Vanished Smile (11 page)

Fernande was one more artifact amid the chaos of Picasso's studio—Alice B. Toklas described her as “superbly decorative,” like “an oriental odalisque.” Beside the small, dark Catalan, the statuesque Fernande was a tawny Amazon, auburn-haired and green-eyed. Heads turned when she entered a room. Born Amélie Lang, Fernande had a miserable history of abuse, a loveless childhood, and a failed early marriage. Like everyone in their group, she was inventing herself, leaving behind Amélie Lang and becoming “la belle Fernande,” Picasso's first
grand’ amour
. He was so wildly jealous that he locked her in his studio, never allowing her to go out without him. He would take the string bag and do the grocery shopping himself.

When the Picassos did venture out, they were in costume.
Fernande in the dramatic hats she adored, looking as if she had wandered off a Toulouse-Lautrec canvas, and Picasso in pegged trousers, brandishing a walking stick like a sword. Apollinaire in his habitual three-piece British suit, and Max Jacob in monocle and a top hat he shared with Picasso, would join them. Their dress was deliberately eccentric. In their person and personality, the friends assumed a studied singularity, a carefully chosen otherness. They were a new breed of artist, and they affected a costume to fit the role.

Fernande's memoir,
Picasso and His Friends
, is the best picture of that band of artistic brothers, the sometimes ignoble few who formed the Picasso gang. They were a fluid group of artists and writers that at any time included Georges Braque, André Derain, Marcel Olin, Maurice Raynal, Ramon Pichot, André Salmon, André Breton, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, and Pierre Reverdy At the center were Picasso and Fernande; Apollinaire and his lover, the painter Marie Laurencin; and Max Jacob, their court jester performing to hold his place at the round table. He called Fernande's book “the best mirror of the cubist Acropolis.”

The years 1905 to 1911 were a magical time of intense creation and extraordinary collaboration. Picasso emerged from his melancholic Blue Period and entered his Rose Period. He took the first steps toward cubism and painted
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
, the controversial work that, more than any other, revolutionized art and implicated him in
l'Affaire des Statuettes
.

Although Fernande was protective of Picasso until the end of her life, she was an astute mistress-muse, and from the reflections in her looking glass, a modernist creation story emerges. In those happy days, Picasso would sell his art by the armful—a hundred francs (then worth about $20) for a stack of drawings; two thousand francs for thirty canvases. A few dealers—notably Ambroise Vollard, astute and fair, and Clovis
Sagot, an unscrupulous ex-clown who sold art out of an old apothecary—were scooping up Picasso's harlequins and saltimbanques for the price of a meal. With youth, brilliance, and a rare bonhomie, money was a luxury, and freeloading was a way of life. “You could owe money for years for your paints and canvases and rent and restaurant and practically everything except coal and luxuries,” Picasso remembered.

His fortunes began to change when the Steins discovered him. Leo and Gertrude Stein, a brother-sister act from America, were in Paris then, auditioning for immortality. (In 1911, Alice B. Toklas, small and wary, was a new addition to their ménage.) The Steins’ money came from the Omnibus Cable Company of San Francisco. Although not the fortune of a Frick or Carnegie, it was sufficient to bankroll modern art.

Gertrude dressed in a brown corduroy tunic and sandals like a distaff Friar Tuck, and like the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, she and Leo came to the rescue of starving artists with generous patronage and platters of jambon and baguettes. In their studio at 2 7 Rue de Fleurus, a short stroll from the Luxembourg Gardens, they presided over Saturday soirees that drew an eclectic company of painters, poets, and hangers-on. Although the neighborhood was more shabby than chic, if it were Versailles in the heyday of the Sun King, it could not have attracted a more lustrous, or soon to be lustrous, crowd.

The Steins were as eccentric as the artists they nurtured—the needle-thin and needling pedant Leo, and Gertrude, the monolithic, self-aggrandizing writer. He had pretensions to erudition, she to genius. She recognized it in Picasso and lusted for it, embracing him perhaps in the hope, conscious or subliminal, that his luster would burnish her. In the early years on the Rue de Fleurus, the main draws for the penniless painters and poets were the free food and wine. By 1911, the star attractions were the art that the Steins were collecting, which by then covered the walls floor to ceiling—and the looming talents: Henri
Matisse, a courtly éminence grise at forty-two, and Picasso, the rude contender.

Although everything about
la bande de Picasso
, their art and their attire, was calculated to make a statement, to break from the past and express their freedom and freshness, they created their revolutionary art within certain bourgeois conventions: Saturday evenings at Rue de Fleurus with the Steins; Tuesday-night poetry readings at the Closerie des Lilas; Wednesday-night
daube de boeuf
dinners at Apollinaire's apartment.

AS THE BARON'S CONFESSIONS
galvanized Paris, Apollinaire grew increasingly alarmed. When Picasso's train pulled into the station, the frantic poet was waiting on the platform. The police had searched his apartment, he said, and Picasso's would be next.

By September 1911, Picasso and Fernande had moved a few blocks from the grungy studio in
le bateau-lavoir
to an airy bourgeois apartment on Boulevard de Clichy “Fernande began to buy furniture and have a servant and the servant of course made a souffle,” Gertrude Stein wrote. Gertrude's friend Etta Cone found the Picassos “appalling but romantic.” Their new apartment was often full of friends, “but on the whole, they were not as happy as they had been.”

At the Boulevard de Clichy apartment, Picasso and Apollinaire plotted their next moves. They were not innocents in
L'Affaire des Statuettes
. Buried in the back of a Norman cupboard within easy reach were two figures—a small, powerfully built stone man and woman carved by the ancient Spaniards
during the Bronze Age. The bottom of each bore the stamp:
PROPERTY OF THE MUSéE DU LOUVRE
.

Painter and poet were expatriates—Picasso was a Spanish citizen, and Apollinaire was a man without a country.
^∗7
They were afraid of being deported or worse.

Political anarchists were loose in the streets of Europe. In the first decade of the new century, anarchists assassinated three heads of state: Umberto I of Italy in 1900; U.S. president William McKinley the following year; and Russian premier Pyotr Stolypin in 1911. The political and social forces that would lead to the first world war were gathering. In Paris, the Bonnot Gang, armed with repeating rifles and the first getaway cars—more sophisticated equipment than the police had—was agitating the Third Republic. In the Bonnot version of criminal anarchy, the state had no legitimate authority, so every law could be broken. The Bonnot Gang's crimes were rash and violent—murder, bank robberies, and auto, not art, theft. But the police made no distinction between political and cultural anarchists—the “motor bandits” and the émigré artists. Being young, foreign, and male was enough to arouse their suspicion.

Apollinaire and Picasso acted like guilty men, concocting elaborate scenarios to elude the police. First they made plans to flee the country, then abandoned them. Next they hatched a plot to destroy the incriminating evidence. They would pack the stolen goods in an old suitcase and drop it in the Seine at midnight. They pictured themselves as actors in a drama, and they were certain the ending would be tragic.

On the night of September 5, a gang of four—Picasso and
Fernande, Apollinaire and Marie—sat nervously around the dining room table in the Montmartre apartment. Although none of them knew the first thing about cards, like two-bit gangsters and their molls in a B movie, they pretended to play all through the interminable evening.

At the stroke of twelve, painter and poet slunk out to dispose of their contraband. Even following an arrowlike route, the distance from Montmartre to the Seine is probably three miles. They walked the distance because they were afraid to attract attention by lugging a suitcase in a cab or carriage. By the time they reached the river, they were already tired.

Picture the pair—Picasso, small and sullen, and Apollinaire, robust and ribald—skirting the Right Bank in the dead of night, Apollinaire bent at a downward angle and Picasso reaching up because one was so much taller than the other, toting their cheap, scuffed valise, the clothes from the cérét vacation dumped out and replaced with the Louvre stash. At first, they tried to carry the valise between them, but they were too mismatched in size, and so they took turns.

The water was dark, the lamplight picking out the ripples and undulations. They followed the quai, which was some thirty feet below street level. Ivy obscured the stone retaining walls and wrapped around the iron rings where merchant ships once moored. The trees from the street above, mostly chestnuts, leaned toward them, and the trees that bordered the river, mostly planes, reached up. The sky, only a shade lighter than the river, was low and overcast, with no stars to steer by, and blotted out for the most part by the trees and shrubs.

They looked constantly over their shoulders, starting at the slightest sound, fearful of every footstep behind them. Electricity was coming slowly to the City of Lights. In the shadows cast by the uncertain gas flames, they imagined uniformed figures flattened against tree trunks and crouched on the riverbank.

Two hours later, they returned to the studio, trudging up the
steep hills of Montmartre, puffing, breathless, exhausted by their paranoia as much as by their aborted mission, still carrying the suitcase and its contents. They had never mustered the courage to act.

Apollinaire spent what remained of the night at the apartment, and in the morning, Picasso brought the incriminating evidence to the
Paris-Journal.
^∗8

ALTHOUGH THE NEWSPAPER
had promised anonymity, the next day, September 6,
l'Affaire des Statuettes
was again a page-one story:

WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
after the story appeared, Apollinaire was under arrest. On the evening of September 7, two detectives paid a return visit to 37 Rue Gros in Auteuil. They spent an hour combing through the apartment. “Without
their help, my correspondence would never have been filed,” Apollinaire would joke later. At the time, though, he was too apprehensive to see any humor in his predicament.

The detectives questioned Apollinaire's concierge and neighbors. Was he a sinister character? Had they noticed any suspicious goings-on or deviant behavior? Did he bring home little boys or girls? Anything at all that aroused concern? Later, Apollinaire would say the experience “made me understand the man who said that, if he were accused of stealing the bells of Notre-Dame, he would take to his heels immediately.”

There was something of Pierrot, the clown with the tear in his eye, in Apollinaire. He was a paradox—a man with legions of friends, yet alone, making everything up, especially himself, and never quite sure if he had pulled it off. He was the dutiful son who never pleased, the loyal friend who would be betrayed, but he had enormous courage on many levels. As Jorge Luis Borges would write, Apollinaire “was a man of elemental, and therefore, eternal feelings; he was, when the fundaments of earth and sky shook, the poet of ancient courage and ancient honor.”

He was born Guillaume Albert Wladimir AlexAndré Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky in Rome in the summer of 1880 and nicknamed Kostro. His father was unknown, although Apollinaire liked to hint that a Vatican cardinal might have been in his lineage. His mother was a Polish aristocrat who was expelled from her convent school—the Trinità dei Monti, at the top of the Spanish Steps—and became a
femme galante
in the casino in Monte Carlo. She was “an adventuress, to put it politely,” Max Jacob said, and the boy Kostro grew up sharing his mother with a series of “uncles.”