Re-viewing Matisse

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In Paris, Albert Godycki discovers how Matisse’s paintings ‘intensify the faculty of seeing’

Looking at a painting by Matisse is like the sensation one might experience when reading a beautiful poem in Braille. Much retinal acrobatics takes place in front of his art – eyes traversing strange visual territories, recording and dispatching for cognitive processing. At a grand show in Paris this activity is intensified, or more precisely doubled, sometimes tripled. ‘Matisse: Paires et séries’ at the Centre Pompidou presents as its theme the artist’s habit of painting and drawing in repetition, of working on more than one picture in the same format and often at the same time. The result is a show that surmounts that intimate plane of art appreciation wherein the viewer’s experience of viewing is paralleled by the artist’s experience of creating.

It is important to remember that Matisse’s exploration of painting was not exactly a search for a personal style, but rather a personal way of dealing with his subjects by painterly means. He began with a downright conventional approach, experimenting with past and present trends(Impressionism, Post-impressionism and Pointillism). Yet as Alistair Wright says in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, by executing his paintings in ‘schizophrenic’ simultaneity, Matisse was able to probe the depths of a picture’s construction, to ‘intensify the faculty of seeing’.

By around 1910, Matisse, helped by his method no doubt, had arrived at a solution. In the exhibition, this emancipatory moment in the history of painting is represented by the visual shift that can be seen between Le Luxe I (summer 1907) and Le Luxe II (winter 1907–08) and between two still lifes painted in Seville in 1910 and 1911. The earlier set seems to belong to Matisse’s formative years along with the two versions of the Young Sailor (1906–07) – once tentative and sketchy, then bold and assertive. In contrast, the two Spanish pictures demonstrate that the process by which individual elements are defined and differentiated on the picture plane need not involve brushy shading or stringent contours separating areas of colour. Instead, Matisse appears to have synthesized what he learnt: where line or shading was once needed, areas of exposed canvas now appear as the seams between distinct forms. Here colour constructs not only difference, but depth, light and atmosphere – it is both harmonic and melodic.

These painterly epiphanies blossomed into a series of works that Alfred Barr, first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), dubbed the ‘symphonic interiors’. Among them, The Red Studio of 1911 (MoMA, New York) is perhaps the best known. At a time when the first purely abstract paintings were beginning to appear (Kandinsky), it is as though Matisse had realized that he too could obtain the emotional power of abstraction, but without forfeiting a representational language. He no longer had to rely on superfluous artifice (Realism, Impressionism, optical theory, etc.); it only remained to be faithful to the eye and cognisant of what the hand could achieve with practice. 

In this surprisingly documentary mode, every object in his paintings is bound together in energetic unity within the composition, regardless of truth to colour or of scale. Perhaps this sense of pictorial accord, as in the two versions of Capucines à La Danse (summer 1912) came from Matisse’s disciplined practice of using canvases of equal size when ‘getting to know’ a subject. Or perhaps it was from his resistance to preparing isolated studies of individual elements, for the eye does not see in fragments but takes in images entire and at once. In the artist’s words:

to prepare a picture is not to work on more or less fixed compartments of that picture. To prepare its execution is,  first of all, to nurture its feeling through studies that have a certain analogy with the picture, and that is how the choice of elements can be made.

Much later, in 1941–2, came a suite of drawings. What may look like a collection of disparate tracings are a nucleus of Matisse’s ideas about art and a paradigm of his working method. The three groups of ‘Thèmes et variations’ that the visitor encounters in Room 5 of the exhibition are part of a suite of 17 albums. The simple, calligraphic drawings in each suite have a single progenitor: a sooty charcoal study in which Matisse practised the choreography for what he would later perform in ink or pencil on the pristine sheets. This procedure seems musical and indeed Matisse drew analogies between drawing and virtuosity on the piano. The poet Aragon observed about Matisse that his comparison reveals how ‘mechanical execution’ brought to the fore the ‘technical consciousness of the draughtsman’.

Matisse was keen to show how his method permeated equally his drawings, his paintings and his sculpture. For a 1945 exhibition at the Parisian Galerie Maeght, Matisse displayed not only finished works but photographic documentation showing the genesis of La Blouse roumaine (1939–40) and Le Rêve (1940). Like the photographs, the drawings in Room 5 let us observe a Matisse unravelled – a stop-frame pilgrimage around his work.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Matisse rarely complicated his art for the viewer. In the exhibition at Paris it becomes clear that the artist strived for optical delectation to be an engaging, even transformative experience. At any rate, we discover an artist who is trying to get the picture ‘right’, making multiple attempts but leaving us with so much to enjoy.

The exhibition in Paris is accompanied by a French-language catalogue: Matisse. Paires et seriesedited by Cécile Debray, published by Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2012. 288pp., 42.00 euros.