The dogs, the dazzle, and the Steins’ rescue

When the picture went up at the Indépendants, the public reaction was loud and hostile. Visitors jeered; critics recoiled. Some of them genuinely feared they were watching the death of French painting, the abandonment of everything that had made the tradition great. A wall-sized field of pink-and-violet nudes painted with no respect for color, light, or perspective looked, to a great many serious people in 1906, less like a masterpiece than like vandalism. What is striking, looking back, is that the most wounding verdict came not from the conservative enemies you would expect, but from inside Matisse’s own camp.

Two summers earlier, in 1904 at the Mediterranean town of Saint-Tropez, Matisse had spent a season learning the dot-by-dot Neo-Impressionist method from its leading practitioner, the painter Paul Signac. Signac had been a mentor and a champion. And when he saw what Matisse had done with Le bonheur de vivre, throwing the careful pure-color dots overboard for great flat slabs of tint, he turned. In a private letter dated January 14, 1906, Signac wrote:

“Matisse, whose attempts I have liked up to now, seems to me to have gone to the dogs. Upon a canvas of two-and-a-half meters, he has surrounded some strange characters with a line as thick as your thumb. Then he has covered the whole thing with flat, well-defined tints, which (however pure) seem disgusting.”

It is one of the very few juicy quotes in this whole story that is securely documented, a real letter, not a legend, which is why it is worth quoting in full and attributing precisely: this is Signac, in private, to a fellow painter. And read it closely. The “line as thick as your thumb” is the very dark bounding contour you just traced around every figure, and the “flat, well-defined tints” are the unmodeled fields of color it fences in. Signac was naming the two exact moves that make the picture what it is, and recoiling from both. You can feel the personal injury under the insult, too. Signac’s entire art was built on those small pure dots of color. Matisse had spent a summer learning the method at Signac’s feet, and then used a vast canvas to declare that he was done with it, that the future was flat fields, not dots. The mentor was not just criticizing a picture. He was watching his own method get thrown out by his most gifted student.

And then, against the jeering, came the rescue. Leo and Gertrude Stein, the American brother and sister who had moved to Paris and become the avant-garde’s sharpest and earliest patrons, bought it. Leo, the connoisseur of the pair, is widely quoted as calling it “the most important painting done in our time.” Gertrude, the writer, ran the salon as much as Leo did, and made it the room where modern writing and modern painting met; her own taste tilted toward Picasso while Leo’s tilted toward Matisse, a fault line that would eventually split both the household and the collection. Together the two made their apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus the single most important room in modern art, the place where, on a given evening, you might find Matisse and Picasso in the same crowd, looking at the newest pictures in Paris on the Steins’ own walls. Matisse himself installed Le bonheur de vivre there at the close of the Salon.

And it was not only Leo and Gertrude. Of the wider Stein circle, it was their sister-in-law Sarah Stein, married to the third Stein sibling, Michael, who became Matisse’s most relentless early champion, promoting him from her own salon nearby and helping launch the short-lived school where he taught. The picture that the public had jeered and Signac had called disgusting now hung as the prize of the most influential private collection in the city, with a circle of believers around it. The scandal had become the centerpiece.