Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that all the same my ambition is limited, and does not go beyond the purely visual satisfaction such as can be obtained from looking at a picture. But the thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means, which must be more complete (and by complete I do not mean complicated) the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.—Henri Matisse, in “Notes of a Painter” (1908)
Matisse first emerged as a leader of the School of Paris in the fall of 1905. That was the year the critic Louis Vauxcelles, who admired the thirty-six-year-old painter even if he did not understand him, coined the term fauves—wild beasts—to describe the work of Matisse and his followers in the Salon d’automne. However ironical or absurd this coinage may now seem to us as a description of Matisse’s pictorial aesthetic, at the time it had the effect of conferring on his work the status of an avant-garde provocation.
The evidence suggests that this had never been Matisse’s intention. The role of peintre maudit was not something he coveted. He had submitted his art to the lessons of the masters. He was forging a style based on the discoveries of Pissarro, Seurat, and Cézanne. Nothing about his experience or his temperament placed him in the line of those révolté personalities who specialized in uproar and anarchy. Yet in the fast-paced world of the Paris avant-garde, where radical innovation was a cynosure of distinction and reputations were made overnight by coterie opinion while the public remained largely oblivious to what was really happening in art, Matisse was thrust into a position wholly alien to his sensibility. For a couple of years thereafter, until Picasso, twelve years his junior, emerged with Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon in 1907 to challenge his rival’s leadership of the avant-garde, every negative opinion, whether academic or “advanced,” only added to Matisse’s preeminence.
After the impact of Les Desmoiselles, however, Matisse was never again mistaken for an avant-garde incendiary. With the bizarre painting that appalled and electrified the cognoscenti, which understood that Les Desmoiselles was at once a response to Matisse’s Le Bonheur de vivre (1905–1906) and an assault upon the tradition from which it derived, Picasso effectively appropriated the role of avant-garde “wild beast”—a role that, as far as public opinion was concerned, he was never to relinquish.
Le Bonheur de vivre, owing to its long sequestration in the collection of the Barnes Foundation, which never permitted its reproduction in color, is the least familiar of modern masterpieces. Yet this painting was Matisse’s own response to the hostility his work had met with in the Salon d’automne of 1905, a response that entrenched his art even more deeply in the aesthetic principles that had governed the Fauvist paintings which had caused such a furor and which did so on a far grander scale, too. Had it been better known, its role both in Matisse’s development and in Picasso’s, too, would have been more readily understood, and it is a great pity that it could not be secured for the marvelous Matisse retrospective that John Elderfield has now organized at the Museum of Modern Art. For it is a painting that stands at the crossroads of modern art. No sooner was this masterwork completed, elevating Matisse’s art to a new level of achievement, than it was eclipsed—in avant-garde opinion, anyway—by Picasso’s bombshell, and this, in turn, did much to determine the way modern art was comprehended from that day until ours.
Whereas Matisse had drawn upon a long tradition of European painting—from Giorgione, Poussin, and Watteau to Ingres, Cézanne, and Gauguin—to create a modern version of a pastoral paradise in Le Bonheur de vivre, Picasso had turned to the alien traditions of primitive art to create in Les Desmoiselles a netherworld of strange gods and violent emotion. As between the mythological nymphs of Le Bonheur de vivre and the grotesque effigies of Les Desmoiselles, there was no question as to which was the more shocking or more intended to be shocking. Picasso had unleashed a vein of feeling that was to have immense consequences for the art and culture of the modern era while Matisse’s ambition came to seem, as he said in his “Notes of a Painter,” more “limited”—limited, that is, to the realm of aesthetic pleasure. There was thus opened up, in the very first decade of the century and in the work of its two greatest artists, the chasm that has continued to divide the art of the modern era down to our own time.
There can be little doubt, I think, that what might be called Matisse’s “tradition,” by which I mean not only Matisse’s own accomplishment but his influence on other artists and the whole spirit of his aesthetic, has been less widely understood than that of Picasso, whose art and life have dominated so much of our thinking about art in this century. The fact that we have had to wait twelve years, since the great Picasso retrospective that was mounted at MOMA in 1980, for a comparable retrospective devoted to Matisse is only another reminder of this basic difference in our apprehension and valuation of their respective accomplishments.
Matisse seems to have understood the implications of the chasm that separated him from Picasso straightaway, and in the immediate aftermath of Les Desmoiselles, as the juggernaut of Cubism was launched upon the Paris art scene, he wrote his great defense of his artistic philosophy in the “Notes of a Painter,” which was first published in La Grande Revue on December 25, 1908. Owing to a single, long sentence in this manifesto, however, Matisse seemed to incriminate himself as some kind of escapist, at least in the minds of the more révolté elements of the avant-garde, and as a result this beautiful avowal of his faith in pure painting made him the target of further hostility for many years to come. Certainly nothing could have made his distance from the spirit of Les Desmoiselles more vivid than the famous passage in which Matisse wrote:
What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker [travailleur cérébral], for the businessman [l’homme d’affaires] as well as the man of letters [l’artiste des lettres], for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
Yet what immediately precedes this passage in the “Notes of a Painter” is an observation about Giotto that is as essential to Matisse’s aesthetic credo as his talk of balance, purity, and serenity.
A work of art must carry within itself [Matisse wrote] its complete significance and impose that upon the beholder before he recognizes the subject matter. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble myself to recognize which scene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I immediately understand the sentiment which emerges from it, for it is in the lines, the composition, the color. The title will only serve to confirm my impression.
Which is why, of course, so large a part of “Notes of a Painter” is devoted to lines, composition, and especially color—to the “means” by which an artist expresses his “thought”—not only in Matisse’s own work but in that of a great many other painters as well.
In his reaffirmation of this philosophy of art, Matisse made a definitive statement about his own artistic goals—goals that it must have seemed to him were imperiled by Les Desmoiselles and the response it instantly ignited. But he also enunciated one of the categorical statements of faith in modernist aesthetics—that belief in the power of “the purely visual satisfaction” of a painting to convey its meaning and spiritual value. This is the belief, whether consciously acknowledged or not, that draws us to the great works of the past even when the stories they retell are no longer of compelling interest to us, and it is what still draws us to many modern works—even, I daresay, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon—long after their subjects have lost their power to excite our attention.
Matisse never abandoned this faith in what he called the painter’s “thought.” He restated it nearly thirty years later in the remarks he published in The Studio magazine under the title “On Modernism and Tradition” (1935). “A great modern attainment is to have found the secret of expression by color, to which has been added, with what is called Fauvism and the movements which have followed it, expression by design; contour, lines and their direction,” he wrote, adding that “if I am not mistaken, only plastic form has a true value, and I have always believed that a large part of the beauty of a picture arises from the struggle which an artist wages with his limited medium.”
Among “the movements” that Matisse had in mind in this statement, Cubism was undoubtedly the most important, and despite his initial recoil from Les Desmoiselles, he monitored the progress of Cubism with close attention to its great contribution to the “plastic form” he valued above all else in painting. He made ample use of it, too, which the current retrospective documents in greater detail than any other Matisse exhibition we have seen. Matisse was never a dogmatist in aesthetic matters. He was open to every possibility except the abandonment of the painter’s “thought” to something outside of the “means” used to express it.
It is one of the many strengths of the retrospective that John Elderfield has organized at MOMA that it has been conceived and executed with a very clear and subtle understanding of the arguments and counterarguments that have dogged Matisse’s reputation since that fateful day in 1907 or thereabouts when he was effectively supplanted by Picasso as the leader of the Paris avant-garde. These, as Mr. Elderfield knows very well, are arguments and counterarguments about the nature of art itself, and not only about Matisse’s and Picasso’s. Yet the fate of Matisse’s reputation, and thus of our understanding of what Matisse achieved as an artist, remains ineluctably joined to the ways in which Picasso has come to define the idea of modern art in this century, and it is Mr. Elderfield’s distinction in this exhibition and in the great catalogue he has written to accompany it to have explored this relationship more thoughtfully than any of his many predecessors. The result of this critical endeavor is the best account of Matisse’s art and thought that any writer has given us.1
That the “Evaluation of Matisse’s importance is still tied to evaluation of Picasso’s” is indeed the donnée of Mr. Elderfield’s approach to his subject, and in the series of oppositions he cites—between the hedonist and the radical, between the artist “on holiday” and the artist “at war,” between the champion of “harmony” and the exponent of “dissonance,” etc., which in the end come down to an opposition between the artist as “French bourgeois” and the artist as “international bohemian”—he places Matisse’s art in the historical framework that we can all instantly recognize as having dominated all discussion of these artists for as long as we can remember. No other writer has explored the implications of these facile oppositions so tellingly or related them so directly to the fact that, as Mr. Elderfield writes, “the very idea we have of modernism contains, if not indeed comprises, the idea of a protracted struggle for dominance between opposing systems, represented by Matisse and Picasso, each claiming for itself proprietary rights on an essential modernism.”
Mr. Elderfield also gives us a very exact account of the reason why Matisse later emerged as the winner, so to speak, in the contest that he seemed for so long to have forfeited.
Matisse’s reputation as a radical artist was not to achieve its full height . . . until after his death. It came as the result not only of broadening critical acknowledgment of his work . . . it also, and more importantly, was the result of Matisse’s influence on new art. His paintings of the 1930s and 1940s had been perceived as maintaining the vitality and innovative possibilities of that art in a period of great stylistic confusion, when the tradition of Picasso’s Cubism decayed into mannerism and mediocrity. His example had certainly been critical to the development of American Abstract Expressionist painting in that way. But it was not until the 1960s, when so-called Color Field painters, Minimalists, and Pop artists could all, in their different ways, find inspiration in Matisse’s work, that he fully recaptured the interest of the avant-garde, was acknowledged as a true radical, and again began to be described as the most important twentieth-century painter.
To which Mr. Elderfield promptly adds the questions that continue to haunt both the debate about Matisse and Picasso and the larger debate about art itself:
But still, was not Picasso, perhaps, a more “serious” artist? And is he not a more influential one? For some, the old questions remain, especially now that the magnificent Alterstil of modernism itself—the American painting of the 1950s and 1960s that came so to value the purely visual, and therefore Matisse—is past.
This retrospective is undoubtedly the finest exhibition of its kind ever mounted, and insofar as it is possible to do justice to an artist of Matisse’s stature in a single exhibition, this one certainly succeeds beyond cavil. And quite apart from what it does for Matisse, it also has the effect of making one feel a lot better about the century in which we live—a terrible century in so many ways, yet one in which we can nonetheless feel an immense sense of pride if, beside its unremitting record of suffering, bloodshed, and tragedy, it can also boast of an achievement as sublime as Matisse’s. Yet there is something about this wonderful event that induces a feeling of sadness and loss as well—a feeling that one of the great possibilities of the human mind may now have spent itself. When we exit this exhibition and return to the sordid cultural landscape of this last decade of the century, it is hard to believe that we shall ever again witness anything like it, now or in the foreseeable future.
[1992]
Footnote
1. John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, with contributions by Beatrice Kernan and Judith Cousins (New York, 1992).