Great Leap Forward: Matisse in Chicago
By Richard Lacayo
April 12, 2010
To restore Matisse to us in all his glorious difficulty is the public service performed by "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," a spectacular new show that can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 20 and then moves to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Why focus on just four years? Because they were a moment when Matisse fundamentally reinvented painting. His works of that period — there are almost 120 in the show, including canvases, prints, drawings and sculptures — truly were radical inventions, new answers to the fundamental question of how to construct a picture. They were also, no surprise, considered ugly and incomprehensible in their time. Matisse once said he wanted viewers to feel about his art the way they would about "a comfortable chair" — an odd sentiment from a man whose art was more like an electric chair.
The years right after 1913 were an anxious time for Matisse. Born in 1869, he
entered his mid-40s more visible than ever in the art world, but with work that
to the French was still an eyesore. Though for the first time he was making
enough money from his art to buy his family a comfortable house in a Paris
suburb, much of his income derived from a single Russian patron, Sergei Shchukin,
a wealthy merchant willing to fill his drawing room with Matisse's most
difficult pictures while Moscow society snickered.
And even as he struggled to gain a wider public, Matisse was losing his position
as leader of the Parisian avant-garde to Picasso, 12 years his junior. Young
artists were fascinated by the militant astringency of Cubism and its systematic
means of exploding form and space. Compared with the bristling brown surfaces in
Picasso and Braque, even Matisse's fiercest pictures, with their dizzying color,
could look a bit "decorative" — a dismissive word thrown at him all the time.
To be regarded as old hat was something new for Matisse. He had made his name in
the preceding decade as the most dauntless of the Fauves — the Wild Beasts — a
small group of painters who pushed the telegraphic brushwork of Impressionism
and the dissonant palette of post-Impressionism into fever territory. At their
head was Matisse, King of the Beasts, building pictures out of colliding zones
of pyrotechnic color or from staccato dashes of magenta and ultramarine.
When he was through with the hectic charms of Fauvism, Matisse moved to distill
and stabilize his art by conjuring up a stripped-bare world of preclassical
antiquity, a place that was one part arcadia, one part Land That Time Forgot. In
enigmatic pictures like Bathers with a Turtle, from 1908, bluntly rendered
figures were disposed among wide, flat bands of nearly abstract blue and green
that signified — just barely — land, sea and air.
Art During Wartime
These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie
D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a
final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion
and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War
I. Rejected for service — he was 44 when the war began — he went on working in a
Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long
after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother
left stranded behind enemy lines and his brother sent to a prison camp. In Paris
on many nights, the booming of German artillery was audible in the distance.
These were the conditions under which Matisse began to produce pictures based on
what he called the "methods of modern construction." Struggling to mount a
personal response to the challenge of Cubism, he approached the very edge of
abstraction. Things and people were reduced to concise signs of themselves, but
in the end Matisse always remained attached to the visible world. Just look at
Goldfish and Palette, from 1914, in which light and shadow, form and space, are
distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the
painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and
its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure
color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black,
white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences
into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers,
structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish bowl, the
highly abstracted orange fish and, to the right, the painter's white palette
with his thumb stuck through it.
Even in his portraits, like The Italian Woman, Matisse could almost entirely
transform the sitter, because he was confident that feeling in a painting was
conveyed not by physical appearance or facial expression but by the sum of the
impressions created by line and color. Often he began a picture with something
like a realistic scene, then distilled it repeatedly. This is what happened with
his magnificent Bathers by a River. When he started the large wall painting in
1909, it was a panorama of voluptuous women in bright colors. When he finished
it seven years later, the women were angular and anonymous, the setting
radically flattened, and the river had become another of those vertical black
bands, with a stark white snake shooting upward along it like a bent poker.
In 1917 Matisse relocated to Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his
work over the next three decades he would return — you might say retreat — to
more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other
artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments.
Color-field paintings, for example — the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth
Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler — would emerge
directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him
too quickly after all.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1977111-1,00.html
