces were repainted.Moreover, Richardson cautions that the era in which Picasso denied the influence of black African art in his work coincided with the end of the Spanish wars and the victory of Franco.To acknowledge the influence of Iberian art on his Maiden of Avignon is to acknowledge his Spanish roots.Between the creation of "The Maiden of Avignon" and the words of the painter before the 1940s, Guernica, a holy city in the Basque Country of Spain, also happened.The Holocaust (Figure 27), the Republicans handing over the leadership of the Prado Museum to Picasso, and the Holocaust crimes committed by African troops who joined Franco's Legion of Honor.Because the land of Spain was humiliated and lost in the war at that time, people needed to defend and fight for it.In Picasso's eyes, these are the major substantive issues.But Andre Salmon sided with the monarchy in the war, covering up the essence of the war.From that day on, Picasso refused to shake hands with Salmon and cut off his contacts. A second question, the question of Cubism was raised.André Salmon and Max Jacobs always believed, and wrote articles, that "The Maiden of Avignon" was the beginning of Cubism.Carnville, who will soon become Picasso's art dealer, also holds the same view.When people carefully observe the right half of the work, they can clearly find the new expression of Cubism.But Pierre Dax explicitly states: Since the 1989-1990 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, people believe that the birth of Cubism is not only the reorganization of natural shapes, but also the deepening of Cézanne's technique of expressing three-dimensionality in paintings. Appears in Braque's 1908 work and in Picasso's finalized Three Women. [Excerpt from Picasso Dictionary by Pierre Dexter, published in 1995] In Dax's view, "Three Women" is the end of the artistic evolution that began with "The Maiden of Avignon".If there was Cubism, it was here and nowhere else.See, how to explain it, people are arguing again. So where does Mattis stand amidst all this debate? He came to the studio of the "laundry boat" Picasso under the leadership of the Stan brothers and sisters, saw "The Girl of Avignon", and understood at a glance what and whom the rough and intense emotions in his little brother's painting were aimed at: It is aimed at what people call "modern" art, that is, at Matisse himself.Isn't he recognized as the representative of the latest trends in French painting?Of course he was very angry, and he threatened to "beat down" Picasso's arrogance. The hostility between the two of them was very serious.According to Salmon, among Picasso's supporters, this hostility took the form of a very comically childlike: Matisse once gave Picasso a portrait of his daughter Marguerite as a gift.One day, a Picasso fan went to a shop on Abbey Street and bought some darts.After returning to the "laundry boat", they took turns aiming darts at the little girl's face and stabbing her.Fortunately, the darts are covered with rubber tips. Matisse has been wondering which hooligans painted some slogans attacking him on the walls of the Montmartre district: Matisse is crazy! [Excerpt from "Infinite Remembrance" by André Salmon, published in 1995] The path followed by Matisse soon won the affirmation of another art school - the official jury and painting association. Relations between Braque and Matisse further deteriorated when the Jury of the Autumn Art Fair refused to exhibit Braque's work.Matisse, who made a fuss about the Autumn Art Fair three years ago, is now a member of the jury for the Autumn Art Fair of 1908.It is arbitrarily believed that Matisse criticized the nascent Cubist art on the jury, and he climbed on the shoulders of Fauvism. Fortunately, the dispute did not last long.At the beginning of World War I, Matisse and Picasso began to go horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne in the western suburbs of Paris, receiving each other in their studios and exchanging works. In 1937, along with many others, the two were condemned by the German Nazis as representatives of "degenerate art".When the Germans entered Paris, their works were stored in the bank vault.Matisse's safe room happened to be near Picasso's.Matisse was not in Paris at the time, and Picasso fought to keep the work on his behalf.For Matisse, Picasso "is both his comrade and opponent; his comrade in arms and the person he hates most". [Excerpt from Brassai: "Picasso Conversations"] After World War II, Picasso went to visit Matisse who had taken refuge in Nice.The antagonism between them has been completely eliminated, and they talk together about their own work and the work of others.Matisse showed more fatherly love, he gave what he could, he passed on the experience accumulated in his life, and Picasso listened.Matisse died shortly thereafter (1954).The Rue Fleuris was nowhere near them, and neither Matisse nor Picasso asked Gertrude Stein to arbitrate for them.They knew full well that both of them were the greatest fathers of modern art.