Matisse's Imprint Upon an Age

What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have toward life.

--Henri Matisse, 1908

HENRI MATISSE may be the best proof since Shakespeare of the irrelevance of the facts of a great artist's life to the genius of his work. Not that the facts are unknown. They are copious. Henri Matisse was born 100 years ago into the family of a grain merchant. He took up the study of law and turned seriously to painting only when he was 22. He married, had three children and emphasized to interviewers that he lived an entirely ordinary, suburban life. Outwardly he was reserved, cautious, methodical--in style of life the lawyer still. He could be diffident to the point of anguish about a work in progress. Despite the anguish, how he did work: twelve hours a day nearly every day for 60 years.

Yet none of the facts even hint at the revolution to which Matisse's pictures stand witness. This law student from Le Cateau in the north of France saw the picture plane flat and saw it whole. He began treating it as a design rather than an imaginary view. A pattern in the wallpaper might come forward to take equal authority with a fruitbowl on a table. He saw women as outlines--a grace, a structure of volume, a presence in a landscape--and abandoned nuances of flesh tones in favor of vigor of composition. Perhaps as much as Picasso, he altered the course of modern perception.

Unlike Picasso, Matisse left in his wake no memoirs by discarded mistresses, no picture books by importunate photographers. His paintings themselves are his only biography, but they tell all: an intimate diary as well as a public record of his subtle intuition, his patiently probing intellect, his will. Now Pierre Schneider, an American critic and journalist who works in Paris, has put Matisse's biography on the walls of the Grand Palais, where some 250 pictures span Matisse's prodigious life work. It is the most important show in Europe this year.

Shy Explorations. To assemble it, Schneider spent two years wheedling the best pictures from U.S. and European collections. He persuaded Leningrad's Hermitage Museum to lend twelve paintings seldom seen by Westerners. He got eight--even less familiar --from Moscow's Pushkin Museum. Rarest of all, he has teased out of several French private collections a score of paintings that have never before been publicly exhibited.

As any scrupulous account of a creative mind should do, this show explores the earliest years, particularly the vivid paintings done in Corsica in 1898 and hardly seen since. The most sweeping changes that Matisse was to make are shyly explored in those first pictures. He celebrated well-laden tables, played with the refractions of light in liquid and glass, and caressed fruits and rich surfaces. He was hypnotized by the mysterious contrast between the cool interior and the hot partial view through the open window. But it was the human form that held for him the ultimate sensuous appeal. It was the engine of his creative exploration, the subject he held fast in order, paradoxically, to range farthest.

Immanent Abstraction. "I don't create women," he once snapped at a critic. "I paint pictures." It sounded like an aphorism. What it meant to Matisse is suggested by his very early (1896), very realistic portrait of a Breton girl. She is subdued, even sallow, but curiously taking: look carefully at the painting, then look away, and all that remains in the mind is the simple shape of face, with eyes and mouth burned in. The human, for Matisse, could be contorted, abstracted, reduced to geometry and architecture and decoration, but without losing particularity. When Matisse succeeded, his human figures made abstraction immanent. It worked with color too, as in the famous Fauve portraits that earned him in 1905 the title "king of the wild beasts."

Nu Bleu, two years later, keeps this power that disturbed his contemporaries. It uses darker but equally vigorous color, and a modeling that has the violence of a flung dishcloth or a snapped rope, to create a figure whose superhuman solidity bends light around it. That same year Matisse painted Le Luxe I. The difference between Luxe and Nu Bleu is the arrow of his creative consciousness: toward massed composition, flat surface, simplified color and, above all, a mood of subtly altered consciousness, which from then on became a major Matisse characteristic. He turns the viewer on to an exaltation, whether ice-cool or abandoned, like the joyful seriousness that perfused public ritual in classical Greece. The result is that "nearly religious feeling" that Matisse said he had toward life.

Le Luxe was pivotal. It was his first picture of monumental size and the up-rearing early pier of the great bridge of painting that culminated within three years in those extraordinary canvases, Music and the two versions of Dance. Brilliantly, Schneider has hung the three huge paintings, two from Leningrad's Hermitage and the first version of Dance from New York's Museum of Modern Art, in the same hall. There the two rings of dancers confront each other in demonic energy, while between them, on the saturated flat green of the grass, under the deep blue of the sky, five vermilion figures are frozen with the concentration of listening and playing.

Tuned Sky. Matisse himself was a violinist. He took an odd pride in the notion that if his painting eye failed, he could support his family by fiddling on the streets of Paris. The same violin in Music appears again, in precisely the same pose except now seen from the rear, in an amusing portrait that Matisse painted in Nice--maybe of himself at his hotel window, practicing. Friends assert that the hotel banished Matisse to a remote back room so that his playing would not torture other guests.

The picture, never before displayed or reproduced, is more than an anecdote. It is an abstraction in verticals and colors, panels within panels, a sky so in tune that its earthy color goes unnoticed. Just as memorable is the painting of his daughter Marguerite in pink and blue stripes; it has been dismissed as a failed Cubist experiment, but it can be seen again as an effective precursor of Op. The square-on verticals are as impersonal and hieratic as a playing-card queen. But look: the girl is also there, three-quarter face, cheek outlined by the strong diagonal at left. As the two images succeed each other, the eyes shift, the lips purse slightly, anda gravely pretty girl emerges in almost sculptural round. Once again the abstract and the particular fuse triumphantly.

Also Nicknames. "What I dream of is an art of equilibrium, of purity and serenity," said Matisse. In his last decade, retreating more to his room, his chair, his bed, he achieved that dream with the resources of a child--paper, colored to his exact specification, which he then carved with scissors and had pinned to huge surfaces until the arrangement pleased him. Sometimes the images produced were springing female figures, dancers and tumblers and sirens --or a girl composedly sitting with her hair about her shoulders, like the blue-on-yellow figure Matisse and family nicknamed La Grenouille--The Frog.

"All artists bear the imprint of their time," Matisse wrote in 1908, "but the great artists are those in whom this stamp is most deeply impressed." He might have added that the greatest are those who stamp their own mark on a time. Looking back from his deathbed 46 years later, he must have seen the imprint he had left, and been pleased.

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