Art: Beauty & the Beast

One of the best arguments ever made for modern art opened this week in Philadelphia.

It was the lifework of Henri Matisse, or as much of it as the Philadelphia Museum of Art could lay hands on: almost 300 paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints. The work told more than all the books on the subject put together, and more than Matisse himself could possibly have explained. The aging master, who doesn’t get around much any more, stayed far away, in his villa just outside the little Riviera hill town of Vence, making more pictures.

The exhibition traced Matisse’s wavering, laborious progression from his early copy of a dead fish by Chardin, gleaming in mahogany darkness, to the abstract paper cutouts, brighter than circus posters, which he makes nowadays. Advancing room by room, visitors saw that Matisse had put increasing kick in his colors and bite in his outlines as he grew older.

Even those who have no stomach for modern art, or think they haven’t, could see that Matisse draws convincingly when he pleases. So why all the distortion? There was no denying that his later paintings had a childlike gaiety about them, but why should he have drawn them all wrong, like untrained children’s art?

“The Inherent Truth.” In the catalogue, Matisse himself tried to spell out his position. “There is an inherent truth,” he explained, “which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented. This is the only truth that matters. . . . Exactitude is not truth.”

That sounded rather professorial, for a painter, but it helped some. A TIME correspondent who penetrated Matisse’s seclusion last week found him far warmer than his words might indicate. At 78, Matisse spends half of each day in bed, and never leaves his house except for a short stroll in the garden after lunch. Illness has not dulled his appetite for life or for work. His blue eyes twinkle youthfully behind his thick glasses; his snowy little beard, jollity and industriousness make him seem something like Santa Claus. His bedroom and studio are both brighter than any toyshop.

He spends his mornings in the studio, his armchair drawn up to the easel, painting from the model or still life. The window looks out on to the uncared-for garden, and provides the quietest view in the room. Everywhere else one looks is blazing with color: bright silk cushions, bric-a-brac, copper vases, flowers, fruits, costume jewelry, feathers, and yards of vivid material looped over chairs or hanging ready for his models. In one corner stands a huge aviary which used to be flashing with Milanese pigeons (most of them died during the war). An old-fashioned country telephone perches on a stand in one corner. The walls are thick with paintings. Sketches of Matisse’s 15-year-old grandson Jackie form a continuous frieze next to the ceiling.

Struggle for the Minimum. A meticulous dandy, Matisse wears a light tweed jacket and tie when he is painting. Never using a palette, he squeezes the colors on to plain white kitchen dishes and uses them just as they come out of the tube, except for the addition of a little turpentine. Each picture starts with a fairly detailed charcoal sketch; he gradually simplifies it as he paints. This process of simplification, he says, is the very symbol of his life: “A constant struggle for complete expression with a minimum of elements.”

An iron bedstead takes up most of the space in Matisse’s bedroom, where he spends his afternoons drawing and making cutouts on a breakfast tray. At either side of the bed is a revolving table with drawers printed in chalk, “Pencils,” “Pens,” “Scissors,” “Paper,” etc.

Abstractions made of pinned scraps of colored paper (see cuts) cover the bedroom walls. To the hasty eye, they might seem as inconsequential as a game, but Matisse himself is deeply proud of them. “Only when one has reached complete maturity and mastery of color,” he explains, “is it possible to do anything like these. They might be compared to direct carving in sculpture—the same thing accomplished in color that Michelangelo did in stone. They are the result of my long career.”

That career started with years of severe schooling, during which Matisse supported himself by copying old masters in the Louvre. (“One must learn to walk firmly on the ground,” he told his own students later, “before one tries the tightrope.”) When he married at 23, Matisse was considered a rising young academician. Soon afterward, he ruined his reputation; he willfully destroyed a perfectly adequate still life he had just finished instead of sending it to his dealer. “It did not represent me,” explained Matisse. “I count my emancipation from that day.”

Sticks of Dynamite. To represent himself better, he took the brightest paints he could find and laid them on in exuberant stabs and slashes. His friend Derain called Matisse’s colors “so many sticks of dynamite,” and in the Paris Autumn Salon of 1905 the stuff exploded. Matisse’s paintings had been put in the same room with those of other crazy young men: Rouault, Dufy, Derain and Vlaminck. Almost everyone who peeked into that room came away reeling with outrage. The new painters were just fauves, they decided—wild beasts—and Henri Matisse the wildest of all.

His wife had to open a hat store to support Matisse and their three children, but it did not stay open long; by 1908 buyers had begun to see the beauty of the beast’s work. In that year he published his ambiguous Notes of a Painter, which have been quoted as his final word ever since. “What I dream of,” he wrote, “is an art that is equilibrated, pure and calm, free of disturbing subject matter … a means of soothing the soul . . . like a comfortable armchair. . . .” That simile has led critics to expect far less of Matisse than he expected of himself.

His paintings were never like armchairs, but there was something soothing in their luxurious brilliance, and they sold well enough to provide him with plenty of armchair comfort. “Tell the American people,” he urged a reporter, “that I am a devoted husband and father . . . that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love . . . just like any man.”

Now ill health limits Matisse’s pleasures almost entirely to his work. He sees almost no one except the handsome Russian woman, Livia Delectorskaya, who has been his chief model, housekeeper, secretary and protector for 15 years. Livia rounds up other models for the master—a hard job in provincially prudish Vence. Sometimes she returns with the 26-year-old girl who is the town’s one harlot, who describes Matisse as “a wonderfully sweet old man, always chattering while I pose.” Matisse avoids fellow artists (“I can’t see many people nowadays”). But the old man loves to have long chats with the town carpenter, who says he is “kindly and simple, but stubborn at times. The other day we were watching a sunset and I said, ‘Just look at that wonderful streak of orange.’ He replied, ‘No, Jean, it’s violet,’ and he convinced me. Then I looked again and was mad at myself. It was really orange, you know.”

For over 50 years, Matisse has been showering his work upon the world, and each picture, taken separately, has given some delight to some people. Have his long labors accomplished anything more than that? The answer is yes, much more, in spite of the fact that Matisse’s avowed purpose has been simply to charm. He has not only enriched the history of art, but changed it.

Reality at a Click. The kind of art developed in Renaissance Italy seemed to be evaporating toward the end of the 19th Century, and at the bottom of the cup lay merely the dry brown sediment of academic illustration. Moreover, the most skillful academicians were unable to compete with photography. In painting, the illusion of reality required the laborious methods of perspective and chiaroscuro. With one click, cameras did the same thing more convincingly. For painting to compete as an art form, and to have something fresh to say painters had to find a new approach to their art.

The impressionists made a bold effort to start afresh. They went into the fields, where perspective laws barely apply, and painted in broad daylight, with the sun behind them, to shake the tyranny of shadows from their colors. The best results, done in bright contrasting dabs of pigment, shone with a fluid sparkle new to art, but surprisingly enough they still looked like windows on an illusory world. The revolution had just begun.

Such post-impressionists as Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne wrenched the wheel further around, by refusing to paint precisely what they saw. They also painted what they felt about it, and they inclined to look more at their pictures than at their subjects. It remained for the living moderns, led by Picasso and Matisse, to give the final twist. A painting, they decided, is a painting first and foremost, and whatever it represents must be secondary. Granted that much, they felt perfectly justified in making their own rules, regardless of “appearances.” Some (the nonobjective painters) chose to ignore nature altogether, but Henri Matisse never went that far.

Because Picasso’s vision was predominantly sculptural, his new rules had mostly to do with form. He thought it might be interesting to break up the forms in nature and rearrange them on canvas—cubism. Matisse was most excited by colors; he did roughly the same kaleidoscope stunt with them—and took art back to the days of the Byzantines and medieval monks, whose flat, glowing illuminations symbolized instead of trying to counterfeit reality.

Ignoring the infinitely various hues of nature, pre-Renaissance and Eastern artists used the clearest colors they could find, combining them in arbitrary and surprising harmonies. They elided, exaggerated, twisted, destroyed, repeated and transposed the contours of real objects in order to draw lines with an integrated life and rhythm of their own—staccato in Byzantine mosaics and stained glass, sinuous in Chinese brush drawings, Japanese prints, Persian miniatures and Turkish rugs.

Picasso found a traditional basis for cubism in primitive African sculpture: the tradition Matisse chose to explore had never quite disappeared from Europe. It still existed in playing cards, tattooing and music-hall posters. They created no illusion of space or of sculptural form, though understanding some of them meant reading form and space into their flat designs. They delighted the eye through an interplay of only two elements: color and line. Matisse set out to do the same.

The High Cost of Rhythm. He once described himself as a seaplane which needed the old masters as pontoons for his own takeoff; it would have been more correct to call the old masters one pontoon and non-European art the other. Like Delacroix, he had visited North Africa and returned with a lasting predilection for harem props and paraphernalia. Unlike the earlier Frenchman, he found an ancient way of seeing as well.

The Hindu Pose shows how Matisse synthesized East & West, new & old. The painting makes a flat pattern, but it can easily be read as a design-in-depth; Matisse saw no reason to unlearn all he knew about putting form and space into a picture. It reflects his infatuation with twining arabesques, but they are tempered by a Northern severity, a love of right angles and straight lines. The figure of his odalisque is ruthlessly reshaped to fit the pattern, regardless of anatomy and proportion, and still has charm enough to veil every deformity.

Music, with Echoes. Matisse’s revolutionary synthesis through the years has become increasingly lucid, brilliant and gay. Now his subject matter means little; the colors are the thing. And each color, linked in loose, insistent rhythms of linear composition, sounds in the eye like a separate instrument: trumpet, cello, cymbals, oboe, harp and clarinet. Freely transforming nature, the paintings resound with symbolic echoes of her.

The falling, cutout black figure of Icarus looks as if it might have been snipped out by a child, until the onlooker comes to sense the impotent hooked flapping of the unwinged arms. The lumpish, drooping legs bewail their mid-air uselessness; the head hangs horrified over the void. By its very color, the body mourns its own impending death, which the red beating heart denies.

Like Icarus, Matisse has flown close to the sun; his most recent pictures are so richly dazzling that beside them such bold 19th Century colorists as Renoir and Van Gogh fade to dimness. And like Icarus, Henri Matisse has not much time. Sitting up in bed, the old man puts importunate visitors off with a serene apology: “I’m very busy,” he murmurs, “packing my bags for the next world.”