Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [220]
Papa Tanguy was a man of golden good nature. Heavy and dullish at first glance, he was in reality the most delicate, pure-minded and upright of men. He was easy-going almost to a fault: never did a painter appeal to him in vain for credit—and often this credit remained open indefinitely. Papa Tanguy was, in his own way, a stoic: “Anyone who spends more than fifty centimes a day is a blackguard,” he liked to say, and the phrase fits the man in whom the kindness of an evangelist was allied to a natural sympathy for the revolutionary and the rebel.
For Tanguy had put himself on the side of the rebels ever since he had fought with the Fédérés and had a taste of prison life. The Impressionists, his friends, were making enemies on every hand; they must be fought for, tooth and nail. In his simple, tender-hearted way Tanguy thought that painting in a high key was Revolution itself. Anyone who fought for the victory of Impressionism and stood up for “the men of our School” (he liked to linger on the word) was fighting for a radiant, high-keyed to-morrow. And besides—Tanguy liked Impressionist painting for itself, and detested the “tobacco-juice” tonality which the middle classes of his time had taken to their hearts.
Unendingly generous by nature, Tanguy liked to assemble “his” painters around his frugal table. Paints and canvas he gave them gladly, and in return would take a picture or two: and what pictures, after all! No one else would look at them. Ribaldry and sarcasm met them on every side: the Pissarros, it seemed, were simply “palette-scrapings laid one after another on dirty canvas”; the Monets were painted “much as people touch up fountain-basins”; and as for the Cézannes, they were best not talked of: it would be many years before they were considered as anything but “painting as a drunken scavenger would see it,” as someone remarked.
To get back some of his expenses—and, of course, to help his artists—Tanguy tried to sell some of the canvases which cluttered his shop in ever greater numbers; but only rarely did he succeed. His pictures were pledges that none could redeem. His collection grew steadily bigger and bigger until the shop became a real little avant-garde museum of contemporary art and a meeting-place for all those who supported the Impressionists and liked to know what was new in the world of art. It was Cézanne’s work, above all, that they came to see. During the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877 Cézanne was attacked so violently, and suffered so deeply in consequence, that he decided that never again would he show his pictures in public. For nearly twenty years—until the famous exhibition organised by Vollard in 1895, which marked the beginnings of his great fame—he took no part in the activities of the art world. And during all that time, or at any rate until Tanguy died in 1894, the shop in the rue Clauzel (moved meanwhile from no. 14 to no. 9, by the way) was the only place in Paris where Cézannes could be seen.
“People went to Tanguy’s as if to a museum,” Émile Bernard tells us, “to see some studies by the unknown painter who lived at Aix … The unpretentious shop became, without knowing it, a Parisian legend. It was talked of in every studio. Members of the Institut, influential critics and writers who wanted to set everything to rights—all flocked there. Such was the unsettling effect of these canvases … the young people sensed that they were works of genius, their elders saw in them the madness of paradox, and the envious invoked the name of impotence.”
Gauguin, Sérusier, Anquetin, Signac and Maurice Denis were among those