"When drawing a tree, you must feel yourself growing with it." -- Matisse
For him, each painting was a rape. "whose rape?" he asked, startling his questioner (perhaps also himself) with the brutal image that surfaced in his mind during an interview that took place more than three decades after he painted Nymph and Satry. "A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic object." He seems to have meant that he relied on his female models to arouse feelings that he could convert to fuel the work in hand. He confronted whatever underlay that proces head on in Nymph and Satyr.
Other artists presented versions of the world with all hints of desire or danger airbrushed out.
Her [Mme Matisse] mariage had been a gamble in which money, security, social advantage played no part. She became her husband's eager partner in a high risk enterprise neother ever truly doubted would one day succeed. She had recognized what was in him at sight, and backed her instinct unreservedly ever after.
At times, when M found himself disowned not only by the professional art world but by most of his fellow artists too, his wife remained virtually his only backer. Mutual trust was the core of their relationship. ...The two did almost everything together. Almost from the first day that they met, they were known as the Inseperables.
Newcomers were often taken aback to find M exhibiting none of the sympotims of a visionary, let alone a wild beast. He no longer loped about the streets, as he had done a little earlier, in a black sheepskin coat worn shaggy side out. As his paintings grew bolder and more disturbing, his dress and manner became quieter and more restrained. ...M's teaching was practical and constructive. He had no set programme or preconceptions. His critical analyses were simple and direct. ...The one thing he could not stand was showing off in paint. Anything flashy, meretricious or exaggerated had to identified and cut out. ...Matisse's teaching classes wore him out. Sometimes when he came home across the garden aftterwords he could no longer see straight. The trouble was that he treated all his pupils equally, applying himself to sorting out the difficulties of even the least gifted with the same concentration he brought to his own struggles on canvas.
M himself was reluctently obliged to accept that the reactions his pictures provoked in the first people to see them were pretty much the opposite of the feelings he intended to convey. Emotion was his prime test of authenticity in a painting. He taught his students to discard their elaborate formal training and trust their instincts instead, explaining that even a still life involved affection and respect. They were to paint not so much the fruit and bowls in front of them as the response these objects comanded in the painter. He showed them how tenderly he himself felt towards the taut compact volumes of an African wood carving, the generous roundness of a copper pot, the swelling, tear shaped belly of a slender vase. He advised them how to analyse and render flesh or cloth without ever losing sight of the human qualities of the hired model on the stand before them.
In his own portraits, the young women whose expressions were once so difficult to decipher now seem to gaze back coolly and with striking confidence at the spectator. Nearly all of them were foriegners, unconstrained by the strict rules that governed French bourgeois wives and daughters. Some were themselves prospective artists, operating automously in a world where women were not expected to challenge or respond to men on anything like equal terms. It was their toughness, more even than their youth and innocence, that touched M. There is nothing sensual or ingratiating about these portraits.[1909] Independence (and the price that had to be paid for it) is implicit in everything about The Girl with Green Eyes, from the unconventional clothes to her straight nose, her thick black brows, her resolute red mouth, the steady look in her eyes and the firm set of her head on its uncomprising columnar neck.
He would strip each work down to its bare essence, examine what was left for any trace of individual expression, and then devote himself to clarifying and strengthening this residuum.
...The incident brought back terrible memories of the summer nine years before when Marguerite fought for breath and her father had to hold her down on the kitchen table of their tiny attic flat while the doctor cut into her windpipe.
Only Amelie Matisse fully understood the state of barely expressed panic that underlay Matisse's own unremitting experimentation.
{Dance and Music} It was the uprush of violence as much as the earthly physicality of the finished work that shocked people. M said he himself took fright, like the Douanier Rousseau, who sometimes had to open a window to let out the elemental force of his own painting. In Dance and Music, M attempted simultaneously to release and contain that force. "At the precise moment when raging bands were milling about in front of his huge canvases, tearing him to pieces and cursing him," wrote Sembat, "he confessed coolly to us: 'What I want is an art of balance, of purity, an art that won't disturb or trouble people. I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my paintings.'"
The effort took everything he had to give. It devoured his days, invaded his dreams at night and put an increasing strain on his private life. The family's daily round at Issy was driven by it. This was the obsessive passion that had wrecked Matisse's relationship with Marguerite's mother. He had warned Amelie about it when they first met, explaining bluntly, "I love you dearly, mademoiselle, but I shall always love painting more."
One may not posses. Yearning is giant power, possession unmans. -- Thomas Mann
I am looking into a world unborn and formless, that needs to be ordered and shaped; I see into a whirl of shadows of human figures who beckon to me to weave spells to redeem them. --Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann
The incident that confirmed Matisse's outcast status, at any rate in his own mind, came one day when he turned into one of the artists' cafes in Montparnasse for a drink with Picasso and his band, who refused to speak to him. Matisse never forgot sitting alone at the next table in a cafe full of fellow painters, none of whom returned his greeting. "All my life I've been in quarantine," he said when he recalled the scene. This was how he had felt as a boy in Bohain, when his father first discovered his mad plan to be a painter. He used the same image to describe how it felt, at the age of twenty-five in 1896, to find people treating his work as if it were alive with germs. He was appalled a decade later when press and public once again identified him as a plague carrier, speading infection and pollution at the head of the notorious Fauves.
Prichard himself held that art was primarily instinctive and emotional. Like many nervous, intense and rigidly controlled ascetics, he needed some sort of tool or strategy to help him break through to a more intuitive level of his being. In his case, it was art. "Much of what Matisse gives us is to be found in our unconsious life," he wrote in one of his notebook devoted to his "Conversations with Matisse". "To find what it is we must plunge there in a state of trance or ecstatsy, we must swim along the bottom of the stream of our existence." Matisse used more violent language to describe his efforts to kickdown the door between himself and painting. The struggle was at its most ferocious over the ring of dancers Prichard had first seen in April 1909. Matisse spent that year concentrating successively on one thing at a time: the fierce clashing movement of the elements in the incoming tide whipped by wind and trapped rocks at Cassis; the vibrating band of light, heat and colour under the pine trees at Cavaliere; the plastic possabilities of the human figure...
Matisse confided in Prichard that what most of his students needed was spiritual makeover rather than technical instruction.
His dark start and his destination in the sun...Matisse was born and raised in the mists of the north, and he had the pale eyes of a northerner, yet in them shone all the luminosity of the Midi: it was reflected in his gaze, and its sparkling brilliance together with the emotion it inspired were in turn perpetuated in his work.
his doctor explained that there was nothing clinically wrong with him, that black despair would inevitably follow bouts of such intense nervous pressure and emotional exhileration....
Matisse acknowledged that he had been possessed at this point by a love of line and of the arabesque - 'those givers of life' - which stirred his senses and appeased his spirit.
...and gloating over the graffiti campaign organised by Picasso's band on the walls of Montmartre ("Matisse drives you mad! Matisse is more dangerous than alcohol! Matisse does more harm than war!")
"The public is against you, but the future is yours."
Life with Matisse was never easy. Sometimes it came close to unendurable. When painting tormented him, he vented his frustrations on anyone or anything that came or seemed to come between him and his work. It brought out a side of him that was jealous, exacting and possessive.
From then on, he painted realities that were only in his mind.
Not things but the essence of things
More than 30 years later Picasso bought Basket of Oranges, and his young lover, Francoise Gilot, enchanted by its warmth and vigour was astonished to learn from Matisse himself that he had been penniless in Tangier and seriously contemplating suicide at the time. "It was born of misery,"he said. This was the mood that had produced the Fauve explosion at Collioure. People found it hard to credit when Matisse explained the depths of frustration that lay behind the sunny, carefree radiance of paintings like The Open Window, or The Gypsy. "It has to be said that the latter shows the energy of a drowning man whose pathetic cries for help are uttered in a fine voice," he wrote grimly in retrospect. "Painting which looks as if it's made through gritted teeth isn't the only kind that's worth attention."
Matisse: he constructed with pure colour: From this further conclusions follow, the first being the high degree of abstraction in his work. Objects rendered by Matisse--whether it is a tablecloth, a vase or, in exactly the same way, a human face -- are dematerialised, transformed into coloured silhouettes, distillations of colour that spill in ornamental streaks and splashes over the canvas. Not things but the essence of things...In his canvases there is an ornamental harmony which is not so much contained as projected upwards and outwards...It is this fluidity...that gives his paintings a kind of life that reaches out from the walls beyond the boundaries of their gilt frames. And here we come up against the essential nature of his decoration: Matisse's paintings seem not so much seperate entities as parts of a non-existent frieze, in other words an oriental frieze.
Matisse's instinctive transition from the concrete to the abstract
Matisse told Semblat that what he was after was the quality of Oriental meditation. "That's what struck me: those great devils who remain for hours lost in contemplation of a flower and some goldfish."
"There are certain truths which transcend the power of the intellect to graps, which can only be conveyed by evocation," wrote Matisse's friend Matthew Prichard, exploring the common ground between Matisse's work and Oriental art. "Reality is one of the truths which exceeds the power of the intellect to grasp, but appearence is a simple intellectual fact." Painting solely by instinct and feeling, Matisse had broken through to a new visual level of reality where few of his contempories could follow him. "You have to look at it as you would look at the sunshine through the window. And then it works, I promise you." --Jules Flandrin on Matisse
HMatisse was generally agreed to be the ringleader in this den of lewdness, profanity, and pollution. The New York Times famously pronounced his works ugly course, narrow, and revolting in their inhumanity. Students at the Art Institute of Chicago planned to celebrate the day the exhibition left their city by hangingg Matisse in effigy. When the authorities intervened, a huge crowd of students burned copies of his most offensive works, Le Luxe and Blue Nude, and went on to stage a public trial for treason of Henry Hairmattress ("Artist Hairmattress...was stabbed and otherwise thoroughly killed and dragged about." reported the Chicago Examiner on April 17, 1912). A representative of the Senate Vice Committee confirmed that the exhibition was immoral.
"We are both searching for the same thing by different means."--either Picasso or Matisse
[While looking at one of his pictures]
Woman: "I don't understand?"
Matisse: (calmly, while lighting a cigarrette) "Neither do I."
When bewildered onlookers protested that no human being resembled the creatures of his imagination, Matisse agreed, adding cheerfully that if he met one on the street, he would probably flee in terror. ...People in Matisse's studio thought that they had stepped into the future: a strange, scary, savage world that filled them with forebding and disquiet.
The resulting drawing was so life-like it resembled not only the sitter but several of her relatives as well...To Prichard, who was beginning to speak of Matisse as a spiritualist or a seer, it seemed as if he could tap into and transmit deep unconscious tides of feeling.
There are some Cubist vestiges in The Piano Lesson, but no Cubist ever surpassed the beautiful divisions, the grave and tranquil elegance of this big picture.
Matisse worked as always on a slower fuse than Picasso.
'It's through a combination of forces brought together on canvas, which is the particular contribution of my generation. And it's also, I think, the feeling of space that I always get from observing the models, and that even makes me put myself into the space. This space is constructed from a convergence of forces that has nothing to do with the direct copying of nature. It's difficult to explain more fully because, with this sort of construction, a large part is down to the mysterious workings of instinct'--Matisse, discussing Interior with a Violin Case
[Matisse's paintings between 1923-28]: The depicted world is one of waiting and sadness; a world of heavy eroticism, almost a world of the voyeur. A distant world in which communication seems impossible, or futile; beside, human beings have become painted things in this world, colour events in view of obtaining light on the painting's surface -- they are dispossessed of all but their chromatic lives. The world of these years in Nice is a world behind glass -- the world in a fishbowl, the world infinitely repeated in a kind of insistent, existential loss. As if the light one had to obtain resulted in nothing but solitude, and demanded a fatal renunciation.
The Matisse of the 1920s and 30s, for so long dismissed as facile and complacent, looks very different today. "Canvas after canvas is filled with images of boredom, claustrophobia, alienation and sexual yearning.
M: "I'm alone...my life doesnt change."
M's parents motto: Suffering is with you for life.
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." 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 can't 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 became an avid rower. "It's a sport that suits me," he told his wife, "...it's a question of suppleness, rather than brute force."
Matisse in Tahiti: lived in a cabin in the untamed jungle, every morning he rose before dawn to wash in the stream and breakfast with the film crew....The grown was strewn with rotten wood that crumbled when you trod on it, released warm, sweet smells of mildew and tiare flowers.
Matisse illustrated [in 1934] an edition of Joyce's Ullysses, which he had not read
truth and rigour
"I work without a theory." -- Matisse
"I am conscious only of the forces I use, and I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture." -- Matisse
"The worry that haunts me is that I'll end up being forgotten." -- Matisse, 1933
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