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                                                                                ART, Page 67

MATISSE

The Color of Genius


A sublime retrospective illuminates the mastery of a paladin
of modernism

By ROBERT HUGHES


    Sometimes an exhibition will define the work of a major
artist for a whole generation. So with the Museum of Modern
Art's Picasso retrospective in 1980. Now New York City's MOMA
has done it again, with "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective"
(through Jan. 12), devoting most of its space to an enormous
survey of Matisse's paintings, drawings, collages and sculpture
curated by art historian John Elderfield.

    The last comparable Matisse show was organized in 1970 by
Pierre Schneider in Paris, to mark the artist's centenary. It
contained 250 works, and its catalog weighed 2 lbs. It seemed,
at the time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400
works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz.,
outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a
show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam
allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement
is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of
the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick up a brush,
so steady in its narrative line and -- not incidentally -- so
sensitively hung, that even if you go in with a certain
foreboding, you come out walking on air and longing to start
right over again.

    Only MOMA's resources -- its own collection, Elderfield's
connoisseurship and the accumulated borrowing power that is the
peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced
this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth
outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's
studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed
collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided
between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum
of Fine Arts in Moscow.

    Starting two decades later, MOMA also plunged heavily on
Matisse; Alfred Barr's belief in Matisse's supreme importance
to modernism, at a time when the artist was widely considered
to be a decorator (albeit a great one), gave New York City a
collection of incomparable breadth. Some key paintings are
absent, chiefly the crucial Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-05. But
there are not many holes in this tapestry, and given the cost
of insurance and owners' growing reluctance to expose artworks
to the risk of travel, it may be that no museum will ever be
able to mount such a show again.

    Matisse, paladin of modernism, is a long way from us now.
Almost a generation older than Picasso, his counterpart, he was
born in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and Gustave
Flaubert published L'Education Sentimentale. Everything that
looked modern in Matisse's environment is now ancient, from the
gas buggies that were just coming onto the streets of Paris when
he was a student in Gustave Moreau's atelier to the Vichy
politicians who ran France during the Nazi occupation as he
painted in Vence.

    The idea that Matisse and Picasso, like Gog and Magog, are
the founding opposites of modern art has left us a partisan
scheme for looking at their work -- and for thinking about it.
Picasso drawings, Matisse color; Picasso anxiety, Matisse
luxury; Picasso the restless inventor, Matisse the calm unifier;
Picasso in conflict, Matisse rhyming with peace; Picasso the
bohemian Spaniard, Matisse the detached French bourgeois. There
is something to these oppositions, but the closer you look at
them the more tenuous they get. Matisse was just as
challengingly inventive in his Fauve paintings in 1905 as
Picasso became, with Cubism, around 1912; and you can't really
argue that the sweet portraits and huge lethargic women of
Picasso's classical period, after 1917, have some radical
quality missing from Matisse.

    As Elderfield points out in a catalog essay, Matisse's
luck with the critics has always been peculiar. At the outset,
part of the tiny modern-art public in Paris thought his work
incoherent, ugly. Others, like Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis,
praised its absolutist devotion to "painting in itself, the pure
act of painting." But there was never a shortage of critics who
saw Matisse as a kind of magisterial lightweight. "It is a
modiste's taste," wrote the poet Andre Salmon in 1912, "whose
love of color equals the love of chiffon."

    This image of Matisse as a decorative, hence feminine,
hence inferior painter tended to stick. Ironically, it would be
supplanted later by the exactly opposite mistake: that Matisse's
gaze on his odalisques in the calm of the Nice studio was the
quintessence of male sexism, and that his love of pleasurable
objects and delectable color, of luxury in general, disqualified
him as a real voice of the 20th century because it was not
revolutionary.

    Matisse's best-known remark about his art didn't help much
either: he wanted "an art of balance, of purity and serenity,
devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter," that would
soothe the mind of "every mental worker . . . something like a
good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue."
He never made a politically didactic painting in his life.

    What horror! There are always folk, especially in puritan
America, who think pleasure is an unworthy goal of art. Academe
is full of ideological nerds who can't look at a Matisse still
life without planning an essay on the gender division of the
work force in the Nice fruit market; how about The Commodified
Fig: Reification As Metaphor in Matisse?

    The view that Matisse was as avant-garde an artist as
Picasso hardly took general hold in America until the 1960s, and
came from his late work. For some years before his death in
1954, Matisse had been working to solve the split he had always
experienced between drawing and painting. By cutting shapes out
of precolored paper -- cutting, as he saw it, directly into the
color -- and then pasting them on the surface, he closed the gap
between outline drawing and color patch. As in Memory of
Oceania, 1952-53, he gave the art of collage a brilliance, size
and optical vivacity it had never had before. Thus in the '60s
he became the father figure of the new art of disembodied color
being created by Americans like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris
Louis.

    The problem lies in the disembodiment. Matisse was no more
an abstract artist than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim
descent from their work without acknowledging that fact. The
worldly motif, especially the human body, and in particular the
female body, was as basic to Matisse's art as it had been to
Delacroix's or Titian's. His paintings vividly communicate a
tension between what he called "the sign" and the reality it
pointed to.

    He had learned about this tension and its anxieties from
Cezanne. But there has never been a great figurative artist who
did not feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto
or even in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse
it was of prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to
fall away, because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in
the world and its objects. This is not an argument against
abstraction, but it helps explain why, in those abstract
paintings that derive from Matisse, one so rarely feels the
urgency of their great exemplar.

    Matisse had his leitmotivs, the full scope of whose
recurrence only becomes clear in a show like this. One is the
view through a door or window, from inside a room. One first
sees it in 1896, in a small, unremarkable study of an open door
giving onto the sea in Brittany. It reappears, in a way that
promises its eventual form, in a small picture from 1901-02,
Studio Under the Eaves -- a brown, dim room with a blaze of
sacramental light at the end, a glimpse of apricot wall and
flowering tree. From then on it will appear whenever he is at
full pitch: in The Open Window, 1905, as he is creating the
speckled, radically colored world of Fauvism at Collioure in the
south of France; in the great "decorative" paintings of 1908-12
like Conversation; in the astoundingly bare and mysterious
French Window at Collioure, 1914; and so on to the palm tree
that, like a firework in the garden, fills the window of
Interior with an Egyptian Curtain, 1948, its explosive light
seeming to cast an inky black shadow under the bowl of fruit.
The room is culture; the window frames nature; it is a kind of
picture-within-a-picture, another trope that Matisse was partial
to.

    It is a habit to speak of Matisse's "assurance," his
Apollonian, almost inhuman, balance. Yet this simple idea does
not survive the evidence of this show. The deeper one looks, the
more doubt and qualification one finds. It was far from
Matisse's mind to impose an artificial certainty on the flux of
vision. The resolution of his great 1914 still life, Goldfish
and Palette, is provisional; on either side of the black central
column things teeter and lean; even the curlicues of the black
iron balcony seem held in a fragile equilibrium.

    He was less interested in "locked" and unified structures
than one thinks. The ring of figures in Dance (II), 1909-10,
refers back to a long tradition of representations of
Bacchanalian dances, from the ancient Greeks through to Poussin.
The color is almost as simple and emblematic as that of an
Etruscan vase: blue sky, green billowing earth, red flesh
inflected with deeper, Indian-red drawing. It could not be more
vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale
of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem,
compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect,
within the brusque signs for arched back, swollen belly,
prancing, dragging, reaching. One clue to this is the
complicated knot formed by the crossing legs of the second
figure from the left, and the hands of the two dancers in front
of her. There the circle of the dance breaks; the hands have
come apart, they do not touch. Classical art would not show
this. Choreographic "imperfection" matches the brusque details
of visual depiction.

    Matisse was the heir to an entire, and in his time still
viable, tradition of European painting. Conversation is, on one
level, an intimate interior -- the painter in his pajamas
chatting with Mme. Matisse in her chair. But its hieratic
grandeur irresistibly puts you in mind of an Annunciation, with
angel (though wingless) and Madonna. In particular Matisse
inherited the pastoral mode, replete with allegory. He refers
to the poetry of his time -- Baudelaire, Mallarme -- with the
same sense of possession and community that Renaissance painters
like Lotto, Giorgione or Titian did to Ovid's Metamorphoses. As
the figures in Venetian Renaissance pastorals tend to be generic
rather than specific -- "a nymph" rather than Egeria or Daphne,
"a warrior" rather than Alexander -- so are Matisse's scenes of
Hesiod ic primitive life. We will never know what mythological
event the standing nude in Le Luxe (II), 1907-08?, with a
crouching woman drying her feet, represents: Matisse didn't know
himself. But the antique mold was a perfect receptacle for some
of his plastic obsessions, such as the human back, and for the
Arcadian vision he inherited from the past and shared with other
avant-gardists like Stravinsky.

    One wonders what the long-term effect of this show will
be. With luck, it will be at least equal in its impact on
artists in the '90s to the one Picasso had in the '80s. We are
at present surrounded with art of depressing triviality -- the
detritus of late postmodernism; with art that lays claim to
remedial social virtue and yet "addresses" social issues in a
depleted conceptualist language that is as socially ineffective
as it is aesthetically boring. Artists are scared by the past
and don't believe in the future.

    Such is our fin-de-siecle. On every side, the idea of
quality is ritually attacked, so that many young artists have
come to doubt the most basic experience involved in comparing
one artwork with another -- namely, that there are differences
of intensity, articulateness, radiance, between works of art;
that some speak more convincingly than others; and that this is
not a political matter. Fifteen minutes in any room of this
sublime exhibition is enough to blow such stale and peevish
trivia away. Matisse did much, at the beginning of this century,
to dispel the mustiness of academic art. At its end, he may
still do the same to the mingy products of end-game academic
modernism.