Matisse in Nice
MASHECK, JOSEPH
On Art MATISSE IN NICE BY JOSEPH MASHECK Matisse is the great modern painter of color as sensation and delight. Americans tend to go for Picasso as combination genius, mover and macho...
...Picasso would have been down on the beach every day, showing off...
...Yet what he worked to make lovely has its depth and its heroism, too...
...Often when space seems decoratively flattened out, Matisse is experimenting with pictorial structure in his own way, assimilating Cubist insights to a more pliant spatial geometry...
...Matisse was his own man...
...His hiding away in a seaside hotel and painting the figure have been considered an artistic retreat...
...No one would guess from these paintings that the Matisse of 1916-30 was working in a time convulsed by war and revolution...
...The more normal still lifes that emerge from interiors and figure studies are charming even when not profound, but most of the plain landscapes are mere weekend paintings, work done on days off from a full-time job in paradise...
...Putting quotation marks around the "reality" of his odalisques is exactly what removes them from the painter's straight pictures of women as really beautiful—it's like taking sunglasses off to look from an odalisquetothe Woman Seated in an Armchair, Peignoir Open (1920...
...The artist, if he appears at all, is politely contained in suit and tie...
...Americans tend to go for Picasso as combination genius, mover and macho stud...
...This impressive exhibition, organized by Jack Cowart and Dominique Fourcade, challenges that view with wonderful paintings...
...In Decorative Figure Against an Ornamental Ground (1925-26), a chromatic jam session, the seated nude practically levitates, serene...
...In Matisse's case, settling in Nice was escapism with a purpose: What he made there still radiates happiness and peace...
...Was he ever a Cubist...
...Matisse, who by comparison was always off playing with the girls, gets the beauty prize...
...Matisse's interior, typically, is aboudoir of color and pattern...
...Whatever Matisse was up to in Nice, he was not regressing to naive representation...
...True, she admitted, Berlioz believed the chromatic scale to be the most important thing in the world...
...But bear in mind that a man can hold such crazy ideas and yet not be the enemy of the human race...
...The theme has been tinged with colonialism since Romantic times, but Matisse went for it precisely as a fiction (a photo in the catalogue shows Pierre Bonnard hamming as an odalisque in Matisse's studio...
...Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930," at the National Gallery in Washington D.C...
...Many of them, moreover, have rarely been made available to the public...
...Before and after Matisse was daring...
...Odalisques are those orientalizing fantasies of women displayed like crown jewels...
...Matisse's model never gets any closer to the water than the balcony of the hotel room, and is usually seen from well inside...
...The fine Woman with a Veil(\921) displays a figure quartered in similar and opposed color zones united by a diagonal grid—a kind of meditation on the simpler decorative patterning of a pair of 1916 portraits of the artist's daughter in a Scotch plaid coat, one with the plaid as black-on-white, the other reversed...
...His penchant for decorative textiles and props, folkloric or Rococo, makes for a feminine sophistication as he borrows their musically abstract rhythms to accompany the figure in his sensitized—and sensualized—painted surface...
...The Studio on the Quai Saint-Michel (1916), painted at the threshold of the Nice period, fascinates partly as a slow-motion replay of better known Cubistic works done in Paris the same year...
...A century earlier George Sand was driven to defend Berlioz against the charge of hiding his head in art...
...Matisse's odalisques are especially erotic yet totally decorous...
...It is not always easy to decide, of a woman and her richly wrought setting, which is garnishing which...
...This was a city boy to whom trees and hills probably looked wonderful—for about an hour, that is, and they would have taken longer to paint...
...In Nice the painter studied the Mediterranean light, in full C-major and related minor keys...
...until March 29, offers over 170 paintings from a neglected phase of the artist's career...
...Matisse liked to toy with standard modes: A trio of big, breezily painted seashore scenes of Etretat, devoid of figures, feature Courbet-like studies of "ugly" sea creatures on the foreground sand—nature morte motifs the artist kept alive with splashes of water...
...That's a teaser...
...Sunshine either spills in freely or is sliced by shutters or filtered through curtains...
Vol. 70 • January 1987 • No. 1
