What once would have seemed a conservative idea now looks timely: the Museum of Modern Art in New York is mounting the king-size " Henri Matisse: A Retrospective" (Sept. 24 through Jan. 12, 1993, not traveling). With more than 400 works, including 275 paintings, 50 of the late paper cutouts and an assortment of sculptures, drawings and prints, the massive show has temporarily displaced the entire permanent collection from two floors of the museum It’s like a long, languorous alfresco feast in the south of France, with course after course of the painterly equivalent of ripe fruit, creme fraiche, warm bread and the giddy intoxication of perfumy rose. The show goes on and on-galleries filled with still lifes, portraits, nudes, landscapes. It’s too much, really, and you’re a bit overstuffed near the end. But a three-star meal like this, gracefully served by an artist unconstrained by excessive theorizing, is rare. You find yourself going back for more.
The show draws most heavily on what MoMA calls the most important trove of Matisses in the world-its own collection. Much of the rest of the exhibition comes from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. The reserved tickets cost a record $12.50 a pop, calculated to enable the $4 million exhibition to break even. (Advance sales hover at around 100,000 tickets, but how many more viewers would come had the price been lower?)
If Picasso was modern art’s brazen high-wire act, then Matisse (1869-1954) is its elegant bareback rider. His graceful economy and sensuous color are almost a match for Picasso’s daredevil feats of cubist contortion. Unbearably clever freshmen art-history students sometimes refer to the pair as “Ma Tisse and Pa Casso.” The two great artists met in 1907, and traded some early paintings with each other, but the older Matisse ultimately tired of the rivalry and remained relatively cool toward Picasso for the rest of his life.
While Picasso was the Spanish emigre offspring of an artist who encouraged his son’s precociousness, Matisse was born in a dull, flat part of northern France to a merchant who wanted his boy to be a lawyer. The younger Matisse obliged, but failed at his first job. His father reluctantly gave him a small allowance and let him go to art school in Paris. Matisse subsisted on half-portions of food in order to buy art supplies. Nevertheless, he found a girlfriend and fathered a daughter, Marguerite, by her in 1894. In 1898, he married another woman, Amelie Parayre (who adopted the beloved Marguerite), and eventually they had two sons, Jean, a sculptor, and Pierre, who became an eminent art dealer. After limited early success in the official salons, Matisse began to experiment with modernism. His lack of sales made him look more and more like a bohemian failure to his father, who cut off the stipend in 1901.
Matisse’s teacher at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was Gustave Moreau, whose gleaming hyperrealism hinted at the mystery lurking beneath the surfaces of figures and objects. He suspected Matisse’s talents were greater than his own and declared that he would “be the bridge.” Matisse briefly fell under the influence of Goya’s paintings and then, profoundly, under Cezanne’s. But after experimenting with the careful manipulation of space in paintings like the nude “Carmelina” (1903-04), he felt the need to push beyond convention. " I had to invent something that would render the equivalent of my sensation-a kind of communion of feeling between the objects placed in front of me," Matisse later recalled. What he invented-with a little help from Andre Derain-in the summer of 1905 was fauvism: an emotion-charged method of separated brushstrokes in floral colors. The style eventually led Matisse to embed objects into whole fields of saturated color. In " Harmony in Red (La desserte)" (1908), for instance, we see the beginning of what the art historian Jack Flam called Matisse’s “metaspace.” At first, the surface looks flat, but then the color seems to pulsate enough to give depth to the crockery, the fruit and the woman.
Matisse drew endlessly, from deftly minimal pen-and-ink sketches to full, fleshy figures. And his seemingly casual color sense-as in the clashing purple, green and black in “Woman in a Purple Robe With Ranunculi” (1937)–was grounded in a fine-tuned appreciation of tonal values. “A colorist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing,” he once remarked in a letter.
In 1912, on one of the two trips to Morocco that transformed his painting, Matisse boasted, “One can drum up a masterpiece with an orange, three carrots and a rag.” Well, at least he could. That’s what makes MoMA’s encyclopedic exhibition so fascinating, and exhausting. Every painting in it-no matter how small, sketchy or thinly painted-deserves a long look. Many are masterpieces, but even if they aren’t, each contains at least a small surprise: the lighthearted equating of elliptical flower buds and an egg-shaped face in " Plum Blossoms, Green Background" (1948) or the soft, erotic forms of the “Odalisque With Magnolias” (1924). Sometimes, as with the grand, simple and fiery " Dance II," you feel awe in the presence of true genius.
Although as early as 1908, Matisse began to sell enough paintings to assume the bourgeois propriety he always coveted, his life was not entirely charmed. The school he opened that year never got off the ground. Detractors sniffed that his students came not from France but “from Massachusetts.” Matisse’s father died in 1910, and the artist felt the need to go off to Spain to recover. Madame Matisse didn’t like being left alone, and complained. Matisse answered, " I am content! You are not content?" " I am content you are content," his wife acquiesced. Relations between the two were more strained (usually by Matisse’s dalliances) than most of the paintings of Madame Matisse imply. The couple finally separated in 1939, over a model who had also been hired as a companion for Madame. While Matisse obstinately refused an offer of a visa to the United States and remained in France during World War II, he fared better in the Vichy south than his estranged wife and Marguerite did in Paris. They were active in the Resistance and briefly imprisoned in 1944. Marguerite was tortured and sent to Ravensbruck, but she managed to survive.
Perhaps the Matisses’ antagonistic marriage inspired the strange, ominous quality that occasionally surfaces in the paintings. You see it early-first in the anxious pose and clay-colored reworking of the central woman’s odd face in “Bathers With a Turtle” (1908). It crops up again in the menacing man in striped pajamas confronting a wary, seated woman in the magnificent “Conversation” (1908-12). But that mood comes to a climax in the gray, empty-eyed visage of Madame Matisse in the portrait of her Matisse painted in 1913. Amelie reportedly wept when she saw it.
Matisse scholars, perhaps taking their cues from the lively bonhomie of most of the artist’s work, are a congenial group who don’t spend a lot of time cannonballing one another’s ideas. John Elderfield, 49, a bookish-looking graduate of London’s Courtauld Institute and the MoMA curator who put together the show, isn’t out to overturn conventional wisdom. His central point-that Matisse is more than modern art’s most likable hedonist-is hardly fuel for controversy.
But Elderfield knows he’s got to come up with an intellectual reason for mounting such a huge and costly show, not just an esthetic one (the art world’s current sensuous impoverishment) or an economic one (soaring insurance costs soon putting grand retrospectives out of reach). So, Elderfield has taken an idea once uttered by Matisse-" The importance of an artist is to be measured by the number of new signs he has introduced into the language of art"and proceeded to filter the artist through a structural-linguistics mesh. He concludes, among other things, that because the human body is a container of sorts, and because the painting “Harmony in Red” contains a lot of objects, the picture must be a metaphor for the body. A bit of a stretch, but also pretty harmless.
What Matisse requires more than another field theory about his work is a full-fledged biography. We’ve had large, glossy books on Matisse and his public, Matisse and his early work, Matisse and his travels. But there’s been little to explain the paradox of his introverted, bourgeois world and the luscious paradise of his art. Critics have left a lot of loose ends to tie up. For instance, art historian Flam wrote in 1986, “Thus, as I interviewed people, it became apparent that Matisse often had intimate relations with his models. It did not, however, seem to me necessary to discuss these relations at any length.” Why not? Would it hurt to know how much Matisse’s painting depended on sexual passion? More important, did it have anything to do with that peculiar dark streak in his art? Of course, the author should be a scholar generous enough not to condemn artistic greatness out of hand just because it’s based on the currently reviled tradition of male gaze and female object.
While we’re waiting for that literary event, we can enjoy this esthetic one at MoMA: the fullest presentation ever of the artist who made paintings the way God makes flowers. At the end of the previous century, when Matisse started to paint, the world looked too blighted by industrialization to be redeemed by the fading cheer of impressionism. At the end of ours, it looks perhaps too fractured, angry and polluted to be changed for the better by anything art has to offer. Yet this grand new look at Matisse and his pursuit of pleasure in the highest sense of that word reacquaints us with the one emotion too often missing from both art and life: joy.
