Matisse, Brise marine from Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1932
When Charlie Chaplin released The Circus in 1928, Matisse saw it twice with his friend Thorndike in Nice, and was struck by its extreme simplicity: “Nothing picturesque about it, no flourishes… it’s like someone who talks as simply as possible using only very few words to express himself.”1 Chaplin himself seemed to have aged, and his playing of the tramp had moved on from captivating charm to something sterner and more touching: “From start to finish you’re glued to what he’s doing, you cant miss anything because nothing is unnecessary.”
This was the kind of streamlined fluidity Matisse wanted in his own work. He responded both as a painter and as a man to the extraordinary gravity he found in Chaplin’s film, which ends with the tramp turning down a fairy tale ending—the girl of his dreams, top billing as a circus star—in favour of a solitary and uncertain freedom. Matisse would be sixty in 1929. A painting of his was on course to enter the Louvre that year. He had already won first prize at the 1927 Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Success, public honour and a comfortable old age lay within his grasp. Rumours circulated in Paris that he intended to retire and take up religion. A New York journalist turned up in Nice to ask if it was true that Matisse had summoned his disciples to announce he was reverting to safer, more traditional methods and abandoning modern art.2
He declined to comment on the contemporary art world to a sympathetic young interviewer, Efstratios Tériade, who arrived in January 1929 to question him about the past. Matisse, briefly in Paris to fetch his wife home after a course of injections, said he could no longer stand the frenetic atmosphere of the capital, “the noise, the movement, the latest news and trends you’re supposed to follow.”3 He insisted that the only show that interested him was the Boat Show. Rowing had become a passion in the last two years. He rowed across the bay in his own skiff most days (“It’s a sport that suits me.” he told his wife, “…it’s a question of suppleness, rather than brute force”),4 winning a medal for taking his boat out more often than any other member of the Sailing Club in Nice. He grew tanned and fit, showing Tériade his calloused palms as if he were in training for some unspecified event. They discussed what lay behind his spectacular breakout as a Fauve in 1905, and Matisse explained that he couldn’t live in an excessively tidy, over-regulated house: “You have to head for the jungle to find simpler ways of doing things that don’t stifle the spirit.”5
Back in Nice, he couldn’t settle. When Amélie returned to Paris to complete her treatment, Henri was disconsolate (“My dear Amélie Noélie, Come back as soon as you’ve finished your injections for I’m miserably bored all on my own…there’s no reason to go out and nothing interests me”).6 The dog did her best to fill the blank—”Ghika treats me with a touching tenderness”—but the highlight of his day outside working hours remained his nightly walk to the station to post a letter to his wife before going home to bed.7 When the sculptor Aristide Maillol turned up with his son in Nice, Matisse took a whole week off work in March to show them round the town and tour the scenery in his Buick (“an open torpedo,” said Jules Romains, recalling hair-raising excursions with the painter at the wheel).8 They visited the heights of Mont Boron and sped round the coast to Monte Carlo, taking in Matisse’s favourite restaurants and lunching on their last day with Bonnard and the collector Arthur Hahnloser. Maillol reminisced about the old days in Collioure, and scrutinised his host’s latest work intently. “He looked at everything, the old fox, but anyway I was glad to see him,” wrote Matisse. “Our understanding is totally different—next to him, I’m a Cubist, a Surrealist even.”9
Maillol was enthusiastic about Matisse’s new studio, impressed by the apartment with its spacious rooms opening into and out of one another (“He found the way we’ve done it up superb”), and deeply envious of his old friend’s domestic set-up. He told Pierre later how much he wished his own wife could be more like Mme Matisse, who embodied his ideal of calm and gracious living.10 Amélie was at her best that summer, scouring the junkshops for rugs and wall-hangings, stitching curtains with embroidered borders for the Duthuits’ new flat in Paris, coordinating a last tremendous onslaught on the Nice apartment by builders, plumbers, carpenters and tiling specialists (“Your father and I have sworn we’ll never build ourselves a house: we’d go mad”).11 She suffered recurrent bouts of the back trouble that always incapacitated her in a crisis, complicated by a kidney attack earlier in the year in Paris, and she still spent up to three days out of six in bed, but the depression itself had evaporated. Marguerite said she watched her mother click out of it one day as if a switch had flipped.12
Matisse had finally found another dancer to replace Henriette. He had spotted Lisette Löwengard in an antique shop, where she and her widowed mother were trying to sell a few pieces to the owner.13 An alert, independent seventeen-year-old, Lisette was the daughter of a leading Parisian antiquarian, Charles Löwengard (who died when she was twelve), and the niece of another, Ernest d’Albret, both well known to the Matisses, a link that immediately reassured both families. When Lisette’s mother went back to Paris, she left her daughter in the care of the painter and his wife, who engaged her to come in daily and found her a room in a nearby hostel run by nuns. She started out as Matisse’s model but quickly became a companion for his wife. Lively and capable, Lisette knew how to tend an invalid, and soon she was massaging Matisse’s painful arms as well, and tucking him up in a rug for his siesta on the balcony after lunch.
Full of plans for the future, Amélie talked of putting the Montparnasse apartment up for sale and finding another studio flat as a pied à terre in Paris to replace the one on the quai St-Michel (finally given up that year when the Duthuits moved out).14 “She’s never been so happy here before,” wrote Matisse, who had finally achieved the balance between life and work in Nice that he had longed for ever since he first arrived.15 For a few months in 1929 the couple showed every sign of settling down into a contented old age. Amélie decided to learn to type (“Your father’s going to buy me a machine”),16 and Henri entertained her as he used to do in his student days, with energetic antics to the latest pop tunes. “He’s playing jazz and all the most suggestive tangos on the gramophone,” she reported cheerfully at the end of May; “at the moment he’s dancing the tango ‘Poule de luxe in his dressing-gown and his black silk night-cap.”17 Three weeks later the painter booked a double cabin to the South Seas aboard a steamship called Tahiti, leaving the following spring from San Francisco.18
When people asked him at the time and afterwards why he suddenly set off for Tahiti at the start of 1930, Matisse gave one of two reasons. The first was that his doctor had ordered a complete rest, and forbidden him to use a brush because he suffered acute neuritis in both arms, especially his painting arm.19 The second was that he was looking for a new light—the tropical light of the Pacific Islands, where he would find dawn and darkness unlike anything he had seen before.20 The two reasons were intimately connected. Matisse habitually linked his periodic flights southwards towards the sun with the need to simplify his work and make it more expressive. Physical and moral compulsion came to much the same thing in these upheavals. His body had always reacted violently to anything that came between him and painting, starting with the mysterious back pains that had crippled him as a teenager whenever his father mentioned alternative careers. “Nervous people produce external symptoms out of proportion to whatever is wrong with the organ in question,” Marguerite explained, reminding her father in retrospect of the complaints that plagued him as he approached the age of sixty and found himself disabled by knifelike cramps and nosebleeds so copious he hardly dared move, let alone paint.21 “God knows how often you told me at the time that you were an old man, that everything was over,” she wrote, pointing out that his aches and pains invariably disappeared as soon as he began to paint.
That prospect receded as the birthday celebrations advanced. Duthuit’s ambitious dream of a book that would do justice to Matisse’s entire career had shrunk in practice to six more or less journalistic publications due in 1929 (“I hope they don’t come to blows in your hall,” Marguerite wrote tartly, when two rival authors proposed to descend simultaneously on Nice with questionnaires).22 There was to be a small Parisian sculpture show and a big Berlin retrospective in 1930. followed the year after by three more retrospectives in Paris, Basel and New York. Matisse dreaded the public tributes, which he correctly predicted would deplore his latest work, consign his achievements firmly to the past and write him off as a spent force in the present. Worse still was his own growing suspicion that painting had indeed abandoned him. For twelve months, he tried to call it back. Still Life on a Green Sideboard, the wonderfully serene and confident homage to Cézanne that had released Matisse from his odalisques, failed to lead as he had hoped to a new way of working, something more solid and less showy. He gave the canvas to the Friends of New Painting, a pressure group of collectors and curators who proposed to infiltrate the French state collection by presenting modern paintings to the Luxembourg in the hope that some at least would end up in the Louvre. The Director of National Museums, Henri Verne, had assured Matisse that his picture would make the transit, but even Verne could not prevent Sideboard from being hung—where Matisse feared his contemporaries meant to situate his entire output—so high up and far away as to be practically invisible.23
Throughout 1929, painting eluded him. Neither his new model nor the great glass-walled, white-tiled studio filled with gleaming reflected light from sky and sea could ignite a spark in his imagination. He had begun the year by setting up a composition for which he had high hopes—”It’s a large-scale thing in colour to be done very quickly along the lines of the big Riff an”24—but an unexpected snowfall blotted out the colours in his studio, and Lisette caught flu. “She’s gone from round and fresh to listless and wax-pale,” he told his wife, abandoning his Woman in a Madras Hat, the first and for a long time the only major canvas he attempted with Lisette.25 He said he got so sick of invoking colour that refused to come that he switched to print-making instead. “Painting is going nowhere,” he wrote. “I force myself for nothing—but lithos flow of their own accord.”26 He was half delighted, half appalled by the ease and spontaneity with which he drew straight onto copper plate or stone, working six hours a day and producing three hundred works in five months (“They’re astonishing, incredibly full of life—it’s as if you used the etching point and copper like pencil and paper,” Marguerite wrote from Paris. “They’re a joy to see”).27
He divided his days between print-making and sculpture, completing two projects generated by the absent Henriette, the Large Seated Nude and the last of three small, harshly distorted and exquisitely sensuous Reclining Nudes. In the summer, the Matisses retreated from the heat and glare of the Mediterranean to the cool, dim, quiet Hotel Lutétia in Paris (the Montparnasse flat had proved too much for Marie, and Amélie could no longer manage it without help). Issy was let to tenants, all except the outbuilding where Jean had set up his studio and living quarters, and where his father now returned to another piece of unfinished sculptural business. This was his final variation on a theme taken initially from the Bathers by Cézanne that exerted peculiar moral and pictorial power over the entire Matisse family. Cezanne’s small, sturdy bathers, each with a long straight tress of hair hanging down her spine, were transposed over twenty years into the four massive, elemental, sculpted Backs, which Matisse produced at intervals like a repeated affirmation of steadiness and purpose. They remained virtually unknown in his lifetime, but their plain rough surfaces and simple geometric volumes embody a private obduracy.28 “If you let yourself respond fully to them,” said the sculptor’s eldest grandson, “you will find in them the whole life of Henri Matisse: an extraordinary equilibrium, returning always to the plumb line.”29
Matisse, Back IV, 1929–30: “You will find there the whole life of Henri Matisse: an extraordinary equilibrium, returning always to the plumb line.”
It was as if he needed to touch base before veering blindly in a fresh direction with no clear idea what he was looking for, or whether he would find it. Doubts and nightmares assailed Matisse now that, no matter what he tried, painting had come to a full stop (“I’ve set myself up at the easel to do some work several times,” he told Marguerite at the end of 1929, “but, in front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatever”).30 Flight seemed the only option, as it had done the first time he headed south at the start of his career. “I’ve got Polynesia waiting for me,” he wrote, “though at times I say to myself: why?”31 He told the other oarsmen at the Sailing Club in Nice that he wished he were back home again before he even started, but at bottom he sensed with an unreasoning, almost visceral certainty that he had no choice. “The retina tires of the same old methods,” he had told Tériade in January. “It demands surprises.”32 Maillol’s visit had confirmed what Matisse already knew, that he could not endure to live like his cautious old friend without ever looking over his own garden fence (Maillol had spent his life in the garden of the Greeks, Matisse told Duthuit).33 “What harmed Maillol a good deal as a sculptor is that he so often called a halt as soon as his work reached a satisfactory stage” Matisse wrote long afterwards to his daughter. “And what has helped me a lot is pushing on beyond that point, in spite of the high risk.”34
Matisse, who had for years found it almost impossible to take a few days off work, even for his father-in-laws funeral or his own shows in Paris, now planned a journey that would last five months without so much as a portable easel in his baggage. His original idea of a visit to Tahiti (by Matisse’s own account, his destination mattered so little that he picked Tahiti, rather than the Galapagos Islands, because it was a regular port of call for Pacific steamers)35 expanded into a world tour, crossing America on the way out and returning by sea through the Panama Canal. He assembled a travel library, studied Lucien Gauthier’s luscious photos of Tahitian jungles and lagoons, read Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas, Marc Chadourne’s best-selling novel Vasco, and a popular account by the sailor Alain Gerbault of a recent voyage from Panama to Tahiti.36 Pierre sent his father a Maori grammar.37 Chadourne, a former administrator of the Leeward Islands, offered an introduction to his Tahitian ex-girlfriend, the heroine of Vasco, who would book a hotel for Matisse in Papeete.
Amélie spent a wretched summer punctuated by kidney trouble and spinal problems so severe that, in spite of her annual mountain cure, she had to stay behind in Paris for further treatment, installed alone at the hotel, instead of joining her husband in Nice. He had booked a cabin for two on the Tahiti, but the chances of her being fit to travel looked slim. When she more or less stopped writing to him, he composed a batch of sample letters for her to sign, describing her calm, orderly progress towards recovery, and declaring her willingness to accompany him round the world: strange documents in which the painter enthusiastically impersonates the fond, supportive, miraculously reinvigorated wife he hoped to take with him to Tahiti.38 The gap between daydream and reality was wide, and growing wider. Henri’s desperation, now that he could no longer paint, had done nothing to draw the two together. Where once Amélie would have taken charge, treating his setbacks as a joint defeat, recklessly expending her own resources to dislodge obstacles and shore up defences, now she no longer had the energy or will.
Their brief domestic interlude in early summer had been for her a form of make-believe at a point when the dispersal of the family left her own aimlessness and lack of purpose painfully exposed. Marguerite was due to leave for Egypt with her husband, who was awaiting confirmation from the Ministry of Arts of his posting as a lecturer to Cairo. Jean had finally found the companion he had been looking for, a fellow painter in process of divorce whom he planned to marry as soon as she was free. Pierre, himself divorced at last and moving steadily towards opening a New York gallery of his own, was about to make a second marriage to Alexina Satler, an American his parents had never met. Amélie’s own heroic dreams had petered out. Her husband’s latest project contrasted sadly with the first time the couple had set off together in pursuit of painting, on their Mediterranean honeymoon. It had been Amélie who initiated and organised that legendary “Revelation of the South.” This time, even if she went with him, she would be at best a passive companion, at worst an encumbrance.
Marguerite, reviewing her parents’ marriage with characteristic trenchancy a few years later, recognised that Amélie had always acted as its safety valve. Her explosions of anger, and even the querulous lamentations issuing from her sickbed as her health deteriorated, were a way of relieving pressures that threatened to become intolerable. Still her father’s severest critic, Marguerite warned him that he was in danger of forgetting the essential generosity and breadth of his wife’s vision:
It comes from the ability to see things in a large context, a quality that was necessary, indeed indispensable to you for twenty years of your life together—her capacity for optimism was for you the happy counterweight to your fundamentally pessimistic nature. When you felt crushed, your spirit was lightened by her moral sanity and balance, and by the inner force she possessed at thirty. Have you never thought what those days might have been like with a woman who was always whining—or feeble or easily daunted—who found it difficult to uproot herself, or who belonged to the type traditionally defined as normal, the type that creates a perfect interior where everything is rigorously clean, neat, organised, but where the air is stifling, poisonous—sterile—where you feel an itch to destroy everything by kicking the place down?39
Amélie’s vision launched and shaped her husband’s career, but the constant tension under which he operated bore down on everyone who worked with him, especially on her. At the beginning of October 1929, she collapsed so completely that Dr. Audistère had to be called to the hotel to administer morphine. Over the next few weeks, he was in constant attendance. Both her sons came every day. Pierre hired day and night nurses. Matisse sent telegrams, telephoned each night for news and offered to come up himself from Nice. Marguerite, in Barcelona with her husband, returned after a fortnight to find her mother pitifully wan and shaky. This was the kind of crisis the family tried at all costs to avoid. Amélie had been a girl of sixteen when she suffered a first frightening attack that gripped her whole body in convulsive writhing and vomiting. For the better part of her marriage she had been free from these excruciating spasms, which began to recur with the onset of depression, causing cumulative damage to her spine, placing grave strain on her kidneys, leaving her physically battered and emotionally drained.40
She dreaded them, and so did everybody else. Amélie’s breakdowns were liable to precipitate a collective release of feelings that had built up for months or years in brooding silence, and could no longer be contained. At times like this, engulfed by ancient rancour, the whole family briskly traded insults with marksmanship and verve. Far away in Nice in the grip of a different panic, too engrossed by his own anxieties to attend adequately to other people’s, Matisse felt his lifelong sense of being excluded and misunderstood rising up in him again, this time with his own children ranged accusingly against him. “My dear Papa, you can believe in my devotion, and don’t let yourself think you’re all alone, as you say you are,” wrote Pierre, assuring his father that all of them, including Duthuit, remained deeply attached to him. “As for the rest of us, if we tear ourselves to pieces, it’s because our love for one another is too strong. Do you really think that, if we were so unfeeling, we would manage to inflict such wounds?”41
The commotion subsided as quickly as it had arisen. Amélie revived as always under her husbands genuine affection and concern (“Your phone calls are the sweeteners in Mamans days,” Marguerite told her father).42 But by the time she was well enough to make the journey down to Nice in December, there was no longer any question of further travel. She could not even leave her bed. Her doctors ordered her to spend the next few months flat on her back, warning that she must not think of trying to get up until Easter at the earliest.43 Her best hope of returning to anything like normal activity was to remain immobile in the sickroom prepared for her in Nice. Lisette moved in, bringing her cat and two parakeets, which became part of the household along with Ghika, Marie the cook, and her husband Michel. Lisette would sleep in Amélie’s room.44
Pierre and his new wife, spending their honeymoon in France, were due to visit, and the Duthuits would follow for a week at Easter. Berthe was on full alert in Aix. Local friends like Bussy and Bonnard were standing by in case of need. Henri promised to keep a journal in the form of letters, posting off instalments so that Amélie could feel he was talking to her every day. She had agreed to do the same, dictating her bulletins to Lisette if she felt too weak to write herself, and assuring her husband she would wait patiently for his return. Henri’s last letter before he embarked included a sketch of his wife in a frilly jacket, reclining on her pillows with raised knees and arms crossed behind her head, looking more like a lithe, frivolous young model than an elderly invalid requiring attendance from a stern-faced Lisette. Matisse had done everything he could think of to make her incarceration bearable when he finally sailed for New York on 25 February 1930, aboard the Ile de France.
Gloomy and apprehensive on the crossing, unable to tear his thoughts away from Nice, half tempted to turn round and take the same boat back, he remained full of misgiving until, sailing slowly up the Hudson River on the evening of 4 March, he saw Manhattan—”this block of black and gold mirrored by night on the water”—and was bewitched.45 He wrote to his wife next day to say his impulse was to cancel all other plans and go no further than New York.46 The city electrified him. He had told virtually no one he was coming, but he made friends on the ship with Henry Farré (a former pupil of Moreau), who blew his cover. New Yorkers did their best at short notice to lay on parties, press coverage, sightseeing, private views. In seventy-two hours in town, Matisse rose at dawn to watch the sun rise over the sleeping city, went up the Woolworth Building, saw a powerful play at a black theatre in Harlem, and toured the Metropolitan Museum (noting with approval a procedure the opposite of the Louvre’s: “All the old pictures are dubious or mediocre—the modern ones are extremely good”).47 He was interviewed by Henry McBride for the Sun and photographed by Edward Steichen for Vogue. Pierre’s partner, Valentine Dudensing, showed him round their gallery, and took him to a show on Broadway.48
Apart from Broadway (“Absolutely infernal, hideous, the only thing I’ve seen that I cant stand”),49 Matisse loved everything, from his first ice cream soda to the traffic system on Park Avenue (his letter home included a helpful diagram). Prodigious energy flowed into him. He was enchanted by the light (“so dry, so crystalline, like no other”),50 by the combination of order, clarity and proportion he found everywhere, and by a quintes-sentially modern, wholly un-European sense of space and freedom which struck him the moment he looked out of his window on the thirty-ninth floor of the Ritz Tower Hotel (“It’s a new world, grand and majestic as the sea—and at the same time you sense human effort”).51 He said that if he were young again he would relocate to the United States.52 “Why did everyone say I wouldn’t like it?” he asked Charles Thorndike on 7 March. “Since I’ve been here I’ve lost at least twenty years.”53
He left that night for Chicago, then on again to California by the Santa Fe Railroad, two nights and three days in transit with stopovers en route. He told Amélie it was impossible to form an inkling of America from photographs or films. The architecture impressed him as much as the architects’ readiness to tear things down and start again (“The perpetual demolition and rebuilding of the houses makes the whole place look like something under construction”).54 He said it was easier to think and breathe on New York streets than in Europe’s cramped, ancient city centres or amid the clutter and confusion of the Paris boulevards. Wherever he went, he marvelled at the infinite variety of skyscrapers, filling the distance, modelling the sky, tapering upwards until they assumed the quality of light itself. “There is nothing ridiculous about these skyscrapers as we Europeans suppose,” he wrote from Chicago, trying to articulate for his wife the combination of grandeur with a modest human sense of scale that made him feel immediately at home.55 He visited museums with Farré (who was married to a top Chicago dress designer) and inspected Farré’s paintings, which were sensitive but sleepy, as if the modern world had passed him by (“Although he’s a few years younger than I am, he could be my grandfather—in everything but his appetite at table”).56 America made Matisse feel like Rip van Winkle in reverse: as if he had just woken, after sixty years on a continent littered and encumbered by the past, to find himself in a purpose-built, twentieth-century environment where for the first time he felt that he belonged.
Light changed from Chicago’s velvet softness to an atmosphere more like the Côte d’Azur as Matisse passed from cowboy country, dotted with grim reminders of resistance and assault (“The poor Indians have paid heavily for it since”),57 to the endless, pale, bright California desert full of colours and a light he had never seen before (“Is it already the light of the Pacific?”). He allowed himself two days in Los Angeles, amazed by the Pasadena landscape, and bemused by the studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. For almost a week he prided himself on travelling incognito, but when his train pulled into San Francisco, the first city in the United States ever to see a Matisse painting, there was a reception party waiting on the platform, including a delegation from the Art Institute with a list of official functions that made their visitor’s heart sink. “You must see that with a worldwide reputation like yours there is a price to pay,” his hosts told him sternly, brushing aside his protests until eventually the French professor of fine arts relented and let him off the worst.58 Matisse took tea with two old pioneering friends from the trail blazed by Sarah Stein: the formidable Harriet Levy (whose Girl with Green Eyes he had just seen hanging in a loan show at the Fine Art Museum), and his former pupil Annette Rosen-shine, whose delicacy touched him, and whose work he found full of life and spirit. He enjoyed himself at a dinner given in his honour by fifty local artists, and spent hours with the art schools staff and students, posing for photos with them, admiring their spacious studios and indulging in a secret rapture in their storeroom. “He fondled the tubes of fresh colour, unscrewing the caps and sampling each,” wrote a local journalist, who watched Matisse’s hands go from one tube to the next, fingering, caressing, sniffing up the contents like a relapsing addict. “At that moment he was a painter among paints.”59
A crowd came to see him off on 20 March, packing his cabin with fruit and flower baskets and waving from the quayside as buglers played a farewell lament. RMS Tahiti turned out to be a battered old English mail-boat with a surly captain, dismal food, and dull company consisting almost entirely of Australian businessmen and sheep traders. The best part of the ten-day passage came as they approached the equator, when the colour of the sea lightened from blue black to the richer, rarer blue—“a blue like the blue of the morpho butterfly”—that had possessed talis-manic properties for Matisse all his life.60 The voyage went badly because there was no refuge from the stifling heat reflected off the water, and it ended worse when the captain did his passengers a last nasty turn by docking an hour early in pitch dark so that Matisse was cheated of the sunrise over Papeete, which he had crossed the world to see. Chadourne’s friend was not expecting him, because the letter alerting her to his arrival was still locked in the Tahiti’s mailbags. But the whole town had turned out to meet the boat, and the first resident Matisse asked readily identified the beautiful Pauline Chadourne, whose looks and personality would have singled her out in any company. She promptly took charge of the painter and his baggage, settling him into the newest of Papeete’s three hotels, the Stuart, a stark concrete block at the far end of the quai du Commerce on the sandy, tree-lined sea front.61 Within a few hours of coming ashore on Tahiti, Matisse had acquired the basics he needed for survival: a room, a view, a shady verandah and a guide prepared to place herself at his disposal for the duration of his stay.
“What haven’t I seen since yesterday,” he wrote on Sunday, 30 March, the day after he landed. “Everything is so new to me—in spite of all I’ve read and seen in photographs, and Gauguin—I find everything marvellous—landscape, trees, flowers, people—and I’ve seen nothing yet.” He had risen at five so as not to miss the cool of the morning when the traders in the covered market at the centre of the town set out an unimaginable profusion of fresh fruit, flowers and fish (“lumpfish, huge sea-bream, orangey red mullets, purply crimson mullets, Prussian blue and emerald green fish streaked with white… extraordinary tones virtually impossible to describe”).62 Soon his pen abandoned the effort to translate sensation into words, swooping and looping round the burgeoning top of a banana palm before the whole page burst into a riotous dance of fruit and foliage. “It all makes an earthly paradise you cant imagine,” he added up the margin of the next page of his letter, which was entirely filled with an exuberant breadfruit tree.
Matisse’s first move in a strange place, as soon as he had arranged somewhere to stay, was always to look out for a shady, secluded garden within easy walking distance of his lodgings. Pauline found him what he wanted on his first day in Papeete: the gardens of the Bishop’s palace in the compound of the Catholic mission at the back of the little town, past leafy streets and palm-thatched houses, along an approach shaded by
Matisse, Trees in Tahiti: first impressions of Tahiti
tamarind trees, through an imposing gateway and across an old stone bridge over the river Papeava. Here he would come early every morning, alone with his drawing pad (“If I go on like this I shall run out of paper,” he wrote after a fortnight),63 to wander among groves of elegant coconut palms, mango, papaya, avocado and the great, spreading breadfruit trees with pale, glimmering, yellowy-green fruit, each cupped by a rich, dark ruff of serrated foliage whose decorative perfection almost overpowered him (“It’s lovely, lovely, lovely… each part is lovely and the whole is extraordinary”).64 He drew continually, as much to relieve as to formulate his feelings. His sketchbooks filled up with tumultuous foliage, feathery palm fronds, silky banana leaves, tall, tufted coconuts, the tentacles of pandanus and blunt, stumpy limbs of banyan.
The shapes and rhythms of trees preoccupied Matisse on Tahiti more even than the flowers—fragile, short-lived, fantastically shaped—growing wild, or gathered and plaited into garlands by Tahitian women, who dressed themselves and their houses every morning with fresh blossoms as a European woman might apply make-up to her face. Flowers were everywhere, festooning town gardens, spilling across front porches and tumbling down the mountainside, many of them familiar from the relatively spindly versions sold as potted plants by French florists: hibiscus, bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, croton and philodendron, the Tahitian gardenia called tiare. “ Giant caladiums grow here like couchgrass at home,” Matisse reported on his first day: “Curly ferns…poinsettias, pink, white and yellow jasmine, and an undergrowth of pelargoniums white instead of pink.”65 The whole island sometimes seemed to him a luxuriant outdoor conservatory or winter garden, extravagantly planted and imaginatively designed. He had arrived in time to catch the end of the rainy season, but as soon as the ground dried out he set out by car with Pauline to drive right round the island, a circuit of roughly forty-five miles on a narrow coastal road of white coral sand with wooded ravines, waterfalls, pinnacles and crags rising to Tahiti’s volcanic mountain core on one side, reefs and ocean on the other. They completed the circuit in a day, fording rivers, crossing rickety plank bridges, swerving to avoid stray pigs and hens, stopping every few minutes for Matisse to sketch or take photographs with a camera specially acquired for his Polynesian trip. The day reinforced his sense of the immensity of the Pacific, and the multiplicity of plant life crammed into the island’s tiny compass. “Everything’s close-packed,” he said, “as it would be in a bouquet.”66
Matisse’s morning walk to the Bishop’s Garden became a familiar beat, so regular that local people looked out for him passing and returning in time to catch the market, which packed up at nine. Before the sun rose too high for comfort, he was back in his hotel room: the kind of bare provisional space in which he had lived and worked at the four main pivotal points of his career in Ajaccio, Collioure, Tangier and Nice. The Hotel Stuart was far from luxurious. Matisse’s room on the second floor had neither bell nor door (Tahitian buildings traditionally left free passage for any breath of air blowing from sea or mountain), but M. and Mme Stuart were efficient and their site well chosen, with coconut palms on the slopes behind and the lagoon in front, bounded by a line of white surf where the reef met the open sea. Matisse drew the room itself, the boats tied up outside his window, and once or twice his own reflection peering from the dressing-table mirror, ready for action with sketchpad and pith helmet, or resting in a Tahitian pareu (a length of flowered cotton worn wrapped round the hips).
These fleeting likenesses of the artist look tentative and uncertain compared to the careless, confident vitality he imparted in his sketches to the Bishops breadfruit trees, or even to the curvaceous wooden rocking chair provided by his hotel management. At the start of his voyage, he had told his wife that he watched images unroll in front of him with as little involvement as if he were at the cinema.67 For much of the next three months he felt he had been relegated to a limbo of enforced idleness and apathy, although he also recognised at some level that his drawing was a form of registration, stocking up on sensations and impressions for attention later. He photographed the trees, the sea, the waterfront and the route around the island, but his densely detailed snapshots dissatisfied him. What he looked for and found in his rapid linear sketches was spontaneous underlying patterns of growth and movement.
Matisse on Tahiti was fascinated by the sensitive plants—les sensitives— that shrank from the slightest contact, folding their leaves defensively when the painter stooped down to tickle them with his hat or Paulines fan. At times he, too, felt a reluctance that made him want to duck and flinch. “On first contact that landscape was dead for me,” he said, remembering Tahiti more than a decade later. “At first it was a disillusionment I didn’t want to admit even to myself.”68 In this mood the vegetation seemed overwhelming, the heat intolerable, the light implacable and without gradation. “You don’t react immediately,” he explained, “which means you have to relax through working.”69 Eventually he learned to accept and revel in the light of the South Seas, characterising it as pulpy, pithy and caressing, telling different people on several occasions that it felt like plunging your eye into a golden goblet.70 But in the first few weeks he fought off fears that his journey had been pointless by throwing himself into a programme of relentless, almost feverish activity.
Every morning Pauline reported to discuss plans for the day: a round of local visits in Papeete followed by lunch and a drawing session from three to five, until the searing mid-day heat had passed, when they set out to see the island. “I took him everywhere,” she said. “He wanted to see everything”71 Pauline had considerable experience of initiating Frenchmen on Tahiti, many of them recommended by two former lovers (Chadourne, who had been the first, sent her personalities from Parisian society and the literary world; his successor was an officer in the French navy through whom over the next half century she met increasingly high-ranking naval personnel). But Matisse was unlike any other visitor she had ever known. In the first place, he had been appalled on the night of his arrival by the party held at the restaurant Tiare to welcome passengers from the mail-boat, mostly middle-aged white males who paired off with local girls in an erotic free-for-all that seemed to him to exploit traditional Tahitian generosity and lack of inhibition with European avidity and lewdness. Matisse, who drank only water and declined to dance or flirt, found the spectacle crude, rowdy and depressing, and made a point of dining early so as to avoid feast nights in future. It left him with a dismal view of European colonial life (“In order to stick it out here, you have to stupefy yourself with an addictive vice—opium, alcohol or women”), which he never essentially revised.72
Pauline was impressed, even overawed to start with by this portly, bearded old gentleman who treated her with old-fashioned politeness, and demanded services no one had ever asked of her before. Occasional eccentrics might want to know about ethnic artefacts and folklore, but she had never met anyone as inquisitive as Matisse about the current life of the island and its people. “He was endlessly curious at the market, oh là là” said Pauline, “he missed nothing” The official government campaign to bring tourists to Tahiti had hardly started in 1930. Access to what eventually became its legendary beauty spots was still difficult or impossible, and Papeete had neither comfortable hotels nor curio boutiques.73 Matisse at sixty walked Pauline (who was twenty-six) all over town, talking to the shopkeepers and market traders, examining their wares, visiting workshops and design studios to see traditional skills in practice from the making of the bark-cloth, tapa, to the weaving of pandanus leaf hats (so striking and effective that the painter abandoned his pith helmet and wore Tahitian sunhats for the rest of his life, with fresh supplies forwarded to Nice at intervals by Pauline). He sampled the local cuisine with a gourmets relish, describing a Polynesian feast or ma’a tahiti (shrimp in coconut milk, raw fish marinated in lemon juice, suckling pig wrapped in palm leaves and cooked on hot stones in a pit) in appreciative detail for his wife.74 His questions were shrewd and practical. Pauline was captivated by his jokes and stories (“He could be so funny”), puzzled by his curiosity, and taken aback by his disapproval of the young women of her generation who enthusiastically rejected their parents’ and grandparents’ social and cultural norms (“They behave like tourists,” Matisse reported in disgust. “They hang out in bars, drinking cocktails, and their sole reading is the seasonal catalogues of Parisian department stores”).75
Once she got over her perplexity, Pauline proved a highly intelligent and resourceful guide. Child of a Tahitian mother and a French father, brought up initially as a European and educated at a French school, she was living when she met Matisse with a new partner, Etienne Schyle, handsome, energetic, a year older than herself and owner of the Union Garage in Papeete. It was Etienne who took the wheel on expeditions, negotiating the tour of the island in his big blue Buick, and sending the
Matisse, photograph of Pauline and Etienne Schyle
car with another driver when he couldn’t come himself. The young couple were intrigued by Matisse’s aloofness from a colonial world where hardly anyone yet questioned the supremacy of white power and values (“In short, in Papeete the Maori is despised—even by the Maori,” Matisse wrote home, explaining that the social standing of a mixed-race child was assessed exclusively by skin colour).76 Pauline herself had grown up with a dual allegiance and many names. Matisse knew her as Pauline Chadourne. As a small child, reared by an adoptive European father (arrangements of this sort were not unusual in a society that traditionally saw nothing
Matisse, Pauline Chadourne (Schyle)
odd in non-nuclear families or communal parentage), she had grown up as Pauline Adams, and she would become Pauline Schyle when she eventually married Etienne. But she was born Pauline Oturau Aitamai. She had lived as a teenager on her mother’s vanilla plantation on the island of Moorea, listening to the songs and legends Matisse made her recount for him, and learning to weave the flower garlands she brought him every morning. Pauline wore skirts as short as any Parisienne but, unlike most of her contemporaries, she had not cropped her hair.
She had been eighteen when she first met Chadourne, who called her his lioness on account of the thick springy mane of blue-black hair falling to her hips that contrasted dramatically with the almost conventual pallor of her skin. Chadourne saw glints of pearl and undertones of amber in her colouring, and waxen frangipani petals in the modelling of her nostrils flaring beneath fine black eyebrows. Before he left France, Matisse had promised the novelist to supply drawings for an illustrated edition of Vasco. At some point he made a set of pen-and-ink sketches of Pauline, reclining on a daybed and looking every inch the sultry heroine of Chadourne’s novel, “with her shining eyes and gleaming teeth, her fiery glance, the tossing motion of her head that sent waves rippling through her hair.”77
But Matisse soon abandoned the illustrations, unable to reconcile romantic fiction with the reality he saw around him.78 “I’ve never seen men or women better built or more vigorous,” he wrote home, comparing a group of visitors from the Paumotu, or Tuamotu, Islands to sea-gods, mythic beings out of paintings by Leonardo or Raphael, the sort of models who would undoubtedly inspire Maillol.79 The Paumotans responded to Papeete’s strict dress code by wearing their unaccustomed European outfits with indescribable panache, topping off the effect with spectacles, often several pairs at once. Matisse, who loved their sense of style, said it would be hard to convey without parody to Western eyes the authentic alien splendour of Tahitians, with their red-gold skins, their solid bodies and high foreheads surmounted by crownlike hairdos buttressed with braided flowers. “You have to come here to understand,” he explained to Amélie. “Their reality would seem like clumsiness on the part of the artist.”
Apart from Pauline, there was in any case no question of any Tahitian woman posing for him, clothed or unclothed. Matisse was baffled by the combination of sexual freedom and a prudishness implanted by Catholic missionaries that seemed in some ways to reverse European concepts of modesty and shame. By ancient Polynesian rules of hospitality, making love to a stranger and bearing his child, especially a white man’s, was an honourable practice conferring status on the child, the mother and her husband. Pauline had two sons, one by each of her French lovers, and introduced them to Matisse with pride the night he landed.80 He admired the handsome little boys but found it hard to grasp that, in a town where no one minded who you slept with, people would be outraged if you walked down the street in shirtsleeves: “They bathe more chastely than at Cannes—and when I tell them about sunbathing and swimsuits, they won’t believe me.”81 In the end, he managed to persuade a waitress from the Tiare to sit for him, producing a series of strong and stylish heads, which was as much as she would let him draw.
Matisse, Tahitiennes
Matisse’s perennial, barely contained anxiety was eased by the warmth and gaiety of Pauline and her friends, especially Lucie Drollet, a massive motherly masseuse who came to the hotel each morning to attend to his rheumatic arm (“They roared with laughter,” said Pauline. “She told him endless stories, the two of them egged each other on, each as full of humour as the other”).82 Pauline organised his shopping, saw to his laundry and generally looked after him. He advised her to marry Etienne, and offered to help educate her son by Chadourne in France. Alone in the evenings, he dropped in at the Cinéma Bambou two or three nights a week to watch old American films and even older newsreels, entertained not so much by the screen as by the running commentary of the man hired to translate the subtitles, and the audiences keen participation in every gun-fight, clinch and car chase. After a day’s strenuous confrontation with the island, Matisse said he needed somewhere to relax, take his shoes off and scratch his insect bites. “It beats even Tangier,” he wrote, describing the Bambou to Amélie.83
A Frenchman who wore pandanus hats, spent his evenings at the local fleapit and put in only token appearances at the Governor’s residence inevitably invited comment from the European colony. Papeete’s function from a government point of view was to make France’s presence in the Pacific as conspicuous as possible, but the social protocol separating white from black and mixed-race communities grated on Matisse, who said the colonial administrators in their white tropical kit and round-topped headgear reminded him of painted skittles (“You instinctively look for a ball to knock them down”).84 A month later, he was even less forgiving (“It has to be said that the politics… are ferocious here and, between one lot and the other, liars and crackpots, it’s impossible to make head or tail of what’s going on”). His temper was not improved by an unfortunate incident at an official dinner party, when he overheard the Governors wife gossiping with her friends about him and Pauline. Matisse unleashed his formidable powers of righteous indignation in a tirade that would have gone down well in his hometown, rebuking their foul tongues, ordering them to cease their slander, and announcing that Pauline’s relationship to him was that of a devoted daughter. “That shut their traps,” he told her emphatically next morning.85 Pauline was touched and bewildered by the vehemence of his denial. Flattered by the allegation that she was his mistress—a position that would have raised rather than lowered her status in Tahitian terms—she could not comprehend the rancour it stirred up in Matisse, who had spent his life escaping from the scandalmongering and petty snobberies of narrow, inturned communities like Papeete.
The colonists had not yet got over the mistake they made with Gauguin, and often complained about the staggering prices currently being paid in Paris for canvases they or their predecessors could have picked up for nothing. “The bureaucrats speak of him with respect,” Matisse wrote home, after ascertaining that none of them had ever actually seen a canvas painted by Gauguin on Tahiti. “It’s just the money they respect, as usual.”86 No one in Papeete had so much as heard of Matisse himself, except possibly the Governor, but that did not stop fellow Westerners demanding his professional opinion of local artists, and bombarding him with prize specimens by the island’s favourite contender to replace Gauguin, Octave Morillot, a hugely popular specialist in Tahitian womanhood whose idyllic, rubbery fantasies were the pictorial equivalent of Chadourne’s Vasco. “ A very sexy subject,” Matisse grumbled to his wife, describing a particularly poor Morillot presented for inspection by an optimistic American: “That’s how the Americans see Tahiti–it’s absolutely all they see here—animal sexuality. I already suspected they despised the indigenous population, in spite of helping themselves to their women.”87
In later years, Matisse was as irritated by the assumption that he trailed after Gauguin to Tahiti as he had been by people taking it for granted that he had followed Delacroix to Tangier. His own sights were trained on the future, not on debts he had once owed in the past, but he took some trouble to track down Gauguin’s son, who turned out to be living a few miles outside Papeete as a Tahitian fisherman (“That should please his father, if he knows,” said Matisse).88 Gentle, powerful and illiterate, easily recognisable on account of his heavy eyelids and hawk-beak nose, Emile Gauguin explained to Etienne Schyle, who translated for Matisse, that he had no memories of his father, and no desire to change the life he led (“watching coconuts ripen and fishing at night,” Matisse remembered nearly two decades later, still impressed by the son’s un-Gauguin-like contentment).89 He visited Mataiea, where Gauguin painted, and Atuona, where he lay buried, sending photographs of the unmarked grave back home to the Duthuits in hopes that publicity might prod the authorities in France to take action.90 Neglect and ignorance of his great predecessor compounded the faults Matisse found with the French colony, in spite or perhaps because of marked attention from its individual members, especially Governor Bouge (who arranged for him to sail to the Marquesas Islands—which Matisse knew from Stevenson as well as Gauguin—and, when that fell through, offered a passage to the Tuamotus instead).
Matisse living rough on the edge of the lagoon at Taiarapu, from a letter to his wife
Impatient with his compatriots, enervated by the steamy heat, exhausted and dissatisfied after three weeks on the island, Matisse opened his travelling paint-box for the first time on Easter Sunday, completing a single tiny tree study before putting his paints away again for good. “I’ve been here almost a month now…,” he wrote on 28 April, posting a mammoth bulletin home by the monthly mailboat. “This country means nothing to me, pictorially speaking. So I give up.” A week later, he started a fresh letter with a sketch of himself as a bearded castaway, seated on the trunk of a coconut palm on a deserted beach beside an empty ocean with a notepad on his knee. He was photographed writing home on this tree trunk by F. W. Murnau, the great German film director, in a break from filming the final sequences of his Tahitian masterpiece, Taboo91 Murnau’s co-director, Robert Flaherty, had invited Matisse to watch the shoot on the peninsula of Taiarapu, the wildest part of the island, primal, uninhabited and accessible only by canoe. The painter spent a week there, 3—9 May, living in a grass hut at the edge of the lagoon, lying awake at
Matisse and the filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, during the shooting of Taboo
night on a rusty bedstead with rock-hard pillows and a mouldy mattress, listening to the roaring of the surf as the wind rattled the hut’s loosely woven walls and drummed on its low tin roof like rain.
This was literally the untamed jungle Matisse had insisted he had to find as a corrective, in his interview with Tériade at the beginning of the year. Every morning he rose before dawn to wash in the stream and breakfast with the film crew before crossing the lagoon to a tiny island, Tapu motu in Bora-Bora, where Murnau filmed and Matisse drew among tangled layers of trees “that grow, die and grow again without anybody touching them.”92 The ground was strewn with rotten wood that crumbled when you trod on it, releasing warm, sweet smells of mildew and tiare flowers. Matisse and Murnau were both too intent on the exigencies of their respective arts to pay each other much attention. The painter had admired Flaherty’s Moana, and he would see Taboo three times after its release in France, but at the time, he had eyes for nothing but the new world of pristine light and rampant energy before him. Mosquitoes swarmed so thickly that his drawing hand grew black with them. “Little by little the country is beginning to reveal itself,” he wrote, finishing off his letter with a second sketch of himself paddling his canoe home at nightfall beneath a spectacular sunset gilding the clouds beyond the blue-black reef.
Back in Papeete, Matisse felt so sure he had got what he came for that he longed to leave for France at once instead of waiting another month for the ship on which he had booked his passage home. Within the week he set out again aboard the government schooner carrying supplies to the Tuamotus, an alarming voyage of one day and two nights on rough seas in a small, leaky, heavily laden boat (“It rolls, it tangos,” wrote Matisse, who was seasick the whole way)93 manned by Tahitian convicts. His landing on 17 May on the coral island of Apataki was a magical reprieve. The administrator of the Tuamotus, François Hervé, a close friend of Pauline and Marc Chadourne, proved only too glad to welcome a painter from Paris into the comfortable, cultured French household he had established with his wife at the end of an irregular supply chain on a tiny, windswept, largely uninhabited coral atoll (the occupants had left to fish for pearls), barren except for tufts of coconut, with nothing to drink but rainwater and no fresh food but fish.
An ex—sea captain and pioneer pearl farmer, Hervé was entertaining and well read, with an intimate knowledge of his archipelago and a daughter who was herself an artist (the twenty-four-year-old Anne Hervé turned out to feel such blazing scorn for modern art and all who made it that, as their guest reported happily, conversations about painting quickly ceased).94 Every evening the Hervés and their guest walked right round their island, a leisurely stroll of just under a mile. Matisse drew the four of them seated on a bench to watch the sun go down at six, subsiding in shimmering silver over the desert islet of Pakaka and casting towards the watchers on the shore a scarf of lilac blue, shading from pale to dark with a rippled silver edging of waves along the water. Matisse described sunsets for Amélie like a collector bringing out his choicest treasures: “I’ve also seen here at night an ash-blue sky alive with stars, brilliant and very close, on the side of the sunset—while the side of the rising sun was crimson purple. It was at midnight, this lingering pale crimson reflection of the sun—which had in fact set at six o’clock on the opposite side from the crimson sky (is that clear?).”95
After a few days Hervé left for a tour of the atolls, depositing his guest on Fakarava, not so much an island as a circular rim of land, eighty miles round and two or three hundred yards wide—”a coral towpath,” in Stevenson’s expressive phrase96—enclosing an inland sea so big its far side remained invisible. Matisse stayed with two hospitable young Polynesians, Gustave Terorotua and his wife Madeleine (a school contemporary of Pauline’s), whose simple, frugal, hardworking way of life made him feel at home. The painter had been deeply impressed, before he left France, by Stevenson’s account of something that seemed to him more curious than any curiosity he had ever paid to see: the fish—“stained and striped, and even beaked like parrots”—cruising among coral thickets in the phenomenally deep, still, clear lagoon of Fakarava. Stevenson had watched them from the deck of his yacht, but Matisse dived in
Matisse in the lagoon at Fakarava
after them, gliding with Gustave Terorotua down through transparent water the colour of grey-green jade shading to absinthe, peppermint green and blue, among fish glinting like enamel or Chinese porcelain, minute, jewelled specks and streaks of colour swarming round his legs, outsize sea-trout drifting by like huge dark airships, the whole shifting, swirling composition punctuated and pinned down by the inert black accents of sea cucumbers.97
Matisse gazed into the lagoon all day every day, alone or with Gustave. Once they watched a pearl fisher diving far below them with a three-metre-long harpoon (“He’s so supple and slow he’s like a fish—he swims alongside the fish, who have no fear of him—he moves like a slow motion film—he makes you think of a vast seaweed floating gently in the water”).98 Matisse drew himself swimming underwater in locally made wooden goggles, or perched precariously on spiky clumps of coral to peer through a cumbersome glass-bottomed viewing box.99 As usual, he saw himself as comically clumsy and absurd, but his concentration had never been more ferocious than in this brief interlude when he strained to grasp and penetrate the duality of Fakarava, the fresh, shining, unpolluted air filling the hemisphere that stretched to the horizon, and the strange, muted brilliance of another world beneath it, “that undersea light which is like a second sky.”100 He experimented with focus, depth and angles, staring down from above into the green floor of the lagoon, looking up from below at a watery ceiling opaque and wavery as medieval glass, plunging repeatedly between the two, schooling the retina to compare the different luminosities of sky and sea.
Matisse spent four days on Fakarava, but he would draw in retrospect on what he saw in those four days to the end of his life. “Pure light, pure air, pure colour: diamond, sapphire, emerald, turquoise,” he wrote laconically to Bonnard, “stupendous fish.”101 On 26 May, he returned reluctantly with Hervé to spend a final fortnight on Apataki, where he said he slept like an angel and soaked up impressions like a sponge. His chief memories, when he summed up the atoll later, were the quivering of its waters, the continuous susurration of the trade winds rustling its coco palms like silk, and “the overall impression it gave of power, youth, fullness and completion.”102 Matisse insisted afterwards that it had taken him three months to acclimatise in the Pacific, and that it was not the fleshpots of Papeete, nor the hothouse luxuriance of the jungle, but the austere simplicity of this bleak, bleached outpost that tuned his responses to their highest pitch. He said no visitor to the South Seas should miss it: “He will see sky and sea, coconut palms and fish—that’s all there is to see—with a pure radiance that makes them incomparably precious.”103 Matisse’s voyage to Tahiti, and its culmination on the Tuamotus. marked the last of the dramatic shifts or leaps of vision that liberated him at intervals all his life. It was on the shore at Apataki that his whole being was repossessed “by the profound emotion born of solitude” that had shaken him as a boy in the high, Gothic nave of the cathedral at Amiens, “where the rumbling of the surf is replaced by the music of the organ.”104
Readjusting to Papeete was a dismal business (“I might as well have been in Paris,” he said flatly; “cars, dust, cinema”).105 Matisse spent his last week at the Hotel Stuart in a fever to be gone, packing, paying farewell calls and devouring mail from home, decorating his own last letter from dry land with a sketch of himself in his Tahitian sunhat running to the post. He sailed aboard the Ville de Verdun on 15 June, loaded down after another splendid send-off with leaf hats, tapa cloths, dried bananas and vanilla pods. Pauline wept to see him go. Governor Bouge, who had been summarily recalled to France with half his staff, left by the same boat. “I call it a shipload of the blackballed—nothing but more or less disgraced civil servants,” Matisse said gloomily, anticipating six weeks of bickering, which he planned to avoid by reading, sipping rum and sunbathing in a deckchair on the poop.106 The fearsome monotony of the voyage was enlivened on the painter’s part by a supremely graceful fall, when he managed to plunge headlong to the deck without breaking his glasses or dislodging the cigarette between his lips, and a final fierce spat with his old enemy, Mme Bouge (“Her eyes were like pistols,” wrote Matisse, “and I don’t suppose mine were tender either”).107
Steaming homewards through the Panama Canal (“glaucous green like the rivers of France”) and on under shadowy grey skies towards Atlantic waters (“the texture of black grape-skins”), Matisse pondered the purpose of his journey. The problems he had left behind in France were still with him, a basic fact from which he logically concluded that he could not live without them. “That is the great lesson I brought back from the South Seas,” he wrote long afterwards, at a moment of terror and desolation in the Second World War.108 Looking back, it seemed to him that a life of idleness and torpor in the tropics insulated Europeans, and brought them face-to-face with their own inadequacies (“In Tahiti there’s nothing, no troubles of any sort, except the inner trouble that makes the European long for five o’clock, when he can get drunk or inject a dose of morphine”).109 The island that had entranced him on his first day—an earthly paradise of unremitting sunshine and unrestricted sexual availability—led back ultimately to the same code of practice as his northern roots: toil, abstinence and the discipline of the plumb line. “I got fed up there in the end,” he said, “but I had learned the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical from the shoreline and the coco palms.”110
Pictorially speaking, he said he returned empty-handed (“Strange, isn’t it, that all those enchantments of sky and sea elicited no response at all from me at the time”).111 He landed at Marseilles on 31 July, and went back to work the day after he reached home on The Yellow Dress, a painting he had started before leaving Nice.112 Matisse posed Lisette bolt upright at the dead centre of his canvas, stiff as a poker, with five symmetrical bows down the front of her dress, against a background frieze of slatted shutters, corrugated curtain folds, window frames and verandah bars which is practically a hymn to the horizontal and the vertical. The whole elaborate construction becomes an instrument for catching the play of light and colour, grey bars of sunlight sifting through the shutters, refracted in the pane of glass, picked up in the pale turquoise window frame and the soft blue strips of curtain, expanding across the red-tiled floor and dissolving in the watery greens, dappled greys and ochres of the dress itself. Matisse said the painting accompanied him at the back of his mind throughout his travels. Sometimes it seemed more vivid than the reality before his eyes, as if it opened a window for him in the tropics on the subtle, nuanced, constantly shifting luminosity of the northern hemisphere.
Matisse wrote longingly of his Yellow Dress to Amélie, who had also crossed America and circled the islands with him in his imagination. He treated his letters home as an extended conversation with her, dashing down everything that caught his eye and posting off his jottings by the monthly mailboat in batches of up to seventy-four pages at a time. To his wife he remained resolutely cheerful, but it was clear to Pauline and others that he was haunted by her absence. “Shadows are rare here,” said Murnau, photographing Matisse writing home on Taiarapu. “There’s sunshine everywhere except on you.” “That’s just what I’m saying to my wife,” replied the painter.113 A telegram announcing that Amélie had got out of bed for the first time came as a relief in May, but he wrote anxiously for further news to Marguerite. In the last instalment of his journal-letter, posted the day before he sailed in June, he begged his wife to wait for his arrival so they could retrace his circuit of the Tuamotus together as he read his daily entries aloud to her at home in August.
At a low point on Tahiti he had sworn never again to leave her side, but he was caught up in preparations for departure almost as soon as he reached Nice. As a former Carnegie Prize winner, he had accepted an invitation from Pittsburgh to sit on the prize jury himself in 1930, which meant he had just time to reestablish contact with his wife and work before leaving to catch a boat back to New York on 12 September. All his old troubles closed once more around him. By 1930 the brief bonanza when buyers on both sides of the Atlantic competed for his canvases was over. Prices tumbled as his stock of pictures dwindled. Matisse now had an invalid wife to support as well as allowances to find for three anything but prosperous children and their partners (Duthuit’s Cairo posting had come to nothing, Jean had just married a woman who like him was struggling for survival as an artist, Pierre’s future as a dealer looked more precarious than it had ever been). When Matisse set out again for the United States, he had painted virtually nothing for two years. The two major works he had attempted with Lisette—The Yellow Dress and the Madras Hat of 1929—were still unfinished. The solution to the structural riddle of his Yellow Dress came to him on the voyage, but there was as yet no sign of any long-term lifting of his blockage. He had nothing in prospect except a potentially disastrous collaboration with the brilliant but perennially underfunded Swiss dreamer Albert Skira, who chose the start of a global slump to launch his first two luxury art books, editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, illustrated respectively by Picasso and Matisse.
Pierre, who had inherited his mother’s steely optimism, intended to dig in for the duration in New York, and treat financial viability as a minor issue. “Whenever you get too worried by it, just do a little sum in your head,” he had advised his father on 25 October 1929, the day after the Wall Street Crash, “and count up all the canvases…you could part from without distress. You’ll see that you haven’t really anything to worry about.” A year later, the United States art market had reached a virtual standstill. Matisse’s steadiest and most serious collectors in the past decade had been Americans, chief among them the infamous Dr. Albert C. Barnes, whose aggressive tactics, propensity for bulk buying and apparently inexhaustible resources had secured him a collection of modern French painting unequalled anywhere in the world, except in Moscow by the holdings of Shchukin and Morosov (which had recently been combined to form the Soviet Museum of Modern Western Art). On 20 September, his first day in New York, Matisse telegraphed Dr. Barnes to ask if he might visit his Foundation at Merion in suburban Philadelphia.114
The Carnegie International Prize was awarded by an essentially academic institution gingerly feeling its way towards the contemporary world. Matisse had been the first modernist winner, in 1927, elected unanimously save for a single dissenting vote from his old rival Maurice Denis (whose Cupid and Psyche frescoes were currently relegated to the cellar of the new museum in Moscow).115 This year the prize went to Picasso (Matisse tried but failed to persuade his fellow jurors to nominate Bonnard as runner-up).116 The jury’s deliberations, satisfactorily dispatched in a single day in Pittsburgh, were followed by a strenuous week of pleasure, including pit stops at some of America’s richest art collections on the way back to New York (“Cocktail parties and banquets all the time—Americans are all alcoholics,” Matisse told his wife ungratefully, declaring he would never have come if he had realised the overwhelming scale of his hosts’ generosity).117 In Washington the Pittsburgh party visited the collection of Duncan Phillips, and lunched at the White House in torrid heat (“like out-of-control central heating”) that made even the South Seas seem cool. As soon as they moved on to Philadelphia, Matisse skipped his morning schedule to keep his appointment with Barnes, a man who had made himself feared and loathed throughout the art world, but especially by his closest neighbours (“There is no use entering into a pissing contest with a skunk,” wrote the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goaded beyond bearing by some fresh piece of skulduggery on Barnes’ part).118
Barnes habitually used his massive chequebook and unerring visual judgement to outwit and taunt his rivals. On buying trips to Paris, he liked to start the day with a mob of hungry artists lined up on the pavement outside his hotel, each proffering a rolled-up canvas.119 A chemist by training, self-taught in the art field and inordinately sensitive to slights, he had made a fortune by manufacturing and marketing an antiseptic called Argyrol, selling his company with characteristic timing three months before Wall Street’s collapse, so as to be free to concentrate on collecting. Bullying, spiteful and vindictive, he imported the strategies that had made him a first-class businessman into a world that crumpled in the face of his innovative brashness and bulldozer drive. People told innumerable stories of the humiliations he routinely inflicted on curators, dealers, painters and fellow art lovers, above all on anyone rash enough to ask to visit his collection.
But Barnes had another side. He watched out for pictures like a hawk, swooping to snatch his prey before more hesitant and less clear-sighted operators got off the ground. He had built up singlehanded at great speed a collection so far ahead of its time and place that Philadelphia had confidently dismissed him with mockery and rebuff. Barnes’ arrogance was a function of his intelligence and originality. He loved painting more than he loved people, explaining that the pursuit of the best in art had infected him like rabies. He said he talked to his pictures and they talked back to him, with none of the turmoil and fury that characterised his human conversations.120 By the time of Matisse’s visit he owned nearly two hundred Renoirs and eighty Cézannes, and had been accumulating canvases by his visitor for almost a decade, including Bonheur de vivre and the Three Sisters snapped up with much else from Tetzen-Lund. Alone with his pictures he was judicious, unassuming and receptive (“I can criticise them, and take without offence the refutation that comes silently but powerfully when I learn months later what they mean, and not what I thought they meant”). Matisse, who had only met this combination of humility with passion once before in Shchukin, could have found no one more apt than Barnes in this mood to release the creative energy dormant in him since his voyage to Tahiti. At the first encounter between the two men on Saturday, 27 September 1930, Barnes asked Matisse to decorate the central hall of his newly built museum at Merion.
Painter and collector were so absorbed by the possibilities of this proposition that they forgot about Matisse’s interpreter (a professor of French from the University of Pittsburgh, brusquely dismissed on the doorstep by Barnes with instructions to come back in two hours), who had to force an entry down a coal chute in order to collect his charge. Matisse felt dubious but sorely tempted as he resumed his official sightseeing that afternoon (“the tomb of masterpieces,” he wrote grimly in his diary, comparing the reverential gloom of Philadelphia’s Widener collection with the open and informal installation designed by Barnes for what he called his “old masters of the future”).121 He described America as an ideal home for artists in an interview with Time magazine, which marked Picasso’s Carnegie triumph by putting “grizzle-chinned, wrinkle-browed Henri Matisse” on the cover.122 By this time, the painter was back in Paris. He had stayed an extra day to fit in
“Grizzle-chinned, wrinkle-browed Henri Matisse” on the cover of Time, 20 October 1930
a second visit to Merion, sailing for home on 3 October hotly pursued by Barnes, who arrived in Paris at the end of the month to finalise the contract. Both men had set their hearts on this commission, both were notoriously tough bargainers, and both emerged well satisfied from the deal. Barnes was to get a wall painting three times the size of Shchukins Dance and Music put together, involving at least twelve months’ work, for $30,000 in three instalments (just twice the price he had paid earlier the same year for a single moderately sized canvas). Pierre’s amazement outstripped even indignation when he heard these terms, but his father rated loss of earnings well below the chance to raise his profile and reach out to a new public in America (“Although there’ll be no profit in it for me,” he wrote confidently to his wife, “this work will have important consequences”).123
He returned for a site conference at Merion in December, making his fifth Atlantic crossing in twelve months. This time the trip included a visit to the only other collector whose Matisse acquisitions in the 1920s came anywhere near matching Barnes’ in either quantity or quality, Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore. Etta had bought a first small Matisse canvas through her friend Sarah Stein before the 1914—18 war, going on after it to acquire two dozen more in tandem with her older, bolder and far more brilliant sister, the majestic Dr. Claribel Cone. Affluent, independent, extravagant in every sense, the two bought lavishly and well without premeditation or advice on colossal annual shopping sprees in Paris, operating on the Barnesian principle spelt out by Claribel for Etta: “If it is pretty… and pleases you—why care a darn what anybody else says of it…if it gives you a thrill, why I guess the thing is to take it.”124 It was Claribel who bought the Blue Nude from the Quinn sale, an astonishing purchase for an elderly maiden lady from the solid conservative upper crust of the American South.
In 1929 Claribel Cone died suddenly, leaving her collection to her sister. Shy, retiring, to Matisse always the more touching of the two, Etta was crushed by grief and shock. At the time of Matisse’s visit in December 1930, she was sixty years old, tentatively beginning for the first time in her life to emerge from the ample shadow of her sibling and take control in her own right of a collection as individual, and in its own way as imposing, as the contents of Shchukin’s palace or Barnes’ purpose-built museum. The sisters had occupied next-door apartments so crammed with statues, ornaments, tapestry and lace, heavy old Italian furniture and contemporary French art that, when Claribel’s rooms filled up, she simply bought a second apartment upstairs to accommodate the overflow. As soon as he stepped through the door into Etta’s narrow hall, Matisse
Matisse in Etta Cone’s apartment, Baltimore: “One looked at the walls and saw the future.”
was surrounded by his pictures, hanging everywhere including the bathroom and the bedroom, their power and sensuality intensified at close quarters in these small, dark, cluttered spaces. To the steady stream of visitors who knocked on Miss Cone’s door over the next twenty years and more, this eighth-floor apartment seemed like a time capsule (“One looked at the walls and saw the future,” said a young friend) suspended above the roofs and towers of sleepy, unsuspecting, still largely nineteenth-century Baltimore.125 For the painter, the collection was a private ark. “In our home he was like a member of my family,” said Etta, commissioning him to make a posthumous portrait drawing of her sister.126 Out of this encounter grew a collaboration that would outlast them both, and prove in that respect more valuable to Matisse than any other relationship he ever had with a collector.
His weekend in Baltimore was squeezed between four successive visits to Merion, where he engaged for the first and last time in a calm, rational and constructive dialogue with Barnes. Both were still exalted at this stage by mutual anticipation (“We have many points in common,” the painter told his wife, “but I’m not so brutal”).127 They spent Christmas week taking measurements and working on a template for Matisse to use in Nice. The space Barnes wanted him to fill was not promising: a surface roughly forty-five feet long by seventeen feet high, divided by projecting shafts of masonry into three round-headed arches, obscured from above by the shadow of the ceiling vaults, and from below by sunlight pouring in through three tall glass doors opening onto the garden. It was too high, too awkward, abominably lit and impossible to see fully from ground level. None of this deterred Matisse. “I’m full of hope and eager to get going…,” he wrote to his wife on 26 December, announcing that he had already picked his colour scheme and sketched out a format. “I don’t think it’s going to be so very difficult for me because I sense that my year of rest has brought great progress in clarity of mind.”
Before he left Nice. Matisse had hired a large garage that would fall vacant in the spring, and laid down a strict exercise regime for Lisette, who was to model the nude figures that would be needed both for Barnes’ decoration and for the Mallarmé illustrations due to be produced over the same period. Lisette was slender but not supple or fit enough for Matisse, who had tyrannised over her by post for much of the past twelve months, sending regular instructions to his wife to oversee her diet and gym schedule. Now he became dictatorial in the extreme. He made her pluck her thick black eyebrows and dye her fashionable white fox fur black.128 In an attempt to calm his nerves before he got to grips in earnest with his decoration, he even tried painting Lisette in harem pants, with a long silk Persian coat, or revamped as a vaguely Hindu beauty in nothing but a transparent bolero and a string of beads with decorative blue dots and crosses which he drew himself on her cheeks and forehead. His impositions were exorbitant, but she remained unruffled. However hard he tried nothing could make Lisette, clothed or unclothed, look other than what she was: a stylish young Parisienne with the bobbed hair, neat features, small high breasts, flat belly and narrow hips essential for the boyish figure currently in vogue.
By the spring of 1931, Matisse could think of little but his new commission. From now on, all other wants or needs were secondary. The whole household was under starter’s orders. Lisette had to be in early every evening in order to be fresh for the next day’s session. She was forbidden to swim except briefly, first thing in the morning, for fear of sunburn. Once she was battered by a freak wave and came home badly bruised, only to be severely reprimanded for spoiling the immaculate purity Matisse needed for his work. It required long hours, short breaks and exclusive concentration from both painter and model. They left after breakfast every day for the garage in a back street near the art school, no. 8 rue Désiré Niel, big enough to hold the three huge canvases destined to fill the hall at Merion. Matisse’s punitive programme was hard on his model, harder on himself, hardest of all perhaps on his wife, whose hopes of recovery seemed to be receding. Her only regular visitor was Berthe, who had stayed with her over Christmas, and would come to spend most holidays in Nice at a flat bought by Matisse for her retirement in two years’ time. Otherwise Amélie’s world had drastically contracted. Her doctors still prescribed bed rest. Marooned with a bad back at the top of five flights of stairs, effectively a prisoner for the past twelve months, she now lost both her young companion and her husband to the ineluctable demands of painting.
The choice of form and content for the new work had been left entirely to Matisse, who apparently never considered painting anything but a Dance. At Merion he rediscovered Bonheur de vivre, the painting (then owned by the Steins) that had inspired Shchukin to commission the first Dance in 1909. Back in Nice, Matisse pinned a reproduction of Shchukin’s panel to his garage wall, roughed out a set of small variations on an overall design, and drew his new Dance freehand (“It was in me like a rhythm that carried me along”) directly onto three adjacent canvases more than twice his height, using a stick of charcoal tied to a bamboo pole.129 Matisse had written to Pauline Schyle when he got back from Tahiti to say space had expanded for him on his return to Nice.130 In this first sketch he peopled it with immense leaping figures, plunging and thrusting in a dance that extended far beyond the three great arches containing his decoration. Heads, arms, legs, hands disappear off the edges of the canvas to link up with other unseen bodies, half glimpsed flickering in the curves of the arcade. The dancers’ energy flows from one extremity to another, surging
Matisse at work on The Dance with the bamboo stick compared by André Masson to a magician’s wand
across the projecting blocks of masonry and out into an imagined space beyond. Matisse said this was one of those periodic points of departure, like Fauvism, when it was necessary to turn back from complexity and refinement to the beginnings of human perception in pure colour, shape and movement—”materials that stir the senses”—elementary principles that give life by coming alive themselves.131
At the end of April, he posted photographs to Barnes showing two successive stages of the initial layout. By June he was beginning to add colour, and so confident of having reached a halfway mark that Barnes paid over the second of three cheques for $10,000. The two met at the opening of Matisse’s exhibition at the Georges Petit galleries, his first Parisian retrospective in twenty years, mounted by the Bernheims (who left the organisation to one of Barnes’ Paris agents, Etienne Bignou). This was a dealers’ show, prestigious and celebratory, concentrating (like the batch of picture books published to mark Matisse’s birthday the previous year) on paintings from the last decade in Nice, with little attempt to present a coherent survey of what had gone before. By the time it opened, Matisse had already moved on into unknown territory. It was three years since he had abandoned the series of Nice odalisques whose dazzling pyrotechnics marked him down, for a public currently mesmerised by Surrealism and its offshoots, as essentially superficial, a kind of twentieth-century Fragonard producing suavely titillating confections for rich men’s Manhattan apartments and villas in the south of France. Pierre, who had come from New York to hang the Petit show at his father’s request, acknowledged afterwards that its limitations played into the hands of those who saw Matisse as at best a minor decorative master with little relevance to the modern world. “All this so as to end up identifying Picasso as the great renovator etc.,” wrote Pierre, confirming his father’s view that the patronising and largely dismissive homage he had received over the past two years was a way of burying him alive.132
The mistake would be triumphantly rectified that autumn in a smaller but more rigorous transatlantic retrospective put together by Alfred Barr, the young director of the newly founded Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Barr has done his best, and succeeded beyond my hopes,” Pierre reported to his father. American critics, headed by Henry McBride, rose to the occasion (“They are delighted to find the artist better understood and appreciated in New York than in Paris with a show that serves rather than crushes him—and it’s true! When you see this show, you get a far greater shock than you did in Paris”). Pierre sent home a detailed assessment of the exhibition, describing its hang and the perspective it imposed on the long march from Matisse’s first copy of Chardin in the Louvre through the Fauve years to the Aubergines from Grenoble and the austere wartime abstractions. Groups of relatively small-scale canvases—early works, paintings of Lorette, a handful of more recent odalisques—fell into place as punctuation, pauses to rest and reward the eye in breaks from the effort required by the demanding and disturbing works at the centre of the show. This was MoMA’s first full-scale appraisal of a European artist, and it covered every phase of Matisses career (except the works in Moscow, which the Soviet authorities had refused to lend) with a pellucid sense of structure, pace and growth.
But by this time the damage to Matisse’s reputation had been done. The attention focussed on him by the Paris show, magnified by national and international coverage before and afterwards, stamped him as facile, self-indulgent and inevitably, in relation to Picasso, the lightweight of the two. From now on Matisse would be dogged by a public image based largely on a misconception of his activity in the 1920s, a view that distorted his overall achievement and made it difficult to look clearly at the work he subsequently produced (“People know nothing of your previous output,” wrote Duthuit in his role of spokesman for the post—First World War generation. “If your decoration were to be exhibited here, it would come as a revelation”).133 By 1931, the moment when his image as a reactionary crystallised in the popular imagination, Matisse was already struggling with a mural intended by himself and Barnes to bridge the gap between public and private art, a goal that would become a major preoccupation over the next decade in revolutionary Russia, Mexico and France. His isolation at this point came, as Pierre Schneider pointed out, “not from his conservatism but from the fact that he had made the transition to the characteristic work of the 1930s before any of his contemporaries.”134
As the decoration took shape, Barnes himself—”part bulwark, part ball and chain,” in John Russell’s graphic image135—became ominously proprietorial, harassing the painter with demands to see the work in progress, threatening to descend on Nice, boasting about his own rapid progress with a book that in his view would be the greatest ever written on Matisse’s work. After six months, The Dance was no longer flowing as smoothly as its creator had anticipated. At the beginning of September, Matisse took a break from his partly painted mural at the Italian resort of Abano Bagno, where he treated his bad arm with a water cure each morning, and refreshed his eye each afternoon with a drive to Padua, to see the frescoes by Giotto that had renewed his power of attack in the Fauve years a quarter of a century before.136 On his return to Nice, he adopted a new method. Setting aside his brushes, he hired a professional housepainter to cover sheets of paper in the four colours finally selected, producing a stack of painted paper in flat, uninflected black, grey, pink and blue that could be pinned onto the canvas. Matisse now drew and redrew his entire design, outlining shapes on coloured paper for an assistant to cut out with scissors.137 After posing all morning, Lisette would put her clothes back on and spend the rest of the day pinning, shifting and repinning a composition that was perpetually on the move. “Nothing comparable was ever invented, before or afterwards, to resolve the problem of form and colour,” said the Surrealist painter André Masson, who watched Matisse using his bamboo pointer—”truly a magicians wand”—to direct an extraordinary performance of shapes and figures emerging from his imagination only to dissolve and reform in endless fluid, filmic permutations.138
The workshop on the rue Désiré Niel was overlooked by the boys’ lycée. Matisse’s working day was accompanied by shouts and catcalls from the pupils, racketing round their playground or peering from their windows hoping to catch a glimpse of the old wizard manoeuvring his weird, headless bodies and truncated limbs in a mural utterly unlike anything they had ever seen in the municipal galleries and town halls of France. The boys’ former teacher, Jules Romains, dropped in expecting to find the kind of decorous public nudes appropriate to the artist’s age and eminence, and was shocked to see Matisse standing on a bench in an abandoned garage fooling about with a stick and scraps of coloured paper.139 Another old friend, the painter Georges Desvallières, was frankly appalled. “He is working himself to death on imperceptible changes that bring others in their wake, any of which he may well think better of next day,” wrote Desvallières, who reckoned that Matisse had surrendered all power of reason, feeling and imagination in a ruthless drive to mechanise production (“If the Cubists and Futurists were as logical as he is, they would go mad”).140
Desperate for some kind of informed response, Matisse drove over to Grasse to look for Masson (who was a friend of the Duthuits), surprising the younger man by paying close attention to his work and inviting him back to inspect progress in the garage.141 Whenever panic loomed in Nice, Bussy received a telegram in Roquebrune (DECORATION IN TERRIBLE STATE COMPOSITION COMPLETELY OUT OF HAND AM IN DESPAIR LIGHT SUITABLE THIS AFTERNOON FOR GODS SAKE COME AT ONCE MATISSE).142 Throughout the long, slow, evolution of The Dance, Bussy regularly arrived to find his old comrade fraught and frantic (“struggling with his vast composition like a kitten with an outsize ball of wool,” wrote Bussy’s daughter, Janie, never particularly sympathetic to her father’s friend and notably unimpressed by his latest crackbrained scheme. “The great dim monstrous de-individualised figures he had conceived began to wind themselves into impossible knots”). Matisse’s problems were compounded by the Mallarmé etchings, which paralleled on a small scale the complexity of his decoration. Both projects demanded surgical precision and the calculation of a chess player. Matisse divided his time between book and mural in a state of continuous high alert, attempting entirely by instinct to conjure unity out of almost infinite combinations of variable elements—page margins, borders, typographical texture, scale and spacing on the one hand, and the twenty-four limbs of his six gigantic dancers on the other.143 “I could proceed only by groping my way forward,” he said of The Dance. He compared the organisation of each set of two facing pages, with Mallarmé’s text on one side and his own spare, linear image on the other, to juggling two balls, one black, one white.144
The coordination of mind, hand and eye required by this double balancing act was intimately connected for Matisse with the disruptions of the year before. He said that travel rests parts of the brain that have been overused, and releases others previously repressed by the will, acknowledging even his intervals of boredom and discontent in Tahiti or Tangier as essential to this process, a sign of something stirring at levels far below the conscious mind.145 “I sometimes think that my stay in Tahiti and the Paumotus has enriched my imagination,” he wrote to Pauline, sending her a photograph of himself at work with his bamboo pole, “as if all that sumptuously lovely light I couldn’t get enough of… is coming out now in my work.”146 By the winter of 1931—32, he had externalised the sensation of expanding space released by his visit to Tahiti, and transferred it to his decoration. “Papa says every so often that he’s very happy with it, when he’s not in complete torment,” Marguerite wrote to Pierre from Paris. “Tante Berthe talks of lightness and grandeur—Skira says it is magnificent—Masson is astonished each time by the latest developments.”147
Masson stood godfather to Marguerite’s son, Claude, whose birth in Paris in November 1931, a few months after Pierre’s daughter, Jacqueline, and Jean’s son, Gérard, completed a trio of grandchildren born that year to the Matisses. The financial havoc threatening to engulf both America and Europe was offset for the whole family that winter by a mood of private and professional optimism. Pierre had made a considerable impact with the opening of his gallery in Manhattan in spite of the calamitous state of the stock market, which made it impossible to sell anything, even at famine prices (“Lean cows have replaced fat cows…,” he reported philosophically to his father on 2 January 1932. “At all events there’s nothing to be done but wait quietly for the storm to pass while trying to avoid false moves”). Barnes’ decoration was nearing completion more or less on time. The popular success of the MoMA show in New York was to be followed in Paris in the spring by a first public showing of The Dance at the Petit galleries, with specially installed lighting and opening hours extended until midnight so that it could be seen by ordinary working people before it was shipped to the United States.148 The American press was already preparing a noisy reception for it, when Matisse made the horrible discovery that he had been working for twelve months from measurements miscalculated by almost a metre. An exchange of telegrams confirmed his fears. Barnes responded angrily (YOU HAVE MADE AN ENORMOUS MISTAKE), and sailed at once for France.149 At their meeting in Paris on 4 March, Barnes was sufficiently mollified to agree that, instead of attempting a salvage operation, Matisse should start all over again on a second Dance.
Habits of drudgery and persistence drummed into him from childhood (“Where willpower isn’t enough, I’ll tell you the trick, you have to fall back on stubbornness instead”) carried the painter through the next twelve months.150 He completed his first abortive decoration, whose six tumbling figures became increasingly agitated and aggressive, before turning to a second set of three freshly stretched canvases on which, at the beginning of July, he sketched out a new, looser and more lyrical Dance with impressive speed and confidence. By the end of the summer, he was ready to start the laborious and exacting job of marrying form to colour, using scissors and a stack of painted paper in place of brush and palette. Lisette remained at the Place Charles Félix as Amélie’s sickroom attendant, leaving Matisse to manage as best he could with casual hired help or students from the nearby art school. In late September he found an unexpectedly reliable assistant, a young Russian film extra called Mme Omeltchenko, who took over cutting, trimming and pinning his shapes in place.151 Matisse was simultaneously correcting the proofs of his Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé, incorporating innumerable, infinitesimal, last-minute adjustments that drove his printer to distraction. Images of The Dance tormented his waking hours and invaded his sleep at night. In the intervals of drawing and redrawing, while he waited to see his latest changes implemented, Matisse left the studio with his dog to walk the short distance to a shooting booth beside the Paillon River. He told his studio assistant that his only relief from tension came in the moment when he raised and levelled his rifle at the target.
In January 1933, Matisse travelled to Mallorca for what proved a nightmarish confrontation with Barnes, who followed him back to Nice at the end of the month to inspect The Dance for the first time. Barnes approved of what he saw, but could not prevent himself from capitalising on the fact that in a collapsing art market ruled by panic and stagnation (both artist and patron were well aware of rumours circulating in Paris that Bernheim-Jeune faced bankruptcy, and the Petit galleries were about to be turned into a garage), he was now Matisses only potential source of income.152 Being treated like a junior employee at a time when he was already exhausted and discouraged did nothing to restore the painters confidence. After Barnes left, Matisse worked with feverish concentration in a state of heightened awareness that blocked out everything except his decoration. “The end is near,” he wrote to Bussy on 7 March, “—win or lose.” Bussy’s disapproving daughter watched her father repeatedly respond to Matisse’s summons that spring only to return exhausted and groaning, “having… saved the decoration from annihilation, if not its creator from suicide.”153 By 20 March, the design emerged complete at last, the studio assistant left, and the housepainter returned to spend the next month painting in the outlines of The Dance on canvas.
André Masson was in Monte Carlo that spring, working with Massine on the ballet Les Présages, which he redesigned four times in a state of such violent frustration that Matisse invited him to stay in Nice (“ ‘It’ll calm you down, he said, “and it will be good for me to take time off ‘ “).154 The two spent mornings in the Nice workshop or drove over to Monte Carlo together to watch the corps de ballet rehearse, distancing one another from their respective frenzies in long walks and talks each afternoon. Mas-son never forgot Matisse’s bleak confession as they walked back one day from the garage to the Place Charles Félix: “He suddenly stopped, after a long silence that I didn’t like to break, to say to me: ‘I’ve lost my touch, everything I do has gone cold.’” Nothing would reassure him. Matisse insisted that his powers had left him (“Remember the canvases I used to paint”), and flatly rejected Massons protests (“He seemed to have no inkling that he was entering into a new manner, full of sap and vigour…a new phase marked by the miraculous alliance of grace with maturity”).
At this point Marguerite arrived with Claude from Paris to find her father in despair (“His philosophy is very close to that which advises taking to your bed and awaiting death,” she wrote to Pierre).155 Matisse attended the dress rehearsal of Massons ballet on 12 April, and finished his own Dance just over a week later.156 For the next ten days the painter and his dog held an informal preview at 8 rue Désiré Niel. Massine was one of the first arrivals, declaring that Matisse had embodied his dream of what the dance should be.157 Duthuit arrived, and Gide came over with the Bussys. Matisse sent his car to fetch young Mme Omeltchenko, and invited Dorothy Dudley, an American journalist who had asked him for an interview.158 Plans to exhibit The Dance in Paris had to be dropped (“I’m so tired and desperate that I don’t care what happens, and I haven’t the energy to see to it… ,” Matisse told his daughter. “Forgive me, Marguerite, but I’m completely drained”).159 Duthuit warned his father-in-law to think again, correctly predicting that he risked losing all credibility with a younger generation for whom he was nothing more than a painter of sexy girls in harem outfits: “We would lose an essential force with the departure of your decoration.… People realise this in Paris, I can assure you. Your abstention will seem to many an act of deliberate hostility or contempt.”160
But by this stage it was almost more than Matisse could do to organise packing and shipment. He sailed for New York on 4 May with his crated decoration in the ship’s hold. On Friday, 12 May, the day after he landed, he was driven down to Merion by Pierre (who was received with Barnes’ usual brutal dismissal on the doorstep). On Saturday the first of the three canvases was fixed in place in an atmosphere so tense that Matisse suffered a minor heart attack, turning blue and having to be revived by Barnes with whisky. A heart specialist called in that night, and three doctors who subsequently
Matisse, The Dance, 1933
examined him in Philadelphia prescribed total rest for the next few months.161 Matisse told his daughter that overwork had probably placed irreparable strain on his heart, and warned her to say nothing to her mother, but his own anxiety was swallowed up in the overwhelming relief of seeing his decoration installed at last. “It has a splendour you cant imagine without seeing it,” he wrote immediately to Bussy, reporting that Barnes had compared the radiant light and colour streaming through his hall to the effect of the rose window in a cathedral.162
But their mutual jubilation was shortlived. Barnes, whose newly published book on Matisse had been comprehensively mauled by the critics, announced that he had no intention of letting anyone see his decoration.163 To Matisse, his behaviour seemed almost unhinged. Pierre, who drove down again early on Tuesday morning to fetch his father, was allowed into the hall just long enough to take two photographs of The Dance before being hustled out.164 When Matisse telegraphed to arrange a second viewing on Friday, Barnes had already locked up his museum and left to spend the summer in Europe. “He’s ill” Matisse reported to his daughter. “He’s a monster of egotism—no one but him exists… nothing can be allowed to interfere with him! Above all not now, when he’s bruised black and blue by the failure of his book.… All this between ourselves, because what counts is that he gave me the chance to express myself on a grand scale, and that he recognises as best he can the excellence of the result.”165
Matisse never saw his Dance again. Its ten days on display to close friends in a Nice garage turned out to be the nearest it ever got to a public showing. Having left home expecting a rowdy reception in America,
Matisse, Le Pitre chatié (The Clown Punished) from the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé
Matisse returned to Nice still barely able to take in what had actually happened. As soon as he got back, he went round to call unannounced on Dorothy Dudley, who asked about the critical reception in America (“He said there was none”), and in particular what their mutual friend McBride thought of the decoration. “But,” he said, “he never saw it. As I told you, nobody has seen it. You’re the only one!”166 Nothing was said explicitly about the purpose of this visit, but Dudley got the strong impression that Matisse wanted an article from her because he could not bear to see the work that had drained him physically and mentally over two years sink altogether without trace (in the event her article, which she had hoped to place with Vanity Fair or The Studio, appeared in Lincoln Kirstein’s Hound and Horn, the only publication in America or Europe to carry an eyewitness account of Matisse’s Dance).167 For the rest of his life, and Matisse’s, Barnes ensured that his decoration remained for all practical purposes unknown. No one was ever admitted to the Foundation without his personal permission, which he refused on principle not only to the press but to collectors, curators, art lovers, anyone suspected of the faintest previous connection with the art world (the list of people turned away eventually extended from T. S. Eliot and Le Corbusier to visitors arriving with Matisse’s personal request that they might be allowed to see his decoration).168 Colour reproduction of The Dance (or anything else in Barnes’ collection) was forbidden.
Matisse was never again commissioned to make a mural, although he told Gide he would happily live on bread and water if he had another wall to decorate.169 The blow Barnes dealt him left him impotent and helpless, sprawling upended on his back like the figure in his illustration to Mallarmé’s poem Le Pitre chatié (The Clown Punished). This was not the comical clownish self-projection of his letters to his wife, more like the private nightmare of a boy who dreamed of becoming a circus clown and grew up to be treated by the neighbours as a village idiot, le sot Matisse, the fool whose paintings made no sense to anyone. Matisse rarely talked about his private bitterness and humiliation, except to his son Pierre, but he did insist that no artist could exist without a public (“Painting is a way of communicating, like language”).170 One of the things he liked about Chaplin’s film The Circus was that it embodied his own image of the artist as the little man trying to entertain a fairground crowd, who would slink away with his hands in his pockets if you took away his audience.
