The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [34]
They call Paris the City of Light, but it struck me from the beginning as the City of Dirt: grimy streets filled with grimy people rushing madly nowhere. If Chicago had intimidated me, Paris left me terrorstruck. You cannot imagine it. From the moment of my arrival in Chicago, I had been uncomfortable walking alone in the city; the feeling had increased in New York, and now, in Paris, it was almost unbearable. Men and women stared at me, or I thought they did, and made remarks among themselves, or I thought they did, understanding a few of their words, having not forgotten my home-tutoring in French. When I heard a man exclaim to his companion, “Tu as vu ces émeraudes?” I knew that he was referring only to the color of my eyes, but I was embarrassed.
My first days in Paris I tried to stay off the streets by retreating into the great museums, the Louvre and the Luxembourg, but the splendor of their masterpieces, my first sight of such incredible paintings by Botticelli and Titian and Poussin, gave me the firm conviction that I could never paint anything worthy of the canvas on which it would be painted.
Strange and huge and dirty as Paris was, I would not have remained there if I had not had a chance encounter with another American girl my own age, in October, named Marguerite Thompson, who was from Fresno, California, and was staying with her aunt in Paris. Like myself, Marguerite wanted to study art and intended to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts. She and I discovered we had a common background, having grown up in small American cities with well-to-do fathers who had arranged for private tutors in French, and both of us had made copies of Gibson girls for friends in high school. But Marguerite had never drawn from the nude, not even the female nude, not even herself in private, and when the entrance examination for the École des Beaux-Arts required us to draw from the male nude (loinclothed, of course), Marguerite could scarcely hold her pencil steady and came close to fainting. I passed the examination with no difficulty, but Marguerite was required to enroll at the École de la Grande Chaumière instead, and she and I drifted apart. But not before we had gone together to be introduced by Marguerite’s aunt to an American woman named Miss Gertrude Stein, who lived on rue de Fleurus in a wonderful house with a friend, Miss Alice Toklas. Marguerite’s aunt, Miss Adelaide Harris, herself a painter, had attended Christian Science Sunday school in San Francisco with Miss Stein, and they were old friends. During my brief chat with Miss Stein, who impressed me as the most emancipated woman I had ever met, I learned that she had a low opinion of the École des Beaux-Arts, and I myself was beginning to question how it was any better than the Chicago Art Institute. After a few weeks there, I transferred to the Académie Julian, where I was much happier. I remained there almost three years. Some of my classmates, as obscure then as I was, were destined to become celebrated.
In November I spent an entire Saturday and Sunday at the exhibition of the Salon d’Automne, where I saw for the first time the paintings of a group of yet little-known artists who were called derisively fauves, meaning “the wild ones.” I learned at this exhibition the three qualities I wanted my own art to acquire: color, simplicity, and spontaneity. The Sunday I discovered the Fauves I also made the acquaintance of the girl who would become my best friend for the next several years, a French girl two years older than myself but appearing younger, called Coco. She has become recently very famous, but you would not recognize her name. In those years she was as much a nobody as I, although she knew some artists who were already on their way to reputation and money.
Coco was not enrolled at the Académie Julian but had attended the Académie Humbert and was now earning her living painting designs on porcelain. Her background was not at