A Forgotten Migrant Artist in Paris

Chagall, Picasso, Mondrian and Others: Migrant Artists in Paris, showing at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, focuses largely on artistic success stories. This article shows the other side of the coin, presenting the story of a forgotten migrant artist: the first Dutch student of French painter Henri Matisse.

Her name was Beatrice, or Bé, de Waard, and she attended the Académie Matisse in Paris in 1909. In 2015 I revealed her identity in a blog post (in Dutch) written in response to the Stedelijk Museum’s The Oasis of Matisse exhibition. This article presents photographs of the artist and her work for the first time. It focuses on her position in cultural life, as part of what is sometimes known as a collective biography. This collective biography recounts the lives of female immigrant artists in Paris in the early 20th century. Though their ranks grew steadily, there are relatively few famous female artists from that period. Why is this? Or did they in fact exist, and is it simply a matter of searching for them in a different and better way? 

In 1909 Matisse organized a musical soiree at his studio. In 1951 his pupil Max Weber recalled that evening: ‘Mlle. Deward, a young Dutch pianist and a member of the [painting] class [of Matisse], played several piano selections’¹. For a long time, this was the only indication that Matisse had had a Dutch student in the early 20th century. Those who knew her described her as very attractive. Does this mean she was a muse, a source of inspiration for artists and writers? Her story tells us that her role in the circle of German writers and intellectuals with whom she associated was mainly that of a fellow intellectual and a person who knew how to get things done. De Waard’s extensive correspondence, which continued to her final years, when she was poor, lonely and ill, reveals how difficult life was for a needy elderly artist in 1950s Paris. 

The Dutch student

Weber wrote the name of the only Dutch student in Matisse’s painting class using a non-Dutch spelling, Deward. In 2014, passages from a letter written by Hungarian painter and Matisse student Géza Bornemisza were published. That letter mentions fellow students’ names, and includes the remark ‘I remember Bé de Ward, a pretty Dutch girl’². De Ward is not a typical Dutch name either. The Archives Matisse have a letter dated 21 November 1909 from ‘B. de Waard’ to Matisse, informing him that she has moved to Berlin with her fiancé and regrets she will no longer be able to enjoy the benefit of Matisse’s instruction. During an online search, I found a mention of a landscape by Beatrice de Waard on an auction site, a composition executed in ink, with no further information. I wondered whether Bé de Ward might in fact be the same person as B. de Waard and Beatrice de Waard. The solution to the mystery was concealed in the 380 pages of correspondence that Beatrice de Waard wrote from her home in Paris and other locations in France to her friends Karl Polanyi and Ilona Duczyńska in New York and Pickering, Canada, between 1948 and 1961. Her letters can be accessed online in the Karl Polanyi Digital Archive under the title: ‘Correspondence Karl Polanyi – Beatrice de Waard, 1948-1961’³. Polanyi was a Hungarian economic historian. His wife, Polish-Hungarian Ilona Duczyńska, was an engineer, journalist and historian. These largely undated letters, signed ‘Bé’ or ‘Be’, written in English and German, frequently discuss fundamental socio-political issues, literature, and painting. She always writes spontaneous thoughts, alternating with subjects like her heart condition, her loneliness, and her financial problems.

In one of her letters she wrote: ‘Karl, in haste: for goodness’ sake, no exhibition etc. and mention of the Matisse school, foreword, etc. No, none of that. In a great hurry, I gave Otto 6 or 7 paintings, only 2 of which may go on public display of any kind’⁴. In another letter, we read: ‘My dear Karl, The M.[ax] W.[eber] book is very funny of course. My role in the whole was only my being so touched by your tone [?] (as to the painter M.[ax] W.[eber] himself, he had been for 40 years out of my mind, was never very much in it (this don’t tell him) except – on the very day your card came afterwards!). As to my image in the Matisse-atelier, it may have been like that – but under what burdens and loadings of misunderstanding. Where was I? And, no[w], no[w], surely you did not reveal your Max Weber’s heritage […] to me. But how much I would like to hear’⁵. These two passages are difficult to decipher and somewhat cryptic, but they certainly establish that Bé de Waard studied with Matisse at the same time as Max Weber.

Erich Unglaub’s Rilke research revealed her full name, based on documents in Munich’s Stadtarchiv. The Hague city council’s population register gives a slightly longer name: Engelbertha Hélène Louise de Waard, born on 19 June 1885 in The Hague, the daughter of pastor Sietze de Waard and his wife Eveline Mathilda Backer. Engelbertha – not a name that would get one far in the world, which is probably why she went by the name Beatrice – was a painter. She grew up in The Hague and Huis ter Heide in Utrecht province, without any professional training, as she herself said. De Waard remembered writing to Polanyi as early as ‘around 1910’.⁶

Her name first appears on 6 - 9 January 1909, in a letter from the Hungarian essayist, art critic and painter Leó Popper to the famous Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács, a close friend of Popper’s. Popper gives the address 225, rue St. Jacques, Paris.⁷ Bé de Waard became engaged to Popper in January 1909.

How did she meet Leó Popper? How did she, a woman from the Netherlands, end up in the class of Henri Matisse, one of the most avant-garde painters of the time? We do not know, but Académie Matisse in Paris was indeed a magnet for foreign art students. 

Académie Matisse

The story of Académie Matisse began in 1907. Friends of Matisse who also painted, and received his informal guidance from time to time, including wealthy Americans Sarah and Leo Stein who had lived in Paris since 1903, inquired whether Matisse would like to begin a painting class. He agreed to the proposal. The founders of the class, who included Sarah Stein and the German painter Hans Purrmann, rented a space, at first – briefly – in the Couvent des Oiseaux and later in the Couvent du Sacré Coeur, both former cloisters in Paris. The Sacré Coeur building that housed the class, as well as Matisse’s studio and family home, was in the grounds of hôtel Biron (now Musée Rodin), a grand 18th-century house with a formal garden. It was one of the many cloisters that had been secularised by the French state (Matisse’s studio and classroom were in the former refectory, separated by a curtain).

Matisse came once a week to assess his students’ work and offer his expertise, as was customary at the many private academies in Paris. They were in fact nothing more than classrooms where students could draw from life and where an artist (or aspiring artist) acted as massier or massière, with responsibility for arranging the facilities. Sometimes, the owner was a former painter’s model. Initially students could attend free of charge, according to Weber, though later they were asked to pay a small sum. We do not know how much, but with Sarah Stein as a co-founder, women will not have been required to pay double, as was common. Just why this was the case is not known. It may have been because female art students often came from middle-class families and were thus able to pay more.⁸ There were thousands of art students in Paris, many of them foreigners. The female students – whose ranks grew steadily – found opportunities to develop there that they did not generally have in their own country. They were for example often barred from life drawing classes back home.

Weber wrote that the members of the group – professional painters, art students and art lovers – were always very nervous as Matisse’s visits approached, but were also delighted and proud to have his help.⁹ For the first few months, Matisse only allowed new students to draw. He would permit them to paint only when they had demonstrated a mastery of the basics. Little by little, Académie Matisse, as it came to be known, attracted all kinds of young painters eager to scramble up the modern art career ladder. By this point, however, Matisse had had enough and, in the summer of 1909, he stopped teaching. The Académie continued without him until the summer of 1911. Weber also maintained that many of the female students had been admitted mainly because of their looks, and had little talent. 

Bé’s fiancé Leó Popper wrote from Paris in 1908 of Matisse and his much-discussed theoretical treatise ‘Notes d’un peintre’ (‘Notes of a Painter’), published that year, which he had read in the journal La Grande Revue. He also reported to Lukács between early October and mid-November that he had met Jóska (József) Bató, a student of Matisse.¹⁰ Matisse’s student Géza Bornemisza continued after recalling ‘Bé de Ward, a beautiful Dutch girl’ with ‘and Edward [sic, Eduard] Witte (Vienna), whom I brought into the school’.  This might mean that he introduced either Witte or Witte and De Waard to Matisse’s class. Popper is known to have produced a number of sketches of nudes in a simplified Matisse-like style, but there is no evidence to confirm that he was one of the artist’s students.¹¹ In his interesting article on the Steins and the young Hungarian painters in Paris Gergely Barki described Max Weber as a key intermediary between the two groups. Weber lived in a complex where four Hungarian painters also lived, and he was in contact with another Hungarian painter, Béla Czóbel. Several students of Académie Matisse, some of them Hungarian, knew each other from Académie de la Grande-Chaumière and Académie Colarossi, which also admitted students free of charge. Bé may have met Leó Popper and learned of Académie Matisse through one of these channels.

Mária Székely of Lukács Archivum supplied me with a photograph of De Waard taken during her engagement. It is taken at an oblique angle from behind, and does not therefore allow a definite identification of Matisse’s only Dutch student. However, I received a much later photograph of her from a French private collection, and this confirms that she is seated fourth from the right in the front row. 

What led her to become a painter? Her letters indicate that she did not at any rate grow up in a parochial provincial setting. As a child she liked to draw, read and play music, and in 1910 she took her Hungarian friends to stay at her parents’ home in Huis ter Heide. On Bé’s recommendation her mother read the celebrated German poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Her parents also took several trips abroad between 1911 and 1914, taking their daughter on some of them. They travelled to Switzerland, for example, where they stayed for some time to alleviate her respiratory problems, an affliction her father also suffered from, and also to Paris, where she arranged accommodation for all three of them. De Waard’s background was that of the typical middle-class female art student in Paris.¹²

De Waard on Matisse

In her letters to Polanyi and Duczyńska De Waard made only one further mention of Matisse. Again, it was a somewhat enigmatic reference. She spoke of the ‘craft aspect of creative production’: ‘The prehistoric drawing was material. But Matisse, for example, not. The cave paintings were métier.’ Her comparison of Matisse with prehistoric art echoes the interests of Polanyi, who conducted research into primitive cultures, though his main interest was trade. The fact that De Waard barely mentions Matisse is somewhat remarkable, all the more so because she alludes to his contemporary, Picasso, with far more frequency. Were they perhaps more interested in Picasso because of his communist sympathies? She always defended Picasso from bourgeois critics not so much, she said,  because of his work, but because she considered him not bourgeois, though his ‘communism’ had, she felt, ‘a certain naïve simplicity’.¹³ Matisse had more of an air of the professorial bourgeois gentleman. Her comment on Picasso’s political sympathies appears to reflect the influence of Popper and Lukács, who introduced a Hungarian social and historical perspective of art history.

De Waard’s comment, cited above, about her ‘image in the Matisse-atelier’ and the ‘burdens and loadings of misunderstanding’ in no way imply that she felt misunderstood by Matisse. In her letter to the artist dated 1909, she not only writes that she misses his tuition but also: ‘I know that in my work, there was little evidence that I understood and followed (what you said), […] in any case, I feel that this set me in motion forever’.¹⁴  She had self-awareness and wit. After noting that she and her fiancé moved to Berlin primarily for the music (Popper had studied at the art academy and the music school), that she now played the piano more than she painted, and inquiring whether she might show Matisse her work again when she next came to Paris, she observed: ‘The last few times I played for you, I had reached the end of my repertoire and perhaps your piano will not close if I want to remedy that fiasco?’¹⁵ In De Waard’s letter, her admiration for the work of Matisse is largely expressed in the comment that she saw so much in ‘the wonderful museums’ of Berlin and that ‘everything pointed me in the direction of your paintings’; she was able to ‘connect them with the grandest and greatest laws of painting’ – which is precisely what, according to Max Weber and others, Matisse taught.¹⁶

She was popular among the early 20th-century cultural elite in Munich for her grace, her bright mind and humour, which had a dark, melancholy undertone, as Fine von Kahler put it.²⁰ Erich von Kahler described their contact as ‘ironic and comradely’, with ‘a sprinkling of comradely human depth’. Compared with another female friend of his, Lilli, the former went better with Lilli than with Bé, and the latter less well. Lilli had ‘more French agility and a well-developed bright consciousness, but as far as I have seen, not so much independent or wise and lonely experience as Be. How one is to fall in love with her, however, is just as incomprehensible as with Be – but what matter?’²¹ Thus far, German painter and literary scholar Friedrich Gundolf’s remark that a portrait painted by De Waard resembled a ‘Jewish student in bad humour’, is the only known early comment on her work, alongside Erich von Kahler’s remark, quoted above, about the warm and spiritually sensitive nature of it.²²

As far as we know, she was never a subject for writers or artists, with the exception of a lost portrait sketched by French painter Ker-Xavier Roussel. In that sense, she was not really a muse.²³ The letters written by her friends in Germany portray De Waard as someone who read their literary and scholarly publications, participated fully in discussions, whose judgment was respected and who arranged and mediated matters. Rilke, for example, wrote to his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé that Bé ‘in her strictness’ rightly criticised a mystical, transcendental passage he had written.²⁴ Although Bé was the daughter of a pastor she was sceptical of anything that hinted at mysticism and the transcendental, in keeping with the views of her Marxist friends Lukács and Polanyi. It appears quite dogmatic to us that, partly for this reason, she expressed a negative view of the work of Franz Marc after Rilke had spoken admiringly of it. Rilke did not say precisely what her criticism was, but he wrote that he respected her judgment, and that in this respect it had caused him some doubts.²⁵

This all suggests that she was an educated, cultured and independent woman, probably like most foreign female art students, and that she could express herself well in French and German.

The paintings by De Waard shown here are modest and unremarkable in terms of their style, format and genre. Her reservations about her work might explain why her ambition was limited. But her modest status was probably not only a matter of talent and ambition. Like many other women, De Waard suffered the disadvantage of having had no preliminary training in art, and having received only a short period of instruction, in her case from Matisse. Historian Siân Reynolds cited the lack of training as one of the general factors explaining the fact that there are so few famous female artists from that period. Male immigrant art students in Paris, many of whom had already sketched nudes at life drawing classes, thus had a headstart on women, who were not generally admitted to nude drawing classes outside Paris. These men were thus able to try out their own style sooner. In this connection, Reynolds also highlighted the male and female role patterns in society at that time. She quoted a British female migrant artist, who said, ‘When a male artist marries he acquires a housekeeper, a model, a brush-washer and perhaps a publicity agent. When a woman artist marries, with rare exceptions, she perishes as an artist, gradually and perhaps painlessly.’³¹

The more that is published about female artists, the more we become aware of bodies of work and careers that defied these patterns. Back in the 18th century Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun managed to continue her glittering career as a painter after her marriage while her husband, who was less successful as a painter, became an art expert and dealer. Dutch artist Suze Robertson, married to Richard Bisschop, painter of church interiors, became the breadwinner in the early 20th century, enjoying more success as a painter than her husband. Generally speaking, however, female artists undoubtedly had a more difficult time of things than their male counterparts because of the traditional roles in marriage. It was not for nothing that Dutch painter Fine Warburg assumed the male artist’s name Nicolaas Warb in Paris during the Second Worldwar. She did so, as she put it, to be taken more seriously by French art critics (and also because her own name sounded German, which could lead to problems in Paris at that time).³² Robertson and Warb were both greatly admired as artists in the world of modern art in the Netherlands and France, respectively.

Old friends came by to visit now and then: ‘[Wilhelm] Hausenstein was here too, the German ambassador, [cultural historian, author of a much-discussed book on Paul Klee and friend of Rilke] now returning back to Munich which I deplore, for we were good friends.’³⁵ She sporadically saw two former friends of Rilke’s who lived in the area.³⁶ The person who did most for her, and was frequently mentioned in her letters to Polanyi, was Otto Mandl.³⁷ In every letter, she made a note of what she was currently reading: Flaubert, the correspondence of the painter Delacroix, Rilke, Sartre, the diary of Anne Frank. Sometimes she was reminded of better times: ‘Awakening and looking at the little Jongkind that hangs above the sofa. If you remember it: the lovely watercolour by the Impressionist Dutch painter given to me by [Ker Xavier] Roussel. […] Roussel took it down from the wall when I said it was my birthday’.³⁸ In 1961, her correspondence ends. Her friends Polanyi and Duczyńska were still alive then. Bé de Waard is believed to have died in or near Paris between 1961 and 1963. It is said there was an accident involving fire, which also destroyed her art.³⁹ If Polanyi and Duczyńska had not kept her letters, this remarkable story would probably have been lost too.

Bé de Waard wrote of her paintings that they should not ‘be forgotten or […] neglected, that is all I wish to say’.⁴⁰ This is the first time they have received any publicity, but they were not included in Migrants in Paris for a number of reasons: because the exhibition features work from the museum’s own collection, plus a small number of works on loan from Dutch public collections, and because De Waard’s paintings did not fit into the themes explored in the different galleries. Furthermore, it is not clear that showing her paintings alongside leading works of modern art would really be to her advantage. Sometimes it is interesting to show works that are not masterpieces of modern art for other good reasons, such as a desire to recount other cultural and artistic narratives. In De Waard’s case, this might be the fact that she was a student of Matisse, or that she opted for naturalism perhaps because of a social engagement tinged with communist sympathies. Bé probably also wanted to produce work for as big an audience as possible for commercial reasons. She made art of the kind that the public already had hanging in their homes, that they could grow fond of, and which they probably would not wish to swap for any modern museum piece.