Matisse, Standing Riffian, 1912
The last thing Matisse had done before leaving Russia was to stage a retrospective for himself in Shchukin’s drawing room in the Trubetskoy Palace. Over the past six years the collector had bought twenty-seven paintings from him, all from periods of radical experiment, many of them commissions that stretched him to the limit, others snatched from the studio before the painter himself had time to grasp what he had done, let alone absorb its implications. “He always picked the best,” Matisse explained, adding that once Shchukin’s unerring eye had settled on a canvas it was useless to protest that the work was not for sale or had turned out a failure (“I’ll take the failure,” said Shchukin).1 This was Matisse’s first chance to see where he had come from, and how far he had got, before starting the next leg of the journey into unknown territory for which he had been strenuously preparing ever since he finished Dance and Music.
His only serious criticism in Moscow was of Shchukin’s installation of his paintings, which had been framed behind glass and hung at a steep angle to the wall, like the French and Italian old masters in other people’s palaces. Matisse’said he had to do battle with his host before he could unglaze and rehang the pictures.2 Shchukin insisted in return that he stay on an extra week to wait for Painter’s Family and Pink Studio to arrive from Paris.3 Matisse took down the paintings by Cézanne and Degas in the drawing room on the first floor, collected his own works from all over the house and hung them two deep, directly beneath the richly moulded cornice and jutting out over the plaster medallions projecting from the walls. All accounts agree that the impact was unlike anything ever seen before. Reversing the principle of the two Studios, where he had sucked the life out of a room to recreate its essence on canvas, Matisse now drew a whole room after him as if by magic into the world of his imagination.
“I did not fully know Matisse until I saw Shchukin’s house,” wrote Jacob Tugendhold, returning home to Moscow after eight years in Paris to write the best of all descriptions of the transformation that overtook this eighteenth-century drawing room with its gilt-legged Louis XVI chairs, rose-patterned silk upholstery and gilded chandelier hanging from a vaulted ceiling painted with birds and garlands:
Matisse, Portrait of Sergei Shchukin, 1912
Here we have in Shchukin’s home a hothouse, an apotheosis of Matisse’s paintings… You appreciate them together with the environment that surrounds them—the pale green paper on the walls, the rose-pink ceiling, the cherry-coloured carpet on the floor—among all of which the blues and cherry-reds and emerald-greens of Matisse blaze out so brilliantly and joyfully. Indeed you cannot actually tell who is responsible for what: whether it is the room that does things for Matisse, or Matisse for the room. You have only the overall impression that the whole ensemble—the walls, the carpet, the ceiling and the pictures—is the work of Matisse’s hands, his decorative mise-en-scène… the true metaphysical life of his art is revealed only in this drawing room.4
It was Shchukin himself who first compared the room to a perfumed hothouse, “sometimes poisonous, but always filled with beautiful orchids.”5 Over the next two years—as the canvases Matisse painted in Morocco reached Moscow to take their places on the walls—the room’s enchantment grew, and so did the underlying scent of risk and danger.
The Archangel Michael, c. 1457: an icon of the Novgorod school from the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow
Fruit, flowers, fabrics, even people gave up their solid separate existence in these pictures, becoming dematerialised and abstracted. “Not things, but the essence of things,” wrote Tugendhold.6 Individually each work produced a powerful effect, but together their decorative impact based on linear form and colour—”pure colour divorced from subject”—was of another order: “This is not decoration in the European sense, but decoration as it is understood in the East.” The giltframed canvases, hung side by side one above another from floor to ceiling, followed a pattern Matisse had seen in the churches of the Old Believers, who built their eighteenth-century Cathedral of the Intercession to hold ten thousand people and adorned it with crystal chandeliers, painted ceilings and elaborate plasterwork as the setting for a sumptuous iconostasis: patriarchs, prophets and apostles four tiers deep, framed in gold or silver cases and accompanied by slender, stylised saints delicately painted in clear, flowerlike colours on the pillars round about.
Matisse. The Moroccan Amido, 1912: the hotel boy who became Matisse’s guide in Tangier
“Here is the true source of all creative search,” Matisse’said of Moscow’s icons. “Russians do not realise what treasures they possess… everywhere the same vividness and strength of feeling.… Such wealth and purity of colour, such spontaneity of expression I have never seen anywhere before.”7 Even Shchukin could not have foreseen the strength of the painters response, although it confirmed the faith each now had in the other. Among the many artists Shchukin collected, Matisse was the only one with whom he formed a personal relationship, the only one whose work he bought directly from the studio, and the only one to whom he gave commissions: “For me Matisse is above all the rest, better than them all, closest to my heart.”8 Shchukin never intervened or attempted to impose his will, but, of all the great Muscovite merchants who filled their houses with French artworks in these years before the First World War, he seems to have been alone in seeing that the traffic between Moscow and Paris need not necessarily be one way.
Matisse arrived in Tangier in January 1912, ready to start on the commission for an extra tier of paintings to add to the secular iconostasis in Shchukin’s drawing room. Although the collector had given no specific instructions, he had a clear preference for figure paintings (and proved it by declining an offer of Red Studio that February).9 Every letter Shchukin sent Matisse contained a gentle reminder, but there were no models to be had in the Muslim city of Tangier. Matisse despaired at first of finding anyone to pose for him. It would be many anxious weeks before he finally began recruiting the mixed bag of locals—a hotel boy, a teenage prostitute, a street pick-up and a mountain bandit—who agreed more or less reluctantly to let themselves be painted. On his canvases, each of them turned into the kind of grave hieratic figure he had seen in Moscow icons: tall slender saints who fit their narrow space so neatly, prophets facing the spectator, apostles turning sideways, all with small heads, long sensitive fingers and bare or delicately shod feet emerging from their robes, each poised lightly like a flower on a flat ground of turquoise, gold or black.
But initially there was no question of painting figures, or landscape for that matter. The Matisses landed on 29 January and checked into room number 38 at the Hotel de France,10 the best European hotel in town, with a spectacular view from their window looking down over the white roofs and terraces of the old town, and out across the bay to the far side of the Mediterranean, where on a clear day you could see the faint, scallop-shaped outline of the Spanish coast. But the hotel turned out to be cramped, dirty and expensive, on top of which for six weeks they could barely step outside. Rain had been falling since the beginning of the year, filling the unpaved streets with foul-smelling liquid mud. Swollen rivers made it impossible to visit the interior, and the whole country was cut off by storms at sea. Matisse posted off furious lamentations to all his friends, and a stream of reproachful postcards to Marquet, whose accounts of Tangier the year before—together with the beautiful, austere, sunlit paintings he brought back—had made the place out to be a painters’ paradise. “Tempest, equatorial rains,” Matisse wrote indignantly. “I cant think what it means, and nor can the people of Tangier, they’ve never seen anything like it. My God, what are we to do! To go back would be ridiculous, and yet it seems the obvious thing. There’s as much light here as in a cellar .… h, Tangier, Tangier! I wish I had the courage to get the hell out of here.”11
Unable to leave the hotel, let alone work out of doors, Matisse painted flowers in his small, bare room darkened by rain lashing at the windows. In clear intervals he painted the view from the window under lowering clouds with black boats tossing on the choppy waters of the bay. On 6 February, he started work on a bunch of lively, luminous purple irises tossing on long green stems against the black depths of his bedroom mirror (this was the first of many variations played on the same theme by Matisse, whose sole luxury when travelling was always fresh flowers jammed into landladies’ jars or vases on the humble commodes, wash-stands and dressing tables of countless middling-priced hotels). Still waiting for the rain to stop, he painted a basket of oranges on a square of white silk brocade embroidered with big, floppy bouquets of peonies, orchestrating a palette of pink, orange, turquoise, purple, lemon yellow and plum red with voluptuous delight and consummate lucidity. More
Matisse the Bay of Tangier,1912
than thirty years later Picasso bought Basket of Oranges, and his young lover, Françoise Gilot, enchanted by its warmth and vigour, was astonished to learn from Matisse himself that he had been penniless in Tangier and seriously contemplating suicide at the time. “It was born of misery,” he said.12
This was the mood that had produced the Fauve explosion at Collioure. People found it hard to credit when Matisse explained the depths of frustration that lay behind the sunny, carefree radiance of paintings like The Open Window (1905) or The Gypsy (1906). “It has to be said that the latter shows the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice,” he wrote grimly in retrospect. “Painting which looks as if it’s made through gritted teeth isn’t the only kind that’s worth attention.”13 Afterwards he was appalled when he looked back to those weeks that seemed like months spent cooped up in the Hotel de France. “The famous Room Number 38” would become Matisse family shorthand for a pit of desperation.14
On 12 February the downpour dried up sufficiently for the hotel guests to explore outside. Entranced by the sun, which shone with a miraculous soft sheen, and by the haze of spring green that instantly clothed the earth beneath it, the Matisses rode out together along the beach, or up beyond the town through fields of iris and asphodel. Amélie (who rode a mule with her husband beside her on horseback) reported everywhere blue morning glories, purple heliotrope and flame-coloured nasturtiums. “Once the rain stopped, there sprang from the ground a marvel of flowering bulbs and greenery,” said Matisse. “All the hills round Tangier, which had been the colour of a lions skin, were covered with an extraordinary green under turbulent skies as in a painting by Delacroix.”15 This was the exuberant annual awakening recorded in paint and words by generations of Frenchmen led by Delacroix, and later Pierre Loti. “What melting light, quite different from the Côte d’Azur,” Matisse wrote to Manguin. “The vegetation has all the blazing brilliance of Normandy, and such decorative force!!! How new everything seems, too, and how difficult to do with nothing but blue, red, yellow and green.”16
His immediate need was a shady and secluded place to work. Matisse consulted Walter Harris, the Moroccan correspondent of the London Times, a colourful character who knew everyone and could fix anything in Tangier from a treaty with the Sultan to a man to tile the patio. Harris canvassed the European residents with villas on the western slopes above the bay, and duly forwarded the response of an Englishman, Jack Brooks, who put his grounds at the disposal of the French painter any time he cared to ring the bell for a servant to show him round. The gardens of the Villa Brooks were famous for their size and splendour.17 “The property… was immense, with meadows stretching as far as the eye could see. I worked in a corner planted with very tall trees which spread their foliage high and wide,” said Matisse, who was fascinated by the glossy green acanthus that carpeted the ground in counterpoint to the rich canopy of leaves above.18 Acanthus could grow taller than a man in Tangier. For Matisse, who had started out as a student copying stone acanthus on fragments of Corinthian column at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, their luxuriant life and energy pointed to an art of the future freed at last from classical gridlock.
He hired storage space for his painting things in one of Brooks’ outhouses, and settled down to paint acanthus on a daily basis for the next month and a half with Amélie at his side. This was the first time they had been free to concentrate on his work alone together, without distraction or interference, for any stretch of time since their honeymoon, when Henri had painted olive trees and peach blossoms in the garden of the Old Mill at Ajaccio. Now, as then, he was breaking new ground. Amélie’s confidence in him reinforced his absorption, which in turn confirmed her sense of purpose. Their partnership regained its old balance and resilience in Tangier. “Your mother is looking young again,” Matisse had written to Marguerite from the boat even before they landed, and they were if anything drawn closer by his sleeplessness and sense of disorientation in the
Henri and Amélie Matisse in their room at the Hotel de France
first weeks, when all he had to hold on to was his wife.19 Years later he compared it to finding himself alone in London in thick fog. “I’ve been in a blind panic ever since I got here, and yesterday I remembered when I’d been in a similar state before,” he wrote to Amélie from the Savoy Hotel in 1919. “It was when we reached Morocco where it had already been raining for a month, and found ourselves stranded there like lost souls.”20
Amélie made a special effort to please him by agreeing to go riding in breaks in the rain on their first two days (“She’s not too sure about it, even though it’s the second time,” Henri reported to his daughter).21 She told her elder son that she was determined to overcome her fear of horses so as to be able to accompany her husband on rides through the woods when they got back to France. After two years at Issy. they had finally decided to buy the property, completing the contract with their landlady on 3 January 1912.22 The price agreed was 68,000 francs with a down payment of 25,000 francs already handed over and the balance due within five years. Whether or not Matisse already had some inkling of a major commission in the offing when he left for Moscow, Shchukin’s request for eleven canvases at 6,000 francs each—almost exactly the sum needed to buy the house at Issy—came in the nick of time. But the first instalment on the purchase price seems to have taken everything the couple had, and the impossibility of finding models in Tangier made Shchukin’s prospective payment look remote. For the moment Matisse could only hope to work on two landscapes he had promised to paint the year before for Morosov, together with a third canvas commissioned as a surprise by Morosov’s wife in Moscow.
Financially as well as pictorially this winter in Morocco was a gamble. It had the backing of the couple’s entire family, who banded together on both sides to prevent a repetition of the previous year’s Spanish fiasco by ensuring that on this trip Amélie could go too. The problem then had been the house and the children. This time the youngest—ten-year-old Pierre—went to his aunt Berthe, who was switching jobs once again that January, moving for the sake of her fathers health to Ajaccio to take charge of the only Ecole Normale Supérieure for girls in Corsica. Charming, bright and funny, always the closest to his aunt of her three little “Matissous,” Pierre became the pet and plaything of the training college, entertaining his grandfather and testing out the students’ teaching skills. Berthe also recommended a boarding school for Jean, whose education was making little or no progress at the Lycée Michelet. The headmaster of the Collège de Noyon was an old friend of hers, and the place itself within easy reach of Bohain, where Jeans paternal grandmother had always been a second mother to him (as Berthe was for Pierre). A private tutor was engaged to prepare him at home, and Jean promised his parents to do better. Henri’s brother Auguste visited Issy with his wife Jane in February, and Maman Matisse herself promised to come up from Bohain the month after.
Marguerite was left in charge of the household. A city child, born and bred in the heart of Paris, she found the silence and isolation hard to bear at Issy, where the family still had few neighbours, and no real friends. Marguerite was seventeen, in all practical matters experienced far beyond her years, but very young to take sole responsibility for dealing with tradesmen, overseeing her brother, demanding reports from the tutor and giving instructions to the new gardener (a German called Gustav, whose manner she found bullying and oppressive). Her upbringing had cut her off from her own contemporaries, and she was reluctant to call for help on either of the two protectors nominated by her parents: her forceful and eccentric great-aunt Nine (still in her late seventies the proprietor of a run-down Paris hat-shop), and the kindly but even more formidable Sarah Stein. Visiting either of them meant taking the train, with a fifteen-minute walk alone to and from Clamart station along a road where even grown men went armed at night.
Marguerite worried about the inmates of the lunatic asylum lower down the hill, and lay awake listening to sudden noises in the bushes or branches tapping at the window after dark. “Le jour l’ennui, la nuit la peur” [“Boredom by day, terror at night”], she told her own son long afterwards. At the time she poured out her anxieties in letters to her parents, who were sympathetic but bracing. Her father promised to write to the gardener, but otherwise could only advise her to get out more, draw up a regular timetable and practise the piano. Her mother sent hugs and kisses, and urged her to be brave. They had left at short notice without making any firm arrangement about money, or fixing a date for their return. Matisse’sent cheques for her to cash at the end of February, and promised that her mother would return as soon as she had seen him settled to his work, which was likely to take another month or so. “I’m sure there’s one person at Issy who’ll be only too glad to see her dear maman again,” Michael Stein wrote after a visit to check up. “and that’s Marguerite Matisse.”23
Tangier was a shock, at any rate to Amélie, who had hardly ever left France (except for ten days at the start of her honeymoon in London, and one brief trip to Italy), and had never glimpsed the Muslim world before. European-style shops, cafés and hotels made the foreign quarter on the summit of the hill look, as Matisse’said himself, like seedy suburban Paris.24 The Great Souk, or market, immediately below was as picturesque as any romantic painting, with its camel trains straight from the desert, its flute-players, sorcerers and snake charmers. But this was far from the fashionable Orient beloved by Parisian department stores. Beggars in the Souk displayed open wounds or bloody eye sockets, and the ground underfoot was a midden strewn with chicken feathers, bones, excrement and scraps of rotting flesh. Arab society remained closed to foreigners. Unveiled European women were treated as freaks or worse outside Tangier, an international city abandoned by its sultan as a den of infidels even in Pierre Loti’s time, more than twenty years before.25 Muslim women on the streets looked like surgeons masked and gowned for the operating theatre, according to the Irish painter John Lavery, a prominent winter resident whom the Matisses met through Walter Harris.26
Lavery was everything Matisse was not. He, too, had escaped in his twenties from a disapproving family to Paris, enrolling at the Académie Julian under Bouguereau, whose teaching he absorbed so smoothly that his paintings brought him fame and fortune from the start. By 1912, Lavery’s self-portrait already hung in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and he was about to begin work on a state portrait of the British royal family (the picture pleased King George V so much that he himself painted in his Order of the Garter, reminding the artist that Philip of Spain had done the same for Velasquez). He would shortly receive a British knighthood on top of honorary membership of the Paris Salon and the Institut de France. One of the secrets of Lavery’s success was his wife, a cosmopolitan beauty celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic in society fashion plates as well as on
Matisse, self-portrait on muleback
her husband’s canvases. Her willowy elegance appealed strongly to the romantic side of Amélie Matisse, who held up the lovely Lady Lavery ever after to her sons as the model of what a painter’s wife should be.27
The two couples were invited to lunch together by Harris to meet the British Ambassador, Sir Reginald Lister, just back from an excursion with his host through the mountains to Tetuan. Harris was among other things a British secret agent. He spoke several Arab dialects, and, where many Europeans (including Loti and Matisse himself) tried on Moroccan costume as a kind of fancy dress. Harris could pass among the local brigands for one of themselves in hooded burnous and yellow leather slippers.28 He and Lavery were in their very different ways striking specimens of British imperial confidence and pluck. Both enjoyed the role of swashbuckling adventurer, unlike Matisse, whose preferred disguise was almost comically conventional and timid. He drew himself in Tangier as a portly, bespectacled painter on a flimsy folding stool with a collapsible easel balanced precariously on his knee, or wearing a straw sunbonnet and perched astride a disproportionately small mule. The last thing he wanted was to look like the kind of rakish daredevil whose painting had outraged Paris, Moscow and London, and whose first sculpture show was causing consternation (“Decadent, unhealthy, certainly unreal, like some dreadful nightmare”) that spring at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York.29
Tangier swarmed with painters, mostly Orientalists following Delacroix, as subsequent generations would follow Van Gogh (and Matisse himself) to the south of France. At one point half the modernists in Paris threatened to turn up, urging Matisse to find them rooms on a postcard signed by practically everyone he knew, from Marquet, Manguin and Paul Signac to Guillaume Apollinaire (a portrait of a pipe-smoking baby on the front of the card was captioned in Marquet’s handwriting: “Maurice Denis, 1912. The Childhood of Ingres”).30 Matisse avoided anyone conspicuously arty or bohemian in Tangier because, as he told his wife, people like that always took him for a madman when they saw his work.31 Lavery himself became sufficiently worried a few years later to consult a trusty colleague, the Scots colourist James Guthrie, who assured him that Matisse’s stuff need not be taken seriously (“It may command attention, but it wont wash in the long run”).32
Matisse visited Lavery’s studio to inspect his studies of Tangerine markets, mosques and moonlit alleys (“What lousy painting,” he wrote home tersely)33 with another former student from the Académie Julian, the Canadian James Wilson Morrice, who was also staying at the Hotel de France. These two got on well, no doubt because the fact that they spoke different visual languages did not stop them accepting and admiring each other’s work. The Canadian advised young would-be modernists like the Englishman Clive Bell to pay attention to Matisse, while never deviating himself from the elegant, accomplished sub-Impressionism that made him, in Bells phrase, “a typically good second-rate painter (first-rate almost).”34 Morrice painted the view from the Hotel de France in Whistlerian shades of pearl and oyster: grey clouds glistening over grey sea and grey-white houses set off by sombre, dark green foliage. Matisse’s Open Window at Tangier renders the same view beneath the same rain-laden sky with fierce, thin, energetic brushstrokes scrubbed across the canvas in jagged bands of yellow ochre, inky blue, veridian and burnt umber.
Tangier’s weather had turned out chancy, and the town itself had little to show of the wonders of the Orient that had mesmerised Matisse in Munich and Granada. The mosques were closed to Christians, and there were no museums, galleries or great houses open for foreigners to inspect their gleaming mosaics, latticed marble screens and intricately patterned tiles. Apart from merchants selling silks and carpets in the bazaar, the nearest Matisse got to the artefacts that had inspired his visit was probably in Harris’s house, which stood in its own park three miles outside the town, a magnificent Moorish villa constructed to its owner’s specifications and embellished by Moroccan master craftsmen trained in the same elaborate skills as their ancestors who built the Alhambra.
Matisse faithfully reflected his own and his compatriots’ situation when he faced the camera looking awkward in an Arab djellabah, or sketched himself as a tourist in a town whose people believed that contact with foreigners made them unclean. Even acting as a servant—valet, door-man, hotel waiter—to a Christian was degrading for a Muslim. Posing was a form of self-destruction. Lavery said that the few Arab sitters whose reluctance he managed to overcome were all convinced that as a painter he possessed the Evil Eye, which meant that anyone modelling for him was damned for eternity.35 He had been smuggled into position to paint his Moorish Harem by a daring friend of Harris’, but, when it came to procuring female sitters, the best even Harris could manage was a couple of elderly candidates from the local brothel, who proved so unsuitable when unveiled that Lavery sent them back.
A girl willing to pose for Matisse was found with difficulty towards the end of March by the French management of his hotel.36 Zorah was young enough to be still under her family’s protection (ten or twelve was the normal age for girls to marry or, at worst, support themselves by prostitution). Matisse painted her quickly and lightly, seating her on the ground in a soft, billowing yellow robe against a pale turquoise wall, and emphasising the decorative quality of his picture by enclosing her body in a graceful curving line offset by the smaller oval of her face. The proceedings were risky and illicit. On the advice of the hotel proprietor, Mme Davin, he hired a studio to which Zorah could have access without being seen, but even so the sittings had to stop almost at once. “Her brother has been with her,” Matisse reported on 6 April. “Apparently he would kill her if he knew that she was. posing”37
Matisse, Three Studies of Zorah, 1912
Morocco was still the strict, fundamentalist, male-oriented society the French had found when they bombarded Casablanca five years earlier (“They entered a closed house,” wrote Harris, “tenanted by suspicion, fanaticism and distrust”).38 “Feminists are unheard of in this country,” Matisse wrote to Gertrude Stein on a postcard showing female coal-porters from the charcoal market near his hotel, “a pity, because the men abuse their previleges.”39 European residents in Tangier swapped grisly anecdotes about what happened to foreign men rash enough to overstep the bounds of Arab hospitality. Lavery told the story of a young subaltern invited to dinner by the Pasha of Tetuan. who sent him a parcel the next morning containing the head of a dancing girl he had admired the night before.40
Women Coal-Porters Tangier, postcard from Matisse to Gertrude Stein, deploring the lack of feminism in Morocco
The ferocious aspect of the civilisation Matisse had glimpsed in Spain lived on in a country that had remained in manyways unchanged since the Moors ruled Seville and Granada. Violence was in the air. Loti said that even the harsh, rasping intonations of ordinary conversation in the Arab quarter sounded as if people were slitting throats or eating one another beneath his window. Amélie Matisse later described to her grandson her terror when she found herself trapped in a narrow street between high white walls by a princely rider galloping towards her, preceded by armed bodyguards driving a panic-stricken crowd before them with cries of “Balek!”:
Mme Matisse knew herself to be lost, and the scene imprinted itself forever on her memory like the last vision of a drowning person. The rider, whom she glimpsed only for a second, had great gleaming eyes in an oval face framed by a hooded cloak of some stuff brilliantly white and light as muslin. She even noted the whiteness of his hands on the reins. The guards rushed closer, shouting and flailing huge leather-tailed cudgels. A few paces short of the European woman, the rider made a curt sign and gave the order: “Madame is not balek!” The men lowered their whips, the crowd scraped past her… drawing level, the rider saluted her with his head and sketched with his hand a gesture of farewell!41
Travellers like Harris reported severed heads still exhibited on palace walls, and atrocious mediaeval tortures inflicted on captives in public places. It was only just over twenty years since Loti had seen bullocks sacrificed to the French ambassador as he rode out from Tangier to present his credentials to the Sultan, who received him in Fez on a white mule caparisoned with gold, beneath a red fringed canopy borne aloft, like the Queen of Sheba’s, by giant Negro slaves. That Sultans successors had infuriated their people by the series of concessions they had been forced to make to France as Africa was split piece by piece among European colonial powers. Popular anger culminated in 1911 in a widespread revolt put down by a French expeditionary force (“Do you think we’re going to go to war over Morocco?” Matisse asked Marquet, who was in Tangier that summer, when Germany sent a warship to anchor off the port of Agadir).42 The provisional treaty in November, which made it safe for Matisse to revive his scheme of wintering in Tangier, looked to Moroccans more like a bill of sale. Resentment built up against the French. By the time the Matisses arrived at the end of January 1912, the Sultan was once again besieged in Fez by his own tribesmen. French troops were dispatched from Casablanca, and the Matisses prudently abandoned plans to visit Fez, which would have meant riding for ten days along unmarked tracks (there were no paved roads in the interior, and no wheeled vehicles) through country criss-crossed by streams in spate, at constant risk of ambush from vengeful Arabs.
Instead they settled for a day’s ride to the Riffian village of Tetuan, just over forty miles away and warmly recommended by Harris for its rugged scenery and spectacular sea views. The Matisses made up a party with two or three other guests from the Hotel de France, accompanied by a couple of Arabs to show the way and do the catering, all mounted on mules with big, flat, wooden saddles (“The sort of saddle you feel you could sit on without discomfort for forty-eight hours at a stretch,” Matisse’said cheerfully).43 They set out soon after dawn, riding first through a broad, sloping valley full of tall grasses mixed with buttercups and daisies that came up over their saddles. “We rode in among this sea of flowers as if no human being had ever set foot there before,” said Matisse, for whom this paradisal meadow in the radiant light of early morning stood out among his two or three indelible memories of Morocco. Tetuan itself, set against a ring of mountains on a site nearly three hundred feet above the sea, pleased him so much that he wished they had decided to go there sooner.
This expedition up stony mountain trails through disturbed tribal territory in time of mounting tension impressed the two Matisses in very different ways. Amélie would entertain her grandson long afterwards with dramatic stories of being held up in Tetuan for three whole days by armed Riffians.44 For Henri, all memory of physical danger was blotted out by the exaltation of the ride through the valley, which took him back to the day his life was changed forever by the gift of his first paint-box (“It was a tremendous attraction, a sort of paradise found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace”).45 As soon as he got back from Tetuan on 28 March, Matisse arranged sessions with the model Zorah. He also returned to the garden of the Villa Brooks, hoping to recreate his feelings in the flowery valley that he described in prelapsarian terms as exquisitely pure and free from people. He said he recognised the spot from a passage in Loti’s Au Maroc or Roman dun Spahi. Neither book contains anything that corresponds exactly to Matisse’s account, but both amply justify his admiration for the painterly quality of Loti’s prose in evocations of the devouring sun or the febrile, sensuous African spring:
Everything turned green, as if an enchantment lay upon the earth; little patches of moist warm shade fell from the leafy trees to the humid ground; the mimosas, flowering in profusion, looked like huge bouquets or festoons of pink or orange… even the heavy baobabs had put on for a few days fresh foliage of a pale and tender green .… In the countryside the ground was covered with strange flowers, wild feathery grasses, daturas with their great scented cup-shaped petals; and drifting over everything waves of hot and scented air.46
In the three canvases produced in Brooks’ garden—Acanthus, Periwinkles (Moroccan Garden) and Palm Leaf Tangier (colour fig. 13)—Matisse painted the complex layers of greenery for which Loti said you would need colours unknown on any palette, colours that would incorporate the strange sounds, the rustlings and above all the silences of Africa, its thundery undertones, its darkness and its translucent delicacy. In these paintings Matisse came close to pure abstraction, “not things but the essence of things,” in the phrase of Jacob Tugendhold. All three canvases are shaped or framed by the slanting shafts of tree boles rising through the dappled half-light beneath the leaf canopy. Within this scaffolding of uprights, the underwood becomes a patchwork of grey, turquoise or lime green and orangey pink, ornamented sparsely here and there by stylised coils of ruffled creeper, drooping swathes or fan-shaped spurts of foliage, serrated acanthus leaves or tiny star-shaped periwinkles.
Amélie stayed just long enough to see her husband fixed up with a model and launched at last in the new directions opening for him in Brooks’ garden. On 31 March she sailed for home on the weekly mailboat to Marseilles. Already strained and sleepless, Henri let his nervous tension show in a heated exchange as the two said good-bye on board the steamer in Tangier harbour. Returning to shore on the launch of the French Chargé d’Affaires, he managed to control himself thanks to the kindness of the minister’s wife, Mme de Beaumarchais, who covered his distress with a stream of small talk. “That stopped me breaking down,” he wrote to his wife next day, explaining that the crisis had forced him to consult a Russian doctor recommended by Mlle Davin at the hotel.47 The doctor blamed Matisse’s collapse on exhaustion after the trip to Tetuan, and prescribed much the same regime (rest, hot baths, daily exercise and early nights) as his colleague in Seville just over a year earlier.
As Amélie slowly steamed away from him, Henri grew increasingly agitated, picturing her alone with her dismal thoughts in stifling heat (“How bitterly I regret parting from you like that. I’m following your voyage, you’ve only another eighteen hours to go—but having to make such a long journey upset as you were when you left me—truly I curse myself”). He worked himself into such a state over the next three days that when she failed to announce her safe landing in Marseilles by telegram, he called at the offices of the steamship company, pursuing the director to his home to ask about storms at sea.
Amélie, whose boat had been slightly delayed by rough weather, reached home in good spirits, and wrote two long letters to tell him so. But Henri was haunted by their parting row on shipboard. He said he had achieved nothing in Tangier, and only stayed on in hopes of finishing the paintings for Morosov that would redeem an otherwise wasted trip. His contrition took the practical form of daily telegrams to his wife keeping her posted on his previous night’s sleep (by 5 April he had managed an unprecedented seven hours twice running) as a gauge or sleep-metre for measuring his work rate the next day. He announced that his underlying problem was pictorial, diagnosing the source of all his troubles as two misplaced spots of sunlight on the trunk of the pine tree in Acanthus (“If only I’d realised sooner, I wouldn’t have been so desperate just before you left”).48 He explained that he could not live with himself without self-knowledge and that, although he produced results unconsciously, he
Matisse out ridingin in Morocco
always needed to know and understand what he had done (“To give yourself completely to what you’re doing while simultaneously watching yourself do it—that’s the hardest of all for those who work by instinct”). Squeezed in apologetically, between the lines of this candid self-analysis. was a confession—”I get worked up too easily”—that ran through their marriage like a refrain.
Matisse’spent his remaining time in Tangier working furiously, riding for two hours every morning and retiring early at night with a comedy-thriller by Charles Dickens that had been a popular hit on the Paris stage (“It’s not terrifying at all. it’s mild and charming,” he reassured his wife).49 He saw virtually no one apart from the hotel people and Morrice. with whom he planned to leave on the next boat or the one after. The two took tea with Lavery, and went back for lunch a couple of days later. The Irishman was an expansive and entertaining host, but it was Harris, dropping in to say good-bye before they left, who got a preview of the prodigal inventiveness and luminous, unearthly beauty of Matisses three garden canvases from the Villa Brooks.
In the first two weeks of April he finally burst through the barrier that had blocked his path for weeks, making him so desperate that he ruined his last hour with his wife. But it is clear from his letters to her afterwards that this crisis freed him, like a fever breaking. He said he was enchanted all over again each time he went back to the Villa Brooks, recalling long afterwards that Palm Leaf Tangier came easily and sweetly “in a burst of spontaneous creation—like a flame.” He made a little painting of a Muslim marabout, or shrine, and another of the model Zorah. When she had
Matisse, Zorah Standing, 1912
to give up posing, he replaced her at the last minute with a boy called Amido, an alert, French-speaking, thoroughly Westernised ex-groom from the Hotel Valentina. Amido posed so gracefully and well that Matisse completed in a few rapid sessions the figure painting he had despaired of producing for Shchukin, working with a freedom of touch that gives the picture the same captivating youth and freshness as its subject.
This last fortnight was darkened by catastrophe in Tangier. On 30 March the Sultan in Fez had finally signed the treaty that would turn his country into a French protectorate. In almost daily despatches printed in the Times that week, Harris reported unrest in Fez and sporadic fighting, culminating on 7 April in a pitched battle which lasted thirteen hours before the Moroccans were decisively defeated by the French general marching in with a relief column to mop up insurrection. Matisse (who showed his work to Harris a few days later)50 was as well informed as anyone in town. But Tangier’s attention had been distracted on 7 April by a tragic accident, when the launch ferrying people to and from the mailboat capsized in heavy seas with all its occupants, including the Chargé d’Affaires and his wife, M. and Mme de Beaumarchais, whose three young children were drowned with their English governess and seven others before the eyes of the horrified foreign community assembled on the harbour front.
Appalled and more than ever anxious to be gone, Matisse’sailed for France on 14 April, travelling by the same boat as Beaumarchais, who signed to him to say nothing about what had happened. Matisse responded instinctively to what he saw as an almost frantic stoicism (he would remember Beaumarchais’s signal twenty-eight years later when he, too, confronted catastrophe and loss on a previously unimaginable scale).51 On 17 April, the day he reached Paris, mayhem was finally unleashed in Fez. Moroccan soldiers mutinied, and murdered the seventeen military instructors who were the only French army personnel left within the city walls. “The Moorish women in the streets egged the rabble on,” wrote Harris, “inciting them with piercing cries to massacre the Christians, and the place became a pandemonium… native soldiery ran amok through the city .… The bank, the French hotel, the tobacco works and other establishments were sacked. The insurgents marched through the streets carrying the severed heads of Frenchmen on pikes.”52 The killing continued for two days until, at dawn on 19 April, three squadrons of French cavalry with infantry and artillery support stormed the gates at bayonet point to find the surviving Europeans barricaded inside their houses. Among the many bodies that had been decapitated and thrown into the river, or stripped, tarred and burned, were the French hotel proprietress, the correspondent of Le Monde, his wife, and the entire staff of the telegraph office.
One of the Fez instructors who survived (presumably because he was on leave or posted elsewhere at the time) was Matisse’s old friend, the genial, art-loving Capitaine le Glay, who had been his host in Algiers on his first encounter with the Muslim world in 1906.53 Matisse did not discuss these horrors when he reminisced afterwards about Morocco, but he could not rid his memory of them, or of the silent exchange with Beaumarchais that lodged forever at the back of his mind. Death and destruction were inextricably linked to the Islamic vision of paradise that he had first glimpsed at the Alhambra, and now they quickened his pursuit of the same purity and intensity in Tangier. A craving for peace was the driving force behind Matisse’s Moroccan paintings, according to Marcel Sembat, who published an enthusiastic account based on their conversations in the spring and summer of 1912. Matisse told Sembat that he found himself instinctively simplifying or abstracting his work in order to come closer to capturing a sense of ecstasy, adding disarmingly that at any rate it calmed him down. “Calm!” wrote Sembat, developing his theme with the zest and brio of a crack parliamentary speechmaker:
How many times, and for how many years, has he said that over and over again to me! Calm is what he longs for! Calm is what he needs! Calm is what he wants to convey!… Matisse keeps his troubles to himself! He has no desire to share them round. He has no wish to offer other people anything but calm.54
Sembat and his wife bought a landscape, View of the Bay of Tangier, as soon as Matisse got back to Paris, and were so delighted by his painting of Zorah that Georgette asked hopefully if 1,000 francs would be enough for them to commission a small companion version of their own on his next visit to Morocco.55 The Sembats were far from wealthy, living modestly on Marcels salary as Socialist deputy for Montmartre together with his journalistic earnings, most of which were spent on the paintings, pottery and artworks crammed into his tiny working flat on the rue Cauchois and the country cottage where Georgette had her studio. They had neither means nor space to collect on a grand scale, but they had the nerve to back their judgement, and their two small Moroccan canvases would remain for nearly thirty years (until Picasso bought Basket of Oranges in 1940) the only ones in France.
Sembat was surprised to find that growing understanding of the work increased his liking for the complex character who made it. Behind the popular image of Matisse as frightening, pitiable, sick or downright mad, he found a thoughtful and slow-spoken man, unexpectedly open and only too anxious to demystify his public image by emphasising his ordinariness in private. This was what most impressed a second interviewer that summer, the American Clara MacChesney, who expected to meet a screwball when she got to Issy, and was taken aback to find that Matisse’seemed neither unhealthy nor unhinged (“He bade me goodbye and invited me to come again like a perfectly normal gentleman”).56 She found his work incomprehensible—”abnormal to the last degree”—but she could not get over the simplicity and friendliness Sembat identified for French readers as the essence of “the real Matisse, the one who hurries to open the door in his gardening clothes when you ring the bell.”
Issy was within easy reach of the Sembats’ house on the river at Bonnières, and the couple often came for lunch, spending a whole day with the Matisses at the end of April, when the four of them walked along the Seine to Port-Villez and back on the far bank.57 Georgette painted a portrait of Marguerite, and dropped in occasionally on her own to see the garden. She liked both Amélie and her daughter, admiring the unconditional support they gave Matisse, and understanding better than most people how much it sometimes cost them. For all their boredom in his absence, and the joy of family reunion that spring, they could never count for long on daily life at Issy remaining smooth. In his letters Matisse had asked anxiously about the garden (“Is it looking pretty? Will I be able to work there?”),58 which struck him when he first got back as wretchedly small (“The opposite of how I had imagined it in Morocco, I thought I’d never work up an interest again in those mean little Paris suburbs”).59 The instructions he sent his wife and daughter to keep fit, ready for his return, by cycling for two hours each day suggest that he anticipated disenchantment with the people as much as with the place.
At all events he planned a fresh start for the three of them that spring. His strenuous energy could be irresistible, bringing with it such a blast of sheer virility that even Gertrude Stein was transfixed by it every time she saw him.60 But Matisse’s sights as an artist were set so high (“He’s rising up towards the eternal, the sublime,” Sembat told his readers, “and he means you to go with him”) that he had trouble adjusting them to an everyday human level. Failure to master a new technique—whether it was painting a pine tree or simpler skills like handwriting and horseback riding—infuriated him in himself or anybody else. Marguerite’s despairing appeals from Issy earlier that year had touched his heart, but once he had commiserated with her and suggested how to solve her problems, he also sent four excoriating pages itemising the spelling mistakes, grammatical faults, poor calligraphy and weak composition in her letters, even enclosing one of them inked over with corrections (“Don’t think I’m nagging you, my dear Marguerite, it’s affection that forces me to make these little criticisms, which you’ll soon see are justified”).61
He demanded too much from himself, and could not see why he should expect less from other people. “I ask you simply—and it’s no small thing—to work towards self-improvement,” he told his daughter, adding that, if only she could grasp his meaning, she would have no reason to feel cross. His wife said that, for all his good intentions, her husband had no idea when to stop. His withering remarks about her own inexperience on muleback (“Your father’s remonstrations are scarcely likely to encourage me,” she wrote to Marguerite from Tangier)62 put paid forever to her own daydream of riding with him in the woods at Issy.
One of the things Matisse did at Issy in the spring or summer of 1912 was to finish the painting of himself and his wife begun four years before. The seven-foot-long and nearly six-foot-high Conversation (colour fig. 12) took its format from a stone stele in the Louvre, showing an Assyrian king greeting a seated goddess.63 Matisse borrowed this hieratic image for a double portrait, posing his wife in her black-and-green housecoat on a thronelike armchair at one side of the drawing-room window overlooking their back garden, with himself standing on the other side in the striped pyjama-suit he wore for work. The painting looks like a graphic version of the scenario outlined in his last apologetic letters to Amélie from Tangier (“How sorry I am to have tormented you like that”). It commemorates a domestic spat or grievance in the sense that a pearl is the end product of a speck of grit. When Matisse came back from Tangier to complete his picture, he emphasised the gravity and stillness of the two figures, and the brilliance of the luxuriant green garden that separates them, by flooding the rest of the canvas with the rich expansive blue of a Moroccan sky. Discussing luminosity long afterwards with his son-in-law. he said that a picture should have the power to generate light. Shchukin (who had also graduated to modern art through looking at flat, stylised Egyptian statuary and frescoes) visited Issy in July, and wrote afterwards to say that the painting glowed in his memory like a Byzantine enamel.
Archaeological finds from Egypt, Russian icons and Islamic decorative art all suggested ways of revitalising the failing and restricted vision of tired Western eyes. In the summer of 1912, Matisse gave a new meaning to the concept of decoration, painting his studio (which now contained a bowl of goldfish as well as its usual paraphernalia) with tremendous gaiety and vigour in a series of related works that mix life and art in perpetually surprising permutations. Each canvas is powerfully absorbent, drawing the viewer into an enfolding element, like air or water, which seems to be the medium of Matisse’s mind. Individual entities—fish, flowers, textiles, painted canvases and patterned screens—dissolve or take on one another’s characteristics, pictorial realities melt and merge, inanimate objects seem to breathe and stir. In Corner of the Studio, a current of air lifts the deck-chair canvas and whisks round the edge of a windswept blue curtain whose woven arabesques seem to grow like big pink blossoms from the foliage of a potted plant spurting up and cascading down the translucent, green-glazed pot from Seville. In Goldfish (colour fig. 14), the spade- and spear-shaped leaves of plants dancing in concentric rings across the canvas circle the fish, themselves circling in their cylindrical glass tank on the flat disc of a tabletop, the whole painted in exuberant hothouse colours—scarlet, emerald green, cyclamen pink and black—that give off an almost palpable powdery warmth and light.
In Goldfish and Sculpture, the most extreme of four variations on the same theme, a plaster Reclining Nude (for which Amélie had posed six years before) takes on the casual sensuality of a real woman stretching in a microcosm containing the fishbowl and the vase of flowers arranged beside her, an animated still life suspended against a film or blur of blue representing the studio beyond the focus of the artist’s eye. Matisse made two successive paintings of a segment of Dance (I) propped up against the studio wall so close to his easel that, apart from a triangle of floor space, the canvas of one painting is entirely given up to the canvas of another. In all these pictures the familiar studio props of life at Issy are woven into the fabric of the parallel painted world—a calm, stable, mysteriously potent alternative reality—where Matisse felt completely free, alone, at peace.
Shchukin, arriving in July to inspect the first results of his most ambitious commission to date, can hardly have anticipated the full extent of developments since the two last met in Russia. “It was in front of the icons of Moscow that this art touched me, and I understood Byzantine painting,” Matisse’said, analysing not only the plastic and spatial pointers but the moral courage he got from Oriental design. “You surrender yourself that much better when you see your effort confirmed by such an ancient tradition. It helps you jump the ditch.”64 He celebrated their partnership that summer with a drawing of Shchukin that was intended, according to Marguerite Matisse, as a preliminary sketch for a full-scale portrait.65 Shchukin chose five canvases: The Conversation, Nasturtiums with “Dance” Corner of the Studio, Goldfish and Amido. Delivery was held up because the first had been earmarked for the second Post-Impressionist show in London in November, and the next two for the Paris Autumn Salon, but when all three eventually reached Moscow, Shchukin hung them on the end wall of his long, panelled dining room, which already contained sixteen paintings by Gauguin. The effect, by Tugendhold’s account, was a modern equivalent of the sumptuous visionary ensembles—”stained glass, gleaming enamels and ceramic tiles”—created by medieval craftsmen in the polychrome nave of a cathedral, or the mosaic dome of a basilica:
This becomes especially clear when you first glimpse, from the doorway of Shchukin’s drawing room, Nasturtiums and the “Dance” and The Conversation. The orangey-pink bodies in the first picture flare out from their blue ground like arabesques of glass. Look at Gauguin’s paintings, and then back at Matisse’s Nasturtiums: the former will seem like a matt fresco, the latter more like a translucent stained-glass window. Matisse’s palette is richer, more complex and grander than Gauguin’s. Matisse is the greatest colourist of our time, and the most cultivated: he has absorbed into himself all the luxury of the East and of Byzantium.66
At the end of September, Matisse returned alone to Tangier, intending to stay just long enough to satisfy Shchukin (who wanted another figure painting to go with his Moroccan boy), and Morosov (whose two landscapes had been regularly postponed for more than a year now). Back in room 38 at the Hotel de France, he picked up his old routine of work and riding, going steady with a horse called Allouf (“which means pig in Arabic: but he’s a pig who goes well”),67 spending the mornings sketching or exploring the old town, and painting in the afternoons. He reckoned to be home by November, when he and Amélie planned a second productive winter in somewhere less likely to be deluged than Tangier—Corsica, Collioure or Barcelona—now that the children were old enough to manage on their own.
Last year’s experiment had worked so well that this year all three young Matisses left home. Their grandmother in Bohain (still stubbornly independent, in spite of a heart attack and her doctor’s warning to take things easy) provided background support for Jean, who started his first term as a boarder at the Collège de Noyon in September. Pierre returned to his aunt Berthe in Ajaccio, accompanied by Marguerite, who hoped to salvage something from her disrupted education before it was too late. Their father spent his evenings writing to them all. He sent daily four-page bulletins to Amélie, and shorter letters every other day to Jean, who was facing the same ordeals at twelve as his father and grandfather before him. Matisse advised him gently not to give in to unhappiness, reliving his own schooldays as wintry rain, ice and freezing fog closed in on the North, asking his son if he had wet feet and whether he wore wooden sabots.
Jean received a stream of postcards urging him to concentrate on work, collect the foreign stamps and never let himself believe that he had been forgotten. One showed a Riff tribesman from the same village as the bandit king Raisouli, a local Robin Hood famous for charging exorbitant ransoms to release Westerners (including Walter Harris) whom he kidnapped on the outskirts of Tangier. “For the sake of peace and quiet the Sultan gave him a province to govern,” Matisse wrote cheerfully on the back. “So then he became an official thief—oppressing the people under his administration.”68 Marguerite got letters from her father delighting in her rapturous response to the Corsican sun, encouraging her and Pierre to learn to dance and ride, asking for more details of the weather so he could picture them settling into their new life (for Matisse fair weather was a professional necessity, like sleep, that coloured everything he did). “You ask what I do all day here alone in Tangier that stops me writing to you for a week,” he answered patiently when she complained of being neglected, “—but, my sweet, I’m working.”69
With the weather on his side and sleep for once under control, Matisse was calm, confident and full of projects (“I’m nothing like I was this time last year,” he told his wife, “—luckily, otherwise I wouldn’t stay a week”).70 Work went well from the start. The hills round Tangier were burnt dry and tawny by the sun, and the place itself seemed smaller than the space it had grown to fill in his imagination (dissatisfied with his painting of Acanthus, Matisse had brought the canvas back to check on what he had left out, only to find that, on the contrary, he had put into it things that were not present in reality at all).71 But the extreme clarity and precision of the light gave great satisfaction, and this time he had Amido to act as companion, guide and middleman with potential models.72
Matisse came across one by chance almost immediately, lounging in a doorway, “stretched out like a panther, a mulatto in Moroccan costume that showed off the slender, supple elegance of her young body.”73 Fatma was more African than Arab, bold, forthright and unveiled. She had the youth and catlike panache of Loti’s tough little heroine in Roman dun Spahi, who was part virgin bride, part tiger and part monkey. Matisse painted Fatma out of doors in a stiff breeze on a roof terrace (the traditional province of women in Morocco), organising his long narrow canvas round the emphatic thrust of jawline, shoulder, elbow, wrist and the slim, straight legs outlined in green inside her purple-frogged, pink-flowered, turquoise caftan. In a second, much smaller canvas (destined for the Sembats), she sits cross-legged against a rich blue ground in plum-red blouse and pants with a sumptuously embroidered orange front and patterned sash. Fatma intrigued him and she knew it, complaining that their sessions tired her, upping her charges by the day, and threatening to stop posing altogether if he failed to pay up.74
Her behaviour exasperated him, and so did unresolved problems with the first canvas, which he abandoned at the end of October, turning it to face the wall (“I brought it home and haven’t the courage to turn it round for fear of disappointment”).75 But in the end their bickering added its own tension, like the wind, to the electric brilliance of both pictures. Fatma’s abrasive personality contrasted sharply with the softness and compliance of Matisse’s other model, Zorah, who had disappeared when he first went looking for her on this second trip to Tangier. With Amido’s help he tracked her down to a brothel whose inmates were forbidden by police regulations to work elsewhere, so he arranged for her to pose for him on the brothel’s flat roof between jobs downstairs (after the few minutes she spent attending to each client, the painter got her back, looking flushed and munching petit beurre biscuits).76
Matisse had now liberated himself from standard visual preconceptions so thoroughly that, without being either provocative or absurd, he could paint a Tangerine prostitute kneeling between her sole possessions (a pair of slippers and a bowl of goldfish) in a pose of iconic purity and simplicity used for centuries in Western art to convey the innocence of the Virgin Mary. He borrowed another sacred image for the Riff tribesman (“magnificent and savage as a jackal”),77 who reminded him of Christ’s head on a Byzantine coin.78 Matisse placed his subject at the centre of a flat, geometrical composition of ochre, blue and emerald green, adding a broad expanse of deep cherry pink in a second version. The abstract simplicity of both paintings intensifies the natural majesty of the model. “Isn’t he splendid, that great devil of a Riffian with his rugged face and fighter’s build,” wrote Sembat, for whom this contemporary Moroccan bandit belonged with the chivalric warrior Moors from the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland.79
The modernity of these images is still startling today. Matisse painted each of his three models twice in the winter of 1912—13, conjuring up their solid physical presence by magical techniques of suggestion and sleight of hand. Each retains a sharply individual identity within an overall pattern structured by his or her gaudy carapace or costume (Matisse was fascinated by Zorah’s blue, gold-braided caftan, the only one she had, designed to be discarded when it wore out and replaced with a fresh one, like a snakeskin).80 All these figures have rudimentary features in highly expressive faces, slippered feet represented by streaks of yellow paint, and hands even more cursorily indicated (in the grave and beautiful On the Terrace, Zorah’s clasped hands are, in Rémi Labrusse’s phrase, “a stupefying absence”).81
Within a month it was clear that Matisse would not be beating a quick retreat to Paris. Ominous letters started arriving from his wife. On 25 October he begged her to resist sinking back into apathy and loneliness, to get dressed, go out, force herself to take the train to Paris, above all to be patient (“We’ll be together again soon… you must accept this short separation without getting too fed up, otherwise I’ll leave here right away”).82 He recommended things for her to do—call on the Steins, visit Jean at school, take her aunt Nine to a concert or a play—but her only response was to stop writing altogether, which alarmed him even more. It was Amélie who had insisted, in spite of protests from her husband, that she could manage perfectly well alone at Issy. “I won’t listen to her another time,” Matisse promised his daughter, “and I wont leave without her.”83 Albert Marquet and Charles Camoin both took the train to Issy to call on Matisse’s wife at his request that autumn. Georgette Sembat, who invited her over to Bonnières, was shocked by her listlessness and depression. “I told her that in her place I would long ago have left to join you, even without permission,” Mme Sembat reported to Matisse on 12 November. “In short I preached insubordination. I would have suggested leaving for Ajaccio but that didn’t appeal to her, it’s you she’s missing.”84
Even before this letter reached him, Matisse himself had written and telegraphed his wife to take ship for Tangier. She left Paris on 20 November escorted by Camoin, who had enthusiastically accepted Matisse’s offer to negotiate special terms for a winter’s board and lodging at the Hotel de France. Camoin had split up the year before with his partner, the painter Emilie Charmy, whose departure precipitated a prolonged crisis of confidence in his own worth as a painter. Like virtually all Matisse’s artist friends, he liked Amélie, and thoroughly approved the marriage: “Mme Matisse was exceptionally devoted, always working to make sure he had nothing to do but paint! Charming, courageous and full of faith in her husbands work.”85 Camoin’s image of her as a model wife was stronger than ever after this Moroccan adventure. A woman who would drop everything, abandoning children, home and friends in order to follow her husband at a weeks notice by sea and land to another continent (“100 hours by boat and 24 by train” was Matisse’s estimate of their journey time) was the kind of steadfast and supportive companion he would have liked for himself.
Amélie now found herself back where she had always been happiest, in the company of painters and their work. Bold, self-confident women who admired her husbands art—and underestimated the key role she played in its most radical phase—tended to write her off as drab and unadventurous (“She’s too timid, though very sweet, a good creature, absolutely devoted,” wrote Mme Sembat. “You’re very lucky to have such a charming companion”).86 But fellow artists, who knew more about the realities of this kind of working marriage, were perpetually amazed by Mme Matisse’s unconventionality and lack of prejudice. They elevated her, only half ironically, to hero status, and she teased them gently in return. All of them recognised that beneath her gaiety and good humour she was at bottom as single-minded as her husband. In Tangier she fell in readily with the two painters’ routine, exploring the old town with them in search of motifs, joining them after work for trips to the cinema or games of dominoes, drawing the line only when it came to galloping with them through the narrow alleys of the Arab quarter (Camoin, who learned to ride this winter under his friend’s supervision, remembered Amélie as still “a bit refractory” in that department).87 Family legend said that Matisse’s wife even accompanied her husband in search of Zorah, causing uproar in the bawdy house, whose inmates had no idea how to treat a Frenchman who brought his wife with him.88
Not that Matisse was an ordinary client. Brothels were a standard resource for painters, supplying models along with other services in every French seaport from St-Tropez to Marseilles. Camoin, who certainly checked out the local talent on arrival in Tangier, reported with amusement the tip Matisse gave him at the brothel door, advising him to remember that they were present in a strictly professional capacity, “like doctors.”89 Much has been made of this remark by art historians, who apparently assume that the only reason Mme Matisse could have wanted to see Zorah again was to check on what her husband was getting up to with a girl at least five years younger than his own daughter. But the comic point of Camoin’s story was precisely that Matisse drew the line between work and leisure differently from other people.
His male friends knew well enough that his adherence to their bawdy subculture of racy jokes and saucy postcards was largely vicarious. He sympathised with Camoin’s predicament after Charmy left him, packing him off for a working summer in Collioure, and posting after him a postcard of a medieval chastity belt endorsed on the back, “To exhort you to be patient” (Amélie added her own ribald postscript underneath: “And to preserve you from the assaults of Père Terms”).90 He entered appreciatively into Marquet’s rackety exploits, roaring with laughter over his account of a gang of small Arab boys who offered themselves as guides to a luxury brothel in Tangier only to sneak in behind the back of the madam, giggling and bouncing on the chairs while she greeted her new
Postcard of a medieval chastity belt, posted to Camoin after his girlfriend left to him with consoling message on the back from the Matisses
French client at the door. “It’s as real to me as if I’d been there,” said Matisse, who kept up a running gag with Marquet about his own bashfulness and inadequacy in this sort of situation.91 “In Tangier we don’t wait for Christmas to make merry, we’re out on the tiles the whole time,” he wrote, urging Marquet to join them for the winter. “Camoin & I can hardly stand upright, you can easily picture the scene—in bed every night by ten.”92
In fact Matisse’s sobriety was legendary. In Marquet’s worldly terms, he was an innocent. With Camoin, who was ten years younger, he had always played the part of dependable elder brother, seeing him through crises in his love life (“Getting me going again as you did last summer was like throwing me a life-belt,” wrote Camoin),93 picking him up and rushing him to hospital when he fell critically ill with diphtheria in Tangier.94 Left to himself, Matisse led a life of monastic regularity, seeing virtually no one except the people from the hotel. “Don’t imagine there’s anything madly exciting going on here, apart from work,” he told his wife soon after he arrived, writing the same week to his children, “Except on my canvases, it’s always pretty much the same here, one meal follows another, and one night the next.”95 For Matisse none of the standard forms of addiction or debauch could hope to match the risk and lure of painting.
When Morrice returned in December, the three painters formed a companionable trio, painting the same motifs, comparing and contrasting canvases, discussing critical theory and the current thirst for innovation. From a practical point of view, they worked well together. The only snag was that Morrice was seldom sober, exasperating even Camoin when he started taking his first tot of rum after breakfast, lurching unsteadily round the hotel and ending up hopelessly fuddled by lunchtime. A string of street boys chanting “Whisky, whisky!” followed him through the narrow streets.96 “Outside working hours, we were always together,” said Matisse. “I used to go with him to the café, where I drank as many glasses of mineral water as he took of spirits.”97 Matisse’s abstemiousness, and even more his capacity for work, inspired a kind of awe—part envious, part appalled—in the other two. Both were restless, rootless bachelors (“Always on the wing like a migrating bird with nowhere to touch down,” Matisse’said of Morrice), perpetually in search of external stimulus to invigorate their output, unlike Matisse, who travelled in order to see his inner landscape in a fresh light. Exotic settings meant nothing to him. When the rains started in the New Year, he hired a photographer’s studio in the centre of the Arab town above the bay, full of light from huge glass
Matisse indicated the location of his studio on this postcard view of Tangier.
windows, so that the three of them could work indoors, whipping up a masterpiece “with an orange, three carrots and a rag,” as he reported in a rare moment of complacency to Manguin.98
The company of other painters was crucial for Matisse in phases of reckless experiment, whenever he felt impelled to jump yet another ditch, to launch himself into nothingness as he had done with Derain in 1905, and as he did once again in 1912–13 in Tangier. This time neither of the other two could follow his relentless drive towards abstraction, although by Camoin’s account they talked at length about the need to push beyond naturalistic conventions towards a simpler, sterner, more concentrated expression of reality. Camoin pondered ways of condensing his own work (over the next twelve months he would write to Matisse in rising panic, which culminated in a bout of frenzy when he burned or ripped up eighty canvases, after which he went back to less extreme procedures). At the time, he said that the best thing about the whole winter was that Matisse had given him back the will to paint, “something I couldn’t help but find again in your company.”99 Even Morrice, never apparently tempted to abandon his own easier solutions, told Camoin how much he admired Matisse, who seems to have felt that his increasingly solitary struggles would have been almost unendurable without his friends’ support.
But the painter most vividly present in his mind in Tangier was Delacroix, who had recharged his own vision eighty years before under the brilliant soft light of the Moroccan sun, drawing strength, like Matisse, from the power and harmony of Oriental design and colour. Matisse dismissed suggestions that he (like the Orientalists) had picked Morocco in
Matisse, sketch of a galloping horseman on the foreshore at Tangier in tribute to Delacroix, 1912
order to retrace the footsteps of Delacroix, but he saw his work reflected everywhere in the landscape, even recognising the background to The Capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders as the view from the terrace of the Casbah café.100 When he sketched the same headland from the same spot, he added a galloping horseman in salute to his great predecessor. In Tangier under the sign of Delacroix, Matisse negotiated a wholly new balance between form and meaning, design and content, external appearance and inner reality. “Where does pattern end and subject-matter begin?” wrote Jacob Tugendhold, discussing the structural principle Matisse pushed to its furthest extreme in his Moroccan paintings, the principle of resonant or vibrating colour, “which is the basic law of oriental colouring as perceived by Delacroix in Women of Algiers.”101
For Matisse, as for Delacroix, travel was a means of cleansing the eye. He needed an unfamiliar world and a new light, for the same reason that he needed the alien decorative discipline of Oriental art, so as to break through to a fresh way of seeing. Tugendhold, who left by far the fullest and most lucid contemporary assessment of the paintings Shchukin collected, analysed Matisse’s work, in terms that made little sense in the West before the First World War, as construction by pure colour:
From this further conclusions follow, the first being the high degree of abstraction in his work. Objects rendered by Matisse—whether it is a tablecloth, a vase or, in exactly the same way, a
Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers 1834
human face—are dematerialised, transformed into coloured silhouettes, distillations of colour that spill in ornamental streaks and splashes over the canvas. Not things but the essence of things.… In his canvases there is an ornamental harmony which is not so much contained as projected upwards and outwards.… It is this fluidity… that gives his paintings a kind of life that reaches out from the walls beyond the boundaries of their gilt frames. And here we come up against the essential nature of his decoration: Matisse’s paintings seem not so much separate entities as parts of a non-existent frieze, in other words an oriental frieze.
Within a few weeks of his return to Morocco in the autumn of 1912, Matisse jotted down ideas for “two Tangier panels” clearly intended for Shchukin.102 These two decorative compositions would prove on completion stranger and more ambitious even than the studies of trees and foliage he brought back from the first trip, or his beautiful iconic figure paintings. Both started out as café scenes. A quick sketch of a group of Arabs drinking on the flat roof of the Casbah café contained the germ of The Moroccans, one of the most uncompromising of the great, austere, semi-abstract canvases Matisse produced in isolation and turmoil in Paris during the First World War. In his last weeks in Tangier he was already working on the other panel, which he called Moroccan Café.
It grew from sketches made in a second café just below the first, housed in the small, cube-shaped white building, covered with trellis and overhung by purple morning glories, which can be glimpsed through the archway in Matisse’s painting of The Casbah Gate. The interior consisted of a single room with one small window overlooking the bay, a low white arcade running round blue-painted walls, and twelve cages of singing birds hanging from the ceiling. Matisse had discovered the place in his first weeks alone in Tangier, when he heard violin music one day as he was passing after work. He went inside, took the instrument from the Arab fiddler and began to play himself, pouring the feelings aroused by his painting into music that held the half-dozen customers spellbound. “I played well,” he told his wife. “My sensibility had been stirred up by the work session I had just finished, and I gave them some nice sounds.”103 The people in the café responded by making him feel at home, and Matisse took to dropping in regularly in the early evenings.
The violin had provided imaginative relief—an escape from drab everyday routine—for Matisse ever since his schooldays, and now it catapulted him once again into another world. He and Camoin (who had taught themselves to draw at top speed as students twenty years before by following Delacroix’s instructions) both produced paintings from sketches of the café with the violin and the caged canaries. “It’s a quiet café full of serious people,” said Matisse, who drew the customers talking, standing at the window, reclining dreamily full-length or squatting on the ground to play cards and smoke hashish. Moroccan Café (colour fig. 15) shows two of them bent meditatively over a bowl of goldfish and a single pink flower drawn up before them on the floor. Amélie reported that her husband had made a good start on this painting in his Tangier studio by early January 1913.104 But, whereas both the café and the customers retain their picturesque appeal in Camoin’s canvases, Matisse’systematically suppressed everything that makes his sketchbooks so lively and engaging, stripping the features from the faces of his human figures, eliminating their long pipes and their slippers lined up at the door, reducing even their canaries to an invisible presence.
“Matisse took care not to paint the cages,” wrote Marcel Sembat (who was one of the few to grasp the implications of Matisse’s “instinctive transition from the concrete to the abstract” in 1913), “but a little of the sweetness of the birdsong passed into his picture.”105 The people in it are no more than flat grey, white and ochre shapes on a pale blue-green ground with two goldfish and a flower reduced respectively to a couple of ochre slashes and three vivid crimson blobs. Matisse told Sembat that
Matisse, sketches of the Arab cafe where he borrowed a violin to entertain the customers after work
what he was after was the quality of Oriental meditation: “That’s what struck me: those great devils who remain for hours lost in contemplation of a flower and some goldfish.”
The Matisses left Tangier in mid-February, travelling via Ajaccio for a brief family reunion and stopping off on the mainland to see Henri’s widowed mother, who was wintering in Menton with a companion from Bohain. Photographs of Matisse buttoned into Edwardian travelling gear of frock coat and leather leggings, or muffled up on the rocks at Menton with his party in voluminous skirts and stately hats, seem to inhabit a different world from the revolutionary works he brought back from Morocco. They went on show for just six days, 14–19 April 1913, at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris. “No one who saw it will ever forget that show,” wrote Marcel Sembat.106 Virtually all the paintings in it (except for the Sembats’ two small canvases) already belonged either to Shchukin or Morosov. “Soon your pictures wont ever be seen again except in Moscow,” Sembat’s wife had written sadly to Matisse the year before. “How many of them are already there, alas, including some of the most beautiful, which no French artist has ever seen? It’s a great shame for the development of taste in France.”107
After one week’s public display in Paris, the pick of Matisse’s Moroccan canvases headed east. Shchukin subjected his collection in 1913 to a comprehensive overhaul, which included rehanging the drawing room to accommodate the new works from Tangier, documenting the hang in photographs and overseeing the compilation of a catalogue. Tugendhold was appointed the collection’s first professional curator. Matisse now had a museum to house his paintings with an enthusiastic young keeper and a director passionately committed to a programme of expansion and public education. Shchukin had already taken delivery of three of the eleven canvases specifically commissioned for his drawing room, and was about to receive four more.108 He had also bought three much larger, decorative panels: Conversation, Corner of the Studio and Nasturtiums with “Dance (I).”
Over the past twelve months he had more than established his credentials
shchukin’s drawing room rehung in 1913 to incorporate painting from Morocco
as a working partner. The one thing that had threatened to disrupt Matisse’s steady progress in Tangier was the news, which reached him in October 1912, of Shchukin’s death. In fact it turned out to be Sergei Ivanovich’s elder brother, Pyotr, who had killed himself (this was the fourth suicide in the collector’s immediate family since he met Matisse), but for a few days, before he realised his mistake, the painter was deeply shaken. “Mme Matisse told me how you felt when you feared Shchukin had died,” wrote Georgette Sembat. “Luckily he’s in very good health, and you can carry on working hard for his museum.”109
It wasn’t simply Matisse’s livelihood that was at stake. Shchukin offered a future for his work, and the hope of comprehension. In Moroccan Café, Matisse had reached a pitch of abstract purity and intensity unprecedented at that point in the West. One of only three paintings offered for sale in April at Bernheim-Jeune, it failed to find a buyer until Shchukin arrived from Russia in the summer and bought it on the spot. When it reached Moscow, he hung it in a small private dressing room where, he told Matisse, he spent at least an hour a day contemplating his latest acquisition, which he had come to like better than all his other paintings.110
“There are certain truths which transcend the power of the intellect to grasp, which can only be conveyed by evocation,” wrote Matisse’s friend Matthew Prichard, exploring the common ground between Matisse’s work and Oriental art. “Reality is one of the truths which exceeds the power of the intellect to grasp, but appearance is a simple intellectual fact.”111 Painting solely by instinct and feeling, Matisse had broken through to a new visual level of reality where few of his contemporaries could follow him. It took faith as well as courage and imagination on the part of both painter and collector to make this leap into the future. “The essential thing about Matisse’s painting is not to judge it except by eye,” wrote the painter Jules Flandrin, reassuring a friend about one of the baffling, semi-abstract little landscapes Matisse produced at the turn of the century, when he abandoned himself for the first time to the light and colour of the south: “You have to look at it as you would look at the sunshine through the window. And then it works, I promise you.”112
