Schoenberg claimed a lot for Pierrot. He had once described Debussy as an impressionist composer, meaning that his harmonies merely added to the colour of moods. But Schoenberg saw himself as an expressionist, a Postimpressionist like Paul Gauguin or Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh, uncovering unconscious meaning in much the same way that the expressionist painters thought they went beyond the merely decorative impressionists. He certainly believed, as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead did, that music – like mathematics (see chapter 6) – had logic.48
The first night took place in mid-October in Berlin, in the Choralionsaal on Berlin’s Bellevuestrasse, which was destroyed by Allied bombs in 1945. As the house lights went down, dark screens could be made out onstage with the actress Albertine Zehme dressed as Columbine. The musicians were farther back, conducted by the composer. The structure of Pierrot is tight. It is comprised of three parts, each containing seven miniature poems; each poem lasts about a minute and a half, and there are twenty-one poems in all, stretching to just on half an hour. Despite the formality, the music was utterly free, as was the range of moods, leading from sheer humour, as Pierrot tries to clean a spot off his clothes, to the darkness when a giant moth kills the rays of the sun. Following the premières of the Second String Quartet and Erwartung, the critics gathered, themselves resembling nothing so much as a swarm of giant moths, ready to kill off this shining sun. But the performance was heard in silence, and when it was over, Schoenberg was given an ovation. Since it was so short, many in the audience shouted for the piece to be repeated, and they liked it even better the second time. So too did some of the critics. One of them went so far as to describe the evening ‘not as the end of music; but as the beginning of a new stage in listening.’
It was true enough. One of the many innovations of modernism was the new demands it placed on the audience. Music, painting, literature, even architecture, would never again be quite so ‘easy’ as they had been. Schoenberg, like Freud, Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Weininger, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler, believed in the instincts, expressionism, subjectivism.49 For those who were willing to join the ride, it was exhilarating. For those who weren’t, there was really nowhere to turn and go forward. And like it or not, Schoenberg had found a way forward after Wagner. The French composer Claude Debussy once remarked that Wagner’s music was ‘a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.’ No one realised that more than Schoenberg.
If Salomé and Elektra and Pierrot’s Columbine are the founding females of modernism, they were soon followed by five equally sensuous, shadowy, disturbing sisters in a canvas produced by Picasso in 1907. No less than Strauss’s women, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was an attack on all previous ideas of art, self-consciously shocking, crude but compelling.
In the autumn of 1907 Picasso was twenty-six. Between his arrival in Paris in 1900 and his modest success with Last Moments, he had been back and forth several times between Malaga, or Barcelona, and Paris, but he was at last beginning to find fame and controversy (much the same thing in the world where he lived). Between 1886 and the outbreak of World War I there were more new movements in painting than at any time since the Renaissance, and Paris was the centre of this activity. Georges Seurat had followed impressionism with pointillism in 1886; three years later, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Aristide Maillol formed Les Nabis (from the Hebrew word for prophet), attracted by the theories of Gauguin, to paint in flat, pure colours. Later in the 1890s, as we have seen in the case of Klimt, painters in the mainly German-speaking cities – Vienna, Berlin, Munich – opted out of the academies to initiate the various ‘secessionist’ movements. Mostly they began as impressionists, but the experimentation they encouraged brought about expressionism, the search for emotional impact by means of exaggerations and distortions of line and colour. Fauvism was the most fruitful movement, in particular in the paintings of Henri Matisse, who would be Picasso’s chief rival while they were both alive. In 1905, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, pictures by Matisse, André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Georges Rouault, Albert Marquet, Henri Manguin, and Charles Camoin were grouped together in one room that also featured, in the centre, a statue by Donatello, the fifteenth-century Florentine sculptor. When the critic Louis Vauxcelles saw this arrangement, the calm of the statue contemplating the frenzied, flat colours and distortions on the walls, he sighed, ‘Ah, Donatello chez les Fauvres.’ Fauve means ‘wild beast’ – and the name stuck. It did no harm. For a time, Matisse was regarded as the beast-in-chief of the Paris avant-garde.
Matisse’s most notorious works during that early period were other demoiselles de modernisme – Woman with a Hat and The Green Stripe, a portrait of his wife. Both used colour to do violence to familiar images, and both created scandals. At this stage Matisse was leading, and Picasso following. The two painters had met in 1905, in the apartment of Gertrude Stein, the expatriate American writer. She was a discerning and passionate collector of modern art, as was her equally wealthy brother, Leo, and invitations to their Sunday-evening soirées in the rue de Fleurus were much sought after.50 Matisse and Picasso were regulars at the Stein evenings, each with his band of supporters. Even then, though, Picasso understood how different they were. He once described Matisse and himself as ‘north pole and south pole.’51 For his part, Matisse’s aim, he said, was for ‘an art of balance, of purity and serenity, free of disturbing or disquieting subjects … an appeasing influence.’52
Not Picasso. Until then, he had been feeling his way. He had a recognisable style, but the images he had painted – of poor acrobats and circus people – were hardly avant-garde. They could even be described as sentimental. His approach to art had not yet matured; all he knew, looking around him, was that in his art he needed to do as the other moderns were doing, as Strauss and Schoenberg and Matisse were doing: to shock. He saw a way ahead when he observed that many of his friends, other artists, were visiting the ‘primitive art’ departments at the Louvre and in the Trocadéro’s Museum of Ethnography. This was no accident. Darwin’s theories were well known by now, as were the polemics of the social Darwinists. Another influence was James Frazer, the anthropologist who, in The Golden Bough, had collected together in one book many of the myths and customs of different races. And on top of it all, there was the scramble for Africa and other empires. All of this produced a fashion for the achievements and cultures of the remoter regions of ‘darkness’ in the world – in particular the South Pacific and Africa. In Paris, friends of Picasso started buying masks and African and Pacific statuettes from bric-a-brac dealers. None were more taken by this art than Matisse and Derain. In fact, as Matisse himself said, ‘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. It was as fine as Egyptian art. 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.’53