The Modes of Matisse
MELLOW, JAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow The Modes of Matisse What could be more sumptuous or more accommodating than a Matisse interior? Bowls of fruit, bouquets of flowers abound. Nudes, clad in...
...He was no longer a revered master, retired from the scene...
...It would be a mistake, however, to deny the importance of Matisse's subject matter in order to extol his formal virtues...
...In his old age, especially, Matisse resembled the stolid businessmen for whom he once said he painted his pictures of luscious fruits and indolent nudes...
...To be sure, he did not enlarge upon the conventional subjects of the Impressionists or the Fauves...
...The whole painting is a miracle of ease and abundance...
...His Fauve paintings, exhibited in the famous Salon d'Automne of 1905, created a stir...
...It is difficult to know what position to take on the huge Matisse retrospective which has just closed in Boston (at the Museum of Fine Arts) after having been seen earlier in Los Angeles and Chicago...
...His late works, in which the forms were cut with scissors from specially prepared, painted papers, had a direct relevance to the hard edges and flat, brilliant color that were beginning to interest a new generation of artists...
...Behind the boy is a Matisse paintinga woman, rigidly structured, seated on a tall stool...
...on the other side, a bowl of vibrant yellow lemons...
...However, for a brief period during World War I, he experimented with the new style and produced a series of paintings -the portrait of Mlle Yvonne Landsberg and The Piano Lesson among them-that was as significant as it was atypical...
...The Museum of Modern Art, for example, which has just mounted its own Matisse exhibition, was represented by only three paintings (its sculptures were duplicated from other sources) and its loans consisted largely of prints and drawings...
...visitors tried to scratch the paint from his Woman with a Hat...
...but its austere geometry, its bold color scheme, make of it an abstract construction of the mind, an invention, almost, of the music the boy is playing...
...Matisse's influence, however, is not restricted to sculpture, nor is it a matter of recent vintage...
...scattered among the paintings, it seemed an incidental activity...
...A metronome, situated on the pink piano top, is the only solid object in a planar world...
...Nudes, clad in gauzy materials, loll about on red divansperfect illustrations for Wallace Stevens' phrase about the "complacencies of the peignor...
...The 200 prints and drawings, as well as a small sampling of his decorative cut-outs, were treated as independent units...
...The wallpaper is one of those things only a painter could love-bouquets of blowsy red and pink roses set in blue quatrefoils against a chocolate ground with random sprigs of flowers...
...Matisse had seen these late works, many of them monumental in scale, not as a change but as a culmination of his previous efforts: "For me it is a matter of simplification...
...Perhaps it was largely a matter of the works that were available...
...In his old age, Matisse honed his subjects to a fine edge, cutting the shapes from virgin color...
...Matisse, himself, was aware of the sculptural implications of his new technique, though he referred to an older tradition of sculpture and not to the impersonal, industrial styles of the moment...
...The background, an unlikely marvel, consists of a figured wallpaper and an elaborate mirror...
...What one missed in the exhibition was an emphasis on Matisse as the rigorous designer that he was...
...This guarantees a precise union of the two processes...
...The salient fact about Matisse is that he continued to be one of the most influential painters of his time while remaining one of the least controversial...
...Or take a painting like Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background, a composition of the late '20s now in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris...
...In the lower right, a boy's head, partly abstract, partly realistic, appears above the music rack of a Pleyel piano...
...Yet, it would not be overstating the case to claim that Matisse's art constitutes one of the decisive influences upon current painting and sculpture...
...As one of the great colorists of Western painting, he had already established his presence in American art through the influence of a painter and teacher like the late Hans Hofmann, an early devotee of his art...
...At least so it seems, until one notices that the straightness of the nude's back forms a stark vertical that parallels the mirror frame, the plant stalk, the edge of a pillow, setting up a rigid counterpoint to the scroll-like arabesques of the wallpaper and the diagonal rhythms of the oriental rug...
...One of the quirks of contemporary art is that two auxiliary modes-first Cubist collage and now Matisse's découpage-should have had an important bearing upon the course of modern sculpture...
...Instead of establishing a contour, and then filling it with color-the one modifying the other-I draw directly in the color...
...There were, it is true, moments of controversy early in his career...
...Matisse is reported to have taken a reactionary stance toward the new movement at first, seeing in Picasso's Demoiselles d' Avignon a crude outrage and a hoax...
...The 92 paintings in the exhibition were drawn principally from private and some public collections in Paris and the United States and they displayed-handsomely, at that-Matisse's glowing mastery within a limited range of subjects...
...Among the newer sculptors, it is in the importance of design, the union of flat color and simplified forms, that one notes Matisse's legacy...
...It was the reward for his perseverence that in his final works he had so wedded color to line the two were indissoluble...
...He worried that the young would see only his facility, the negligence of his drawing, and fail to recognize the patient efforts that had been expended during a lifetime...
...The drawing, for lack of a better word, seems deshabilléloose, diffident, almost careless...
...But the Fauves, with their brash color and slashing rhythms, were overtaken by the more revolutionary Cubists and the course of modern art became one of strenuous polemics...
...The nude is not especially realistic, although the forms are sensuous and plastic...
...One has been taken in by an apparent diffidence only to be taught an essential rigor...
...For the most part, his work neither sought nor advocated the shock tactics that characterized so much of modern painting...
...He had arrived at a distillation of form: "Of this or that object which I used to present in all its complexity in space, I now keep only the sign which suffices, necessary for its existence in its own form, for the composition as I conceive it...
...To the left, against a field of resilient gray, a large triangular wedge of green cuts down through the vertical strictures of an open casement window...
...For that reason, the absence of a painting like The Piano Lesson (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art) was all the more unfortunate...
...Taking over these "bourgeois" themes, Matisse endowed them with a stringency that placed them well beyond corrosive sentimentality...
...That is the lesson of Matisse...
...they become one...
...Picasso, for all his formal audacities, has been more prone to becoming maudlin about his subject matter and not only in the paintings of the "Blue" and "Pink" periods, but in the midst of sterner tasks, like Guernica...
...She has taken a striking pose, one arm resting on her knee, while seated on an oriental rug that is a luxuriant field of russet and purplish-blues...
...To cut from living color," he remarked, "has something in common with a sculptor's trimming his stone...
...In the lower left, there is a sketchy representation of one of Matisse's early sculptures, a small nude...
...One virtue of the retrospective was that it brought together all of Matisse's important sculptures but, in the Boston showing, these were dispersed among several galleries...
...It is that reductive purity that is the emblem of a good deal of the painting one sees in the galleries nowadays and which was noticeable, even, in the "minimal" sculpture recently displayed in the Jewish Museum's exhibition, "Primary Structures...
...Matisse's luxe, calme, volupté retained a classical firmness...
...He could exclaim, as Toulouse-Lautrec had done, "At last, I do not know how to draw anymore...
...It is an exercise as taut as a piece of chamber music...
...his themes remained the still life, the nude, the sumptuous interior...
...Five years ago, when the Museum of Modern Art put on a posthumous exhibition of the French master's late cut-outs, one's evaluation of Matisse was radically changed...
...It was, certainly, one of the most beautiful exhibitions of the season, but it did not stress Matisse's formal importance so much as display his charme, and one came away from the exhibition feeling that a major opportunity to place Matisse in the mainstream of modern art had been missed...
...He lacked the flair and showmanship that Picasso brought to the international art scene...
...Since Matisse is not generally known, or appreciated, as a sculptor, it would have been impressive to see this work en masse...
...The painting can be taken as a symbol of art, of Matisse's art in particular...
...The Piano Lesson is one of the great formal triumphs of Matisse's career-a painting in which his abilities as a colorist, a designer, a figurative painter are blended into a striking whole...
...Among Matisse's paintings, it is the one that most exemplifies what Louis Aragon has called Matisse's "intellectual chastity...
...Moreover, though now half-acentury old, The Piano Lesson is a contemporary painting-hard edge, even, for all its recognizable content...
...Beside that of his rival and contemporary, Picasso, Matisse's career was ordinary and pedestrian...
...To one side of her is a tall leafy plant, sprouting up from a porcelain jardiniere patterned in blue and white...
Vol. 49 • July 1966 • No. 15
