Le Select as it is today is pretty much as it was in 1926.
The Prince of Montparnasse
25 Years of High-Life
By Richard Erickson
Paris Kiosque - December 2000 / January 2001 - Volume 7, Number 11
Copyright (c) 2000 Richard Erickson - used with permission
Julius Mordecai Pincas was born in Vidin, Bulgaria in
1885 and he died as Pascin in his Montmartre atelier
in Paris in 1930.
Between the two dates, Pascin
also managed with ease to become the symbol of Montparnasse;
its living incarnation. Why nobody remembers him as Montparnasse's unofficial
'Prince' of the '20's is a mystery.
Exiled by his
father from provincial Vidin, Pascin studied art in Germany, but
ended up selling drawings to magazines; including to 'Simplicissimus,' beginning
in 1905. But a grand retrospective of Van Gogh's in
Munich in 1903 had made Paris the place to be.
For Pascin, Montparnasse started on Sunday, 24. December 1905 when
he arrived from Munich, to join the friends he had
made there. These included old pals Rudolf Grossmann and Georg
Grosz, who met him at the station - exceptionally! -
and conducted him to the terrace of the Dôme.
If he and his friends were not working or eating
or sleeping, the Dôme was their home, their living room;
open to all comers. In 1908, the Scandinavians, the eastern
Europeans, the artists from the Balkans, all funneled through Germany
to arrive at the Dôme - they were, collectively, Les
Dômiers.
To forget the hard work of their ateliers, and
when they ran out of talk, they oftenplayed poker
- at the center of the room at the front.
It was a non-stop game played for years. In a
middle-Europe tradition, the Dôme was their stammtisch.
But the Dôme is totally changed; except for its location.
They made
no particular attempt to participate in the salons in Paris,
nor in exhibitions in their home countries. In June 1914,
there was one exhibition at Flechtheim's gallery in Düsseldorf. It
was called 'Der Dôme' and 23 artists showed there, not
all of them Germans, not of any 'movement;' they were
merely all these Dômiers.
When Pascin arrived, he installed himself
in the Hôtel des Ecoles in the Rue Delambre around
the corner from the café, and he stayed in the
hotel until 1908.
With his humor, he became the figure
at the centre of the Dômiers. At the café, he
would demand paper and turn out sketch after sketch; sometimes
adding color with 'marc,' a raw brandy like 'grappa' or
by lightly singeing the paper with a lit match.
When
he did watercolors, he used 'Seltz' brand mineral water. Designs
he did not care for were dropped on the floor,
and after a while his place in the café resembled
a pigpen.
His sketches, drawings and caricatures were successful -
they were much in demand for use by newspapers and
magazines.
So it was perversely natural that he really wanted
to be a painter. Like other artists in the group
of Dômiers, he would go to the Louvre to copy
the masters; although his choices there were a bit eccentric.
He also took drawing courses at the Academy Colarossi and
turned out a style far, far from the masters in
the Louvre.
From 1908 to 1912 his designs were shown
at the Fall Salon, and at salons in Berlin and
Budapest. Berthe Weill accepted some of his drawings for an
exposition in January 1910; but she had to put them
in a corner of their own, because they could be
shocking to ordinary viewers of the day.
Pascin drew from
the life around him. In the Dôme, in the restaurants
of Montparnasse, in the brothels; he made sketches of his
friends, their models, his models, girlfriends, their girlfriends, his friends'
wives; of costume balls, even of Cinderella. After the Dôme,
after the party, throughout the night he would often draw
on copper with a ivory pen, in effect doing engravings
by drawing 'blind.' He was engraving the night.
Amid the
noise, the smoke, shouted orders, the multilingual conversations, he would
draw. It was said he could draw so fast, that
he would have a portrait of a man jumping out
a window finished before the subject hit the pavement four
floors below.
During the forty-five years between the dates of
his birth and death, Pascin managed to either live in
or visit Bucharest, Vienna, Munich, Spain, Cologne, Berlin, New York,
London, South Carolina, Florida, Cuba, Tunisia, Cairo and Düsseldorf, not
to mention holidays with the Dômiers on the Côte d'Azur.
Pascin made his last visit to Bulgaria in 1913.
The nearby academy for painters and sculptors, nearly unchanged.
Not all
of the Dômiers were men. Hermine David, who learned to
paint miniatures, engraving and design, began studies at the Beaux-Arts
in 1902, which lasted only a few months before she
left for the Académie Julian. Starting in 1905, she exhibited
regularly at the Salon des Femmes, where it was said
she had a 'future'.
This future began in 1907 when
Pascin, wearing a kimono at Henri Bing's apartment, opened the
door to Hermine and immediately figured out with scissors how
to unravel the rock-solid corset Madame David had installed on
her daughter. Pascin prudently allowed the quite respectable Rudolf Levy
inform Madam David of the fait accompli.
Women were tolerated
with no great politesse by the Dômiers; they were usually
models or transitory girlfriends, and it took a while for
Hermine to be accepted there. It was said she had
a side to her considered to be 'a bit childish
and hysterical' - characteristics foreign to the Dômiers of course.
She also drew these surroundings incessantly and became respected for
her talents and for her patience with whole evenings when
only German was spoken. When Pascin quit the Hôtel des
Ecoles and took up a nomadic life in Paris between
Montmartre and Montparnasse, he would be often rejoined by Hermine
- who never entirely left her mother either.
One of
the three French students of Matisse, Pierre Dubreuil, a friend
of Per Krohg and Nils Dardel - Dômiers all -
were more comfortable with the Germans than the Americans. They
were part of Pascin's crowd, even though he mocked them
for their attachment to Matisse.
Pierre Dubreuil fell in love
with Elvire Ventura who lived in the Rue Delambre, whose
father was a sculptor and assistant of Rodin's. In 1910
at the age of 14, Elvire had posed for Pascin,
at his atelier at 8. Rue de la Grande Chaumière.
Elvire was a girlfriend of Cécile Vidil, who everybody called
Lucy. Lucy's mother had taken her out of school in
1905, also at the age of 14, to become an
apprentice. She didn't care for this and ran away from
Issy to Paris - no major distance - and later
had a bad turn when her 'rich' Brazilian boyfriend failed
to turn up for a meeting with her parents.
She
then followed Elvire's advice to become a model in the
academies of Montparnasse and in 1910 she was working at
Matisse's, where she met Per Krohg. 'Amour' exploded - 'love
at first sight' - between them at the Bal Bullier
in early 1911, although she had posed for Pascin in
Montmartre in 1909 and 1910 while he was still attached
to Hermine.
After passing the War years in North America,
Pascin and Hermine returned to Paris at the end of
October 1921. On going back to the Rue Joseph-Bara to
recuperate drawings left in a cave there, Pascin met Lucy
again and they took a walk in the nearby Luxembourg
gardens.
The two couples and Guy, the Krohg's son,
spent a lot of time together before going different ways
for the summer - the Krohgs to Norway and Pascin
and Hermine to Tunisia.
In the fall, Hermine broke off
with Pascin and moved to the Hôtel d'Odessa while Pascin
found an atelier in Montmartre. Pascin schemed at a reunion
with Lucy, and if she did figure increasingly in his
designs and etchings, she refused to quit Per and Guy.
Pascin was obsessed with her.
In September 1922 Nils Dardel
and Thora ran into Pascin by chance on a Montmartre
corner, and they became friends. Montmartre was not what it
had been before the war, but Braque, Gris, Utrillo and
Suzanne Valadon lived there, and Picasso returned from Montparnasse.
Le
Dôme's modest memorial for Jules Pascin.
Pascin had a huge
but practically empty atelier on the top floor of the
middle-class building at 36. Boulevard de Clichy. Pascin held monster
parties in it, amid the smells of the boulevard below
- waffles, crêpes, candy floss, cooking gas, lions in cages
at the nearby Médrano circus, mixed with firecrackers and poorly
cooked sauerkraut served as the atelier's buffet.
Pascin continued to
write invitations to Lucy. Per meanwhile found a new girlfriend
in Treize, who he met at Le Jockey where she
went nightly with Kiki. Per refused to let Guy leave
with Lucy for Pascin and his 'deregulated' life, and Lucy
insisted on maintaining a semblance of family life by living
near her son.
In fact, she passed the days with
Pascin and then returned home to have dinner and feed
Guy. Afterwards she went out with Pascin's crowd in the
evening. Pascin was not happy with this arrangement, and drank
more and more.
During a dinner in 1925 at Chez
Alfredo near Pigalle, the American engraver and poet, Herbert Lespinasse,
invited a whole crowd down his 'villa' at Saint Tropez.
Pascin, who never missed a party or a trip that
promised to be one, accepted. Nils Dardel and Pascin were
unable to wake Thora and they left by train without
her.
A day later and furious, Thora rounded up the
Swedish painter Zuhr and his wife and they took the
express to Toulon. Arriving at Saint Tropez after dark, a
café waiter indicated the way to the Dardel 'villa,' and
after much stumbling around in the dark, they arrived to
find the ladies of the Chez Alfredo party in men's
pajamas, and the 'villa' not much more than a simple
cabin.
Lespinasse woke the party in the mornings with gunshots,
and assigned everybody their tasks. Nils and Pascin were charged
with carrying water and several of the ladies gathered firewood.
While Rolla, Lespinasse's model, talked 'back to nature,' she applied
her elaborate makeup using a pocket mirror, the only one
there.
They went for boat rides, they went swimming, and
after a few days Madame Zuhr and the Dardels went
to Marseille, on account of Pascin's greco-turk-roman cooking.
Pascin, of
course followed, but not for the food; he and Kisling,
under the protection of a local brothel-owning art lover, undertook
an intensive tour of the local color in the Vieux
Port, where they painted and did other amusing things.
By
the time Pascin was 40 - on Tuesday, 31. March
1925 - he was pretty famous. His works were sold
in Pierre Loeb's gallery in the Rue Bonaparte, along with
the works of Léger, Miro, Soutine, Utrillo and Picasso; and
Lucy was selling more of them in the Bernheim-Jeune gallery.
The birthday party was held at Dagorno's, a well-known steak-house
near the old slaughter-houses out at La Villette. A small
group of loud friends gave him a golden replica of
his habitual bowler hat.
When Pascin was invited to dinner,
he arrived with all the bottles of red he could
carry. When he invited everybody, as he did often -
to Alfredo's - Afredo feared for his premises. In summers,
they would go in great groups to picnic beside the
Marne; with the lunches lasting all afternoon.
Pascin became an
American citizen in 1927; he was sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz
and Maurice Sterne. Pascin arrived in New York in August,
and Lucy followed in January, but did not feel at
ease there and returned to Paris after a few weeks.
Back in Paris, Pascin continued to make his 'bombes' -
wild parties - with his band from around the Boulevard
de Clichy; but more than ever he was despondent over
his inability to achieve personal success with his painting.
He
thought maybe he should quit it altogether, and content himself
to hang out, go on trips, and modestly get by
with the sale of his drawings.
On Thursday, 5. June
1930, Lucy, who had been looking for Pascin for days,
got an apprentice locksmith to open the door of his
live-in atelier, and Pascin was found dead and had been
dead for several days.
He had written "Adieu Lucy" on
a wall in blood from a pricked finger. After failing
to bleed to death, he had hung himself from a
door handle.
Pascin's funeral was on Saturday, 7. June. All
the galleries in Paris closed for the day. Thousands, including
waiters and barmen, musicians, the artists of Montmartre and Montparnasse
and all of their models, everybody Pascin knew, all dressed
in black, followed the coffin the five kilometres to the
cemetery at Saint-Ouen under a blazing sun.
Lucy and her
brother were last in line, on foot, behind Hermine David
and a rabbi in a car. Abruptly, Per left the
side of Treize and gesturing Lucy's brother aside, took the
arm of Lucy and went the rest of way with
her.
A Final Word About Pascin
Pascin lived in Paris
on and off for 25 years from just after the
turn of the century until 1930. Paris was the subject
of his drawings, paintings and engravings, and they also constitute
a sort of illustrated autobiography.
In an exhibition a
few years ago, a hundred or so of his engravings
were on display. If he was drawing non-stop from his
arrival in the Dôme in 1905 and he was as
fast as he probably was, then his creative production from
that date could have easily amounted to 25,000 works.
He
was an artist personally as well as professionally. But as
a painter, he was not up to his own -
perhaps too high - standards, and considered himself a failure.
As a person who 'lived' in Paris, even in those
days when the living was particularly vivid, Pascin also set
a standard - which was matched by a few but
exceeded by none.
If Montparnasse is synonymous with the 'Années
Folles' - the Crazy Years - then Pascin was 'Monsieur
Montparnasse.' This born Bulgarian, was an artist who was a
Parisian; one with an American passport. So right, so Paris.
You probably don't remember that you might
have already heard of Pascin. In 'A Moveable Feast' Ernest
Hemingway wrote a chapter titled, 'With Pascin At the Dôme.'
The Coupole opened in 1927 with one of the
biggest parties ever.
One evening, after Hemingway doesn't like the look of characters
he sees in the Select and the Rotonde, Pascin waves
him to his table at the Dôme, where he is
sitting after a 'hard days' work' with two models who
are sisters.
The way Hemingway has written it, it sounds
like Pascin, who asks the writer, "You have to go?"
"Have to and want to."
"Go on, then," Pascin said.
"And don't fall in love with typewriting paper."
Richard Erickson, living in Paris for the last twenty years, has been putting
Paris online as long as anyone. More of his writings can be found in
Metropole Paris
where this article first appeared.
He can be contacted via
erickso@world-net.sct.fr.
