TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070290/0702400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.6 KB | 143 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 53

A Domain of Light and Color


Morocco's impact on Matisse is traced in a radiant show

By ROBERT HUGHES


    "Matisse in Morocco," which opened Sunday at New York City's
Museum of Modern Art (it was at the National Gallery in
Washington through the spring, and will go to Moscow and
Leningrad in the fall and winter), is what used to be called
a connoisseurs' show. It covers a short time in a long life.
Henri Matisse visited Morocco just twice, in early 1912 and
again in the winter of 1912-13. Hence the exhibition is fairly
small, only 24 paintings and a large group of sketchbook
drawings. It can be seen without sore feet and framed as a whole
in one's mind. It is thorough, scholarly -- Jack Cowart, John
Elderfield, Pierre Schneider and others have done a fine job
on the catalog -- and, above all, full of exhilaratingly
beautiful paintings that have lost none of their sensuous
finesse and cerebral sharpness in the nearly 80 years since
Matisse made them.

    As a bonus, some of the paintings are being seen in the U.S.
for the first time. Most of the best work that Morocco evoked
from Matisse was bought by those two pioneer collectors Sergei
Shchukin and Ivan Morosov and has remained in Leningrad's
Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin museums since the Russian
revolution. As no reproduction has ever done justice to the
peculiar intensity of the thin, washed, yet highly saturated
color Matisse developed in Morocco, one is grateful that the
components of this phase of his work have at last been reunited.
Matisse was a mature painter of 42 when he went to Morocco,
but what he learned from the trip struck to the very root of
his development as an artist. He was tempted to make a third
trip but never did.

    Why should he have gone to North Africa, a part of the world
that Frenchmen in 1912 were still apt to generalize as "the
Orient"? There were two basic reasons: cultural curiosity and
the search for light.

    Matisse wanted a place where the sun shone reliably, like
a lamp, where the conditions of light, constant from day to
day, enabled him to pursue his researches into color without
distraction. Later he would find this stability by moving
permanently to Nice, but it was not available in Paris.
Following the sun, going south to a domain of purer light and
color, had been his obsession since his first trips to Provence
in his Fauvist years. In North Africa it produced radiant
motifs: the green garden, the white breastlike curves of
marabout domes, the angled cuts of shadow in street and alley,
the blue haze of light behind ogival arches.

    But Matisse's pictorial motives differed from those of all
European artists who had visited "the Orient" before. French
painters from the 1830s on, starting with Eugene Delacroix, had
gone there in search of the picturesque, the exotic, the
ready-made subject: mosques and Riffian horsemen, camels and
harem slaves. By 1880 Orientalism had become a large fashion
among salon painters and their clients. French artists brought
their minutely realist style and their mildly prurient
interests to Fez and Marrakech, and went back to Paris with both
intact. To be influenced as a painter by Islamic art --
architecture, rugs, tiles, cloth, miniatures -- was
inconceivable, like "going native." The imperious gaze went
only one way; its view of Morocco was colonialism in paint.

    But Matisse was intensely interested in Muslim decorative
arts, and it was their intrinsic style, not their use as exotic
props, that affected him. He had been to Algeria in 1906. In
1910 he was bowled over by an exhibition of the art of Islam
in Munich and by a visit to the Moorish monuments of Andalusia.
As a result, he recalled, "I felt the passion for color develop
in me." This was dramatically confirmed by Morocco, where
Matisse's aesthetic of decoration took full hold. Flat pattern,
inlaid motifs, sharp conjunctions of highly decorative forms
-- as in the wonderful Basket of Oranges, 1912, with the sharp
forms of citrus fruit and their leaves competing against the
more diffuse pattern of the flowered silk drape on which they
rest -- these were the signs of a world crammed with pictorial
events, all common yet all august and tending to equivalent
value.

    It seems that as Matisse's experience of Islamic art
deepened, he tried to find equivalents for it, not only in his
shapes but also in the substance of his paint. He worked
increasingly in vaporous, quick washes thinned to watercolor
transparency -- stains of extraordinary beauty that establish
a constant field of light against which the passages of denser
paint and linear drawing create, by subtle inflection, the
illusion of solidity. These are, in part, Matisse's response to
the textiles and ceramics he observed, in which the color was
dyed or glazed rather than opaquely painted.

    Light, landscape, enclosed gardens and domes were
everywhere; regular human models, harder to come by. Matisse's
main one was a girl named Zorah, who worked in a brothel in
Tangier. She is most unforgettably commemorated in On the
Terrace, the central panel of a triptych he painted in 1912-13,
on commission for Morosov. Zorah kneels in front of a bowl of
goldfish in the suffused aquamarine light of a terrace.
Apparently Matisse was worried that Morosov would object to the
use of a prostitute, since the central panels of Russian
triptychs often contained figures of the Virgin Mary. But one
can hardly doubt that the artist enjoyed the switch, and
submissive Zorah does become a kind of Moroccan madonna.

    Zorah has many descendants in the artist's mature work, and
it is evident that in Morocco Matisse's basic idea of the
artist-model relationship crystallized. He began to envision
the studio as a kind of harem, where the static and endlessly
compliant figure submitted again and again to the pasha-like
gaze of her observer.

    The great summing-up of Matisse's experience in North Africa
occurred several years after he had returned to France, in The
Moroccans, 1915-16. In that dense, grand and mysterious
painting, the intensity of light is evoked, with all the
courage of paradox, with a predominant velvety black. The
ambiguous forms -- Are the green curved objects in the left
foreground melons, as some think, or the backsides of Muslims
praying to Mecca? -- combine in a pictorial structure of
wonderful explicitness and rigor. One sees in the work painters
who would not be born for another 20 or 30 years: Frank Stella,
Sean Scully. Clearly, though Matisse left Morocco, Morocco
never left him.