“The mood of artistic self-consciousness” in turn-of-the-previous-century Montmartre, Paris, says Sue Roe in her jauntily written recent book, In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art (Penguin), “had replaced the decadence of the Belle Époque and came to characterize the modern age.” For the modern artist, art was about finding ways “of expressing the interior life,” but as Roe points out, “the intellectual ambience was still predominantly satirical.”
Take the unspoken dress code at the artists’ watering hole, the Lapin Agile, where couture ranged from workaday grubbies to the attire of shepherdesses, harlequins, or something out of a Louis XV costume ball. Although united by their adamant bohemianism, the artists all had “their own clique and their own established corner of the tavern. Groups of strangers eyed one another up suspiciously.”
It was in Montmartre in 1900 — at the time, a ramshackle village barely within the city limits — that the ferociously ambitious 19-year-old Pablo Picasso chose to settle. Fast forward a century or so later, add two or three years to his age, and give him a bachelor’s degree, and that same young Picasso, instead of heading to Montmartre, would be stepping out of an Uber car in front of a university art building, ready to start life as a graduate student — the first move in a world-famous career as a hot “practitioner” of photo-text-based installations or “zombie formalist” abstract painting. In the company of his fellow M.F.A. students, Picasso, plus ça change, would find himself right at home — nurtured in the warm atmosphere of irony and a community of skinny-jeaned hipsters and holdover goths. Like the Lapin Agile artists of a century previous, he’d also spend hours hanging out and talking with fellow “practitioners” — all working in a variety of “modes of artistic production” (a.k.a. styles) and all warily sizing up one another.
Granted, in 1900, there was only one Montmartre, compared with the more than 200 master-of-fine-arts programs in the United States today, programs that handed out something north of 16,000 M.F.A. degrees in 2011-12. Yet the problems of struggling artists in today’s M.F.A. programs are strikingly similar to those faced by the painters and sculptors who populated Montmartre in the first decade of the 20th century.
Young artists always have had to scramble for money, and time and space in which to make their art. In an M.F.A. program, of course, time and space are taken care of, but at a price: Average yearly tuition at a top-10 program is a little less than $40,000, and the median debt upon exiting a two-year program is over $20,000. As my late art-professor-friend Walter Gabrielson used to say, “A lot of kids go into art and strike it poor.”
Today’s graduate art students share with the Montmartre artists a longing to be in a serious art community that’s less alienating than society at large, as well as a desire for some kind of cushion against the ruling art world. The hope of serious attention — from collectors buying art, dealers and curators organizing exhibitions, influential critics, and even conversations with peers — has been, self-expression notwithstanding, the prime motivator of modern artists, especially younger ones. For many of them, mustering out of graduate school means exiting a world of continual art conversation and entering one where no one knowledgeable is paid to look at, and comment on, their work.
High on the top of a hill, Montmartre had been an artistic enclave since the 12th-century days of Louis VI (a.k.a. “Louis the Fat”), a supporter of the arts, who purchased the hilltop in order to build an abbey. Much later, for Fernande Olivier, the artist’s model who would become Picasso’s lover, the attraction of the quartier was its “harmonious mix of amateur painters, office workers, laborers, and streetwalkers, admiring the theatricality of the women with the vampish clothes and painted faces who unashamedly strolled through the lanes.” The spillover from the 39 million visitors to the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris, however, turned the view from the hill, and the neighborhood’s inexpensive restaurants, into prime tourist attractions. In 1901, a funicular to the top of Montmartre was built, enabling more and more lookie-loo’s to flood the area.
In terms of styles of art, the artists of Montmartre remained outliers. “Most consumers of art in 1901,” Roe says, “were still concerned with polish, finish, narrative subject matter — soothing landscapes tastefully executed, in pastel or grey tones — or with the snob value attaching to the work of known academicians.”
That was certainly not the sort of art produced in the large, dilapidated building at 13 rue Ravignan, known as the Bateau Lavoir because it looked like one of the laundry barges on the Seine. By 1904, when Picasso moved in, the building had been divided into 30 rooms and “was little more than a stack of shacks … labyrinthine, with corridors and precarious makeshift staircases … planks of wood piled up outside, the window panes … cracked … the walls seeped; the place smelled of mildew and cats.” Picasso’s studio, like his art, was a risky venture, as it was located at the very top of the rickety building.
Montmartre was filled with artists as radical as Picasso (who, at the time, was still groping his way through his Blue Period, before lurching toward his seminal Cubist masterpiece, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”): André Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, Marie Laurencin, and Henri Rousseau. A frequent visitor was an older artist, nicknamed “the doctor” because of his bourgeois attire and monocle; his name was Henri Matisse.
There was something new brewing among these artists, and a few collectors, having seen the rise in reputations of the formerly unpalatable Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, were sniffing about. A sign in the former pharmacy that had been turned into a gallery by the ex-circus clown Clovis Sagot read: “SPECULATORS! Buy art! What you pay 200 Francs for today will be worth 10,000 Francs in ten years’ time.”
M.F.A. candidates live by the same fantasy — except they hope, on the basis of collectors glomming onto young artists as producers of flippable goods, that the gap between selling work for a pittance and having it fetch five figures in a sleek New York, L.A., or Miami gallery, is a lot less than 10 years. They are, however, willing to do more than suffer penury while they struggle through making their early-period art. “At Hunter College [in Manhattan], there is a real push by both students and faculty for specific technical knowledge,” says Howard Singerman, professor and chair of the fine-arts department there, and author of the benchmark 1999 study, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (University of California Press). “We also require at least three courses in art history. Most students take more, and most students take at least one pre-modern. At Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, they have a theory and history boot camp, and their students spend a significant amount of time in seminars.”
Although some smaller sustainable art worlds — less cutthroat and more concerned with “community” than those in the major cities — have grown up in towns with prominent universities housing large M.F.A. programs (for example, Chapel Hill, Missoula, Richmond, and Austin), it’s still the possibility, however remote, of eventually succeeding in big-time cosmopolitan art scenes that drives most of the better M.F.A. candidates.
In that respect, says Singerman, “There are basically only a dozen M.F.A. programs that are ‘worth’ their tuition dollars.” Since the cost of a graduate studio-art degree is so high, and the odds against gaining some attention from the art magazines, establishment galleries, museum curators, and collectors with more than spare change in their pockets are so great, and since almost none of those entities care where and for how long an artist of interest went to school, why couldn’t a young artist simply move to a rough neighborhood in a big city and go from there?
A cynical answer might be that for the more ambitious graduate students, “M.F.A.” stands for “My Fat Address book.” In other words, graduate school is most valuable for networking with professors who themselves network, for contacts for jobs as studio assistants to famous artists or schlepping in the back room of a good gallery, and meeting young modern-art historians who are also art bloggers and aspiring critics. A more conventional answer would be that most undergraduate art students still need considerable tuning up after earning their bachelor’s degrees.
In its heyday, in the first 10 years of the 20th century, Montmartre possessed many of the qualities that M.F.A. candidates find in graduate school. A cadre of different artistic types, for one. Even if for much of the time he didn’t have two centimes to rub together, Picasso was the star; his attitude and confidence said it all — in Olivier’s words: “He loved anything with strong local color … . It seemed as though nothing abstract or intellectual could move him.”
Matisse, his main competitor, was the older, more settled artist, with a spouse (Amélie) who “was prepared to devote her life to creating the conditions he needed to pursue his work.” Modigliani was the self-destructive romantic, dead at 35 from drink, drugs, and tuberculosis; and Utrillo, who had been institutionalized, used painting as a psychological gyroscope.
On an art-political level, Montmartre also offered the spice of a growing enmity between two aesthetic camps. At the opening of the 1908 Salon des Indépendants, Gertrude Stein — along with her brother Leo, the most active patrons of Montmartre artists — noted that “the feeling between the Picassoites [who favored daring over beauty] and the Matissites [who favored a daring beauty] became bitter.” Near the end of Montmartre’s fertile decade, the Futurists (who coupled a Cubism-in-motion style to exhortations to actual anarchy, and thought that intra-art disputes were inherently trivial) moved in and escalated the debate.
Contemporary graduate art programs manifest something of the same kind of pushing, shoving and passionate argumentation about art, albeit with the “Let’s all just try to get along” ambience so dear to academe. Politically minded identity-conscious artists give the common courtesies to formalist abstract painters, who tolerate figurative artists. Video and performance artists give grudging credence to sculptors who weld, and vice-versa. Research-based artists making temporary installation pieces about global warming politely, if a tad condescendingly, respect the photographers hard at work digitally altering their images of junkyard fences.
Yet the “Montmartre moment” of 1900-1910 was unique, resulting from the perfect storm of Paris, and its history with art, and a serendipitous gathering of an all-star team of artists whose like wasn’t seen again until Abstract Expressionism emerged in New York in the 1940s.
Today’s studio-art graduate schools, with their parity of women and men, and a wider racial and cultural range of students than ever before, is not the contest of raging male egos, or the maneuvering over winning first place in the avant-garde game, that was Montmartre. Today, in fact, there is a general consensus that the term “avant-garde” should, in the words of the conceptual artist Dan Flavin, “be restored to the French Army where its manic sense of futility propitiously belongs.”
In short, no M.F.A. program is going to replicate — to cite the subtitle of Roe’s book — “the birth of modernist art,” and the odds are considerably against even adding something significant to postmodernist art. Unless, of course, there’s an unbelievably lucky confluence of genius in the students. Barring that, the best that will happen is that each candidate arrives with his or her own private Montmartre, tucked close to the heart.
Peter Plagens, a painter, is the author of Bruce Nauman: The True Artist (Phaidon, 2014). Plagens’s papers recently have been acquired by the UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E.Young Research Library.
