He certainly did, for the statuette seems to have been the first inspiration toward Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As the critic Robert Hughes tells us, Picasso soon after commissioned an especially large canvas, which needed reinforced stretchers. Later in his life, Picasso described to André Malraux, the French writer and minister of culture, what happened next: ‘All alone in that awful museum [i.e. the Trocadéro], with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting – yes absolutely…. The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things…. The Negro pieces were intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything – against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! … all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion – they’re all the same thing. I understood why I was a painter.’54
Jumbled up here are Darwin, Freud, Frazer, and Henri Bergson, whom we shall meet later in this chapter. There is a touch of Nietzsche too, in Picasso’s nihilistic and revealing phrase, ‘everything is an enemy! … They were weapons.’55 Demoiselles was an attack on all previous ideas of art. Like Elektra and Erwartung, it was modernistic in that it was intended to be as destructive as it was creative, shocking, deliberately ugly, and undeniably crude. Picasso’s brilliance lay in also making the painting irresistible. The five women are naked, heavily made up, completely brazen about what they are: prostitutes in a brothel. They stare back at the viewer, unflinching, confrontational rather than seductive. Their faces are primitive masks that point up the similarities and differences between so-called primitive and civilised peoples. While others were looking for the serene beauty in non-Western art, Picasso questioned Western assumptions about beauty itself, its links to the unconscious and the instincts. Certainly, Picasso’s images left no one indifferent. The painting made Georges Braque feel ‘as if someone was drinking gasoline and spitting fire,’ a comment not entirely negative, as it implies an explosion of energy.56 Gertrude Stein’s brother Leo was racked with embarrassed laughter when he first saw Les Demoiselles, but Braque at least realised that the picture was built on Cézanne but added twentieth-century ideas, rather as Schoenberg built on Wagner and Strauss.
Cézanne, who had died the previous year, achieved recognition only at the end of his life as the critics finally grasped that he was trying to simplify art and to reduce it to its fundamentals. Most of Cézanne’s work was done in the nineteenth century, but his last great series, ‘The Bathers,’ was produced in 1904 and 1905, in the very months when, as we shall see, Einstein was preparing for publication his three great papers, on relativity, Brownian motion, and quantum theory. Modern art and much of modern science was therefore conceived at exactly the same moment. Moreover, Cézanne captured the essence of a landscape, or a bowl of fruit, by painting smudges of colour – quanta – all carefully related to each other but none of which conformed exactly to what was there. Like the relation of electrons and atoms to matter, orbiting largely empty space, Cézanne revealed the shimmering, uncertain quality beneath hard reality.
In the year after Cézanne’s death, 1907, the year of Les Demoiselles, the dealer Ambroise Vollard held a huge retrospective of the painter’s works, which thousands of Parisians flocked to see. Seeing this show, and seeing Demoiselles so soon after, Braque was transformed. Hitherto a disciple more of Matisse than Picasso, Braque was totally converted.
Six feet tall, with a large, square, handsome face, Georges Braque came from the Channel port of Le Havre. The son of a decorator who fancied himself as a real painter, Braque was very physicaclass="underline" he boxed, loved dancing, and was always welcome at Montmartre parties because he played the accordion (though Beethoven was more to his taste). ‘I never decided to become a painter any more than I decided to breathe,’ he said. ‘I truly don’t have any memory of making a choice.’57 He first showed his paintings in 1906 at the Salon des Indépendants; in 1907 his works hung next to those of Matisse and Derain, and proved so popular that everything he sent in was sold. Despite this success, after seeing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, he quickly realised that it was with Picasso that the way forward lay, and he changed course. For two years, as cubism evolved, they lived in each other’s pockets, thinking and working as one. ‘The things Picasso and I said to each other during those years,’ Braque later said, ‘will never be said again, and even if they were, no one would understand them any more. It was like being two mountaineers roped together.’58
Before Les Demoiselles, Picasso had really only explored the emotional possibilities of two colour ranges – blue and pink. But after this painting his palette became more subtle, and more muted, than at any time in his life. He was at the time working at La-Rue-des-Bois in the countryside just outside Paris, which inspired the autumnal greens in his early cubist works. Braque, meanwhile, had headed south, to L’Estaque and the paysage Cézanne near Aix. Despite the distance separating them, the similarity between Braque’s southern paintings of the period and Picasso’s from La-Rue-des-Bois is striking: not just the colour tones but the geometrical, geological simplicity – landscapes lacking in order, at some earlier stage of evolution perhaps. Or else it was the paysage Cézanne seen close up, the molecular basis of landscape.59
Though revolutionary, these new pictures were soon displayed. The German art dealer Daniel Henry Kahnweiler liked them so much he immediately organised a show of Braque’s landscapes that opened in his gallery in the rue Vignon in November 1908. Among those invited was Louis Vauxcelles, the critic who had cracked the joke about Donatello and the Fauves. In his review of the show, he again had a turn of phrase for what he had seen. Braque, he said, had reduced everything to ‘little cubes.’ It was intended to wound, but Kahnweiler was not a dealer for nothing, and he made the most of this early example of a sound bite. Cubism was born.60