Matisse The Color of Genius

By ROBERT HUGHES

Sometimes an exhibition will define the work of a major artist for a whole generation. So with the Museum of Modern Art's Picasso retrospective in 1980. Now New York City's MOMA has done it again, with "Henri Matisse: A Retrospective" (through Jan. 12), devoting most of its space to an enormous survey of Matisse's paintings, drawings, collages and sculpture curated by art historian John Elderfield.

The last comparable Matisse show was organized in 1970 by Pierre Schneider in Paris, to mark the artist's centenary. It contained 250 works, and its catalog weighed 2 lbs. It seemed, at the time, exhaustive. This one has rather more than 400 works, and its catalog tips the kitchen scales at 5 lbs. 7 oz., outweighing even MOMA's Picasso catalog by 11 oz. It isn't a show to approach casually, even if the coming box-office jam allowed it. But Elderfield's panorama of Matisse's achievement is so exhilarating, so full of rapturous encounters with one of the grandest pictorial sensibilities ever to pick up a brush, so steady in its narrative line and -- not incidentally -- so sensitively hung, that even if you go in with a certain foreboding, you come out walking on air and longing to start right over again.

Only MOMA's resources -- its own collection, Elderfield's connoisseurship and the accumulated borrowing power that is the peaceable blackmail of the museum world -- could have produced this show. Its essential component, never seen in such depth outside Russia before, is the paintings bought from Matisse's studio 80 years ago by those two inspired and obsessed collectors, Ivan Morosov and Sergei Shchukin, now divided between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

Starting two decades later, MOMA also plunged heavily on Matisse; Alfred * Barr's belief in Matisse's supreme importance to modernism, at a time when the artist was widely considered to be a decorator (albeit a great one), gave New York City a collection of incomparable breadth. Some key paintings are absent, chiefly the crucial Luxe, Calme et Volupte, 1904-05. But there are not many holes in this tapestry, and given the cost of insurance and owners' growing reluctance to expose artworks to the risk of travel, it may be that no museum will ever be able to mount such a show again.

Matisse, paladin of modernism, is a long way from us now. Almost a generation older than Picasso, his counterpart, he was born in 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened and Gustave Flaubert published L'Education Sentimentale. Everything that looked modern in Matisse's environment is now ancient, from the gas buggies that were just coming onto the streets of Paris when he was a student in Gustave Moreau's atelier to the Vichy politicians who ran France during the Nazi occupation as he painted in Vence.

The idea that Matisse and Picasso, like Gog and Magog, are the founding opposites of modern art has left us a partisan scheme for looking at their work -- and for thinking about it. Picasso drawings, Matisse color; Picasso anxiety, Matisse luxury; Picasso the restless inventor, Matisse the calm unifier; Picasso in conflict, Matisse rhyming with peace; Picasso the bohemian Spaniard, Matisse the detached French bourgeois. There is something to these oppositions, but the closer you look at them the more tenuous they get. Matisse was just as challengingly inventive in his Fauve paintings in 1905 as Picasso became, with Cubism, around 1912; and you can't really argue that the sweet portraits and huge lethargic women of Picasso's classical period, after 1917, have some radical quality missing from Matisse.

As Elderfield points out in a catalog essay, Matisse's luck with the critics has always been peculiar. At the outset, part of the tiny modern-art public in Paris thought his work incoherent, ugly. Others, like Gauguin's friend Maurice Denis, praised its absolutist devotion to "painting in itself, the pure act of painting." But there was never a shortage of critics who saw Matisse as a kind of magisterial lightweight. "It is a modiste's taste," wrote the poet Andre Salmon in 1912, "whose love of color equals the love of chiffon."

This image of Matisse as a decorative, hence feminine, hence inferior painter tended to stick. Ironically, it would be supplanted later by the exactly opposite mistake: that Matisse's gaze on his odalisques in the calm of the Nice studio was the quintessence of male sexism, and that his love of pleasurable objects and delectable color, of luxury in general, disqualified him as a real voice of the 20th century because it was not revolutionary.

Matisse's best-known remark about his art didn't help much either: he wanted "an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter," that would soothe the mind of "every mental worker . . . something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue." He never made a politically didactic painting in his life.

What horror! There are always folk, especially in puritan America, who think pleasure is an unworthy goal of art. Academe is full of ideological nerds who can't look at a Matisse still life without planning an essay on the gender division of the work force in the Nice fruit market; how about The Commodified Fig: Reification As Metaphor in Matisse?

The view that Matisse was as avant-garde an artist as Picasso hardly took general hold in America until the 1960s, and came from his late work. For some years before his death in 1954, Matisse had been working to solve the split he had always experienced between drawing and painting. By cutting shapes out of precolored paper -- cutting, as he saw it, directly into the color -- and then pasting them on the surface, he closed the gap between outline drawing and color patch. As in Memory of Oceania, 1952-53, he gave the art of collage a brilliance, size and optical vivacity it had never had before. Thus in the '60s he became the father figure of the new art of disembodied color being created by Americans like Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis.

The problem lies in the disembodiment. Matisse was no more an abstract artist than Picasso. No abstract painter can claim descent from their work without acknowledging that fact. The worldly motif, especially the human body, and in particular the female body, was as basic to Matisse's art as it had been to Delacroix's or Titian's. His paintings vividly communicate a tension between what he called "the sign" and the reality it pointed to.

He had learned about this tension and its anxieties from Cezanne. But there has never been a great figurative artist who did not feel and exemplify it. It can be as poignant in Giotto or even in Poussin as it is in Cezanne or Matisse. For Matisse it was of prime importance, whereas in abstract art it tends to fall away, because one end of the cord is no longer anchored in the world and its objects. This is not an argument against abstraction, but it helps explain why, in those abstract paintings that derive from Matisse, one so rarely feels the urgency of their great exemplar.

Matisse had his leitmotivs, the full scope of whose recurrence only becomes clear in a show like this. One is the view through a door or window, from inside a room. One first sees it in 1896, in a small, unremarkable study of an open door giving onto the sea in Brittany. It reappears, in a way that promises its eventual form, in a small picture from 1901-02, Studio Under the Eaves -- a brown, dim room with a blaze of sacramental light at the end, a glimpse of apricot wall and flowering tree. From then on it will appear whenever he is at full pitch: in The Open Window, 1905, as he is creating the speckled, radically colored world of Fauvism at Collioure in the south of France; in the great "decorative" paintings of 1908-12 like Conversation; in the astoundingly bare and mysterious French Window at Collioure, 1914; and so on to the palm tree that, like a firework in the garden, fills the window of Interior with an Egyptian Curtain, 1948, its explosive light seeming to cast an inky black shadow under the bowl of fruit. The room is culture; the window frames nature; it is a kind of picture-within-a-picture, another trope that Matisse was partial to.

It is a habit to speak of Matisse's "assurance," his Apollonian, almost inhuman, balance. Yet this simple idea does not survive the evidence of this show. The deeper one looks, the more doubt and qualification one finds. It was far from Matisse's mind to impose an artificial certainty on the flux of vision. The resolution of his great 1914 still life, Goldfish and Palette, is provisional; on either side of the black central column things teeter and lean; even the curlicues of the black iron balcony seem held in a fragile equilibrium.

He was less interested in "locked" and unified structures than one thinks. The ring of figures in Dance (II), 1909-10, refers back to a long tradition of representations of Bacchanalian dances, from the ancient Greeks through to Poussin. The color is almost as simple and emblematic as that of an Etruscan vase: blue sky, green billowing earth, red flesh inflected with deeper, Indian-red drawing. It could not be more vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem, compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect, within the brusque signs for arched back, swollen belly, prancing, dragging, reaching. One clue to this is the complicated knot formed by the crossing legs of the second figure from the left, and the hands of the two dancers in front of her. There the circle of the dance breaks; the hands have come apart, they do not touch. Classical art would not show this. Choreographic "imperfection" matches the brusque details of visual depiction.

Matisse was the heir to an entire, and in his time still viable, tradition of European painting. Conversation is, on one level, an intimate interior -- the painter in his pajamas chatting with Mme. Matisse in her chair. But its hieratic grandeur irresistibly puts you in mind of an Annunciation, with angel (though wingless) and Madonna. In particular Matisse inherited the pastoral mode, replete with allegory. He refers to the poetry of his time -- Baudelaire, Mallarme -- with the same sense of possession and community that Renaissance painters like Lotto, Giorgione or Titian did to Ovid's Metamorphoses. As the figures in Venetian Renaissance pastorals tend to be generic rather than specific -- "a nymph" rather than Egeria or Daphne, "a warrior" rather than Alexander -- so are Matisse's scenes of Hesiodic primitive life. We will never know what mythological event the standing nude in Le Luxe (II), 1907-08?, with a crouching woman drying her feet, represents: Matisse didn't know himself. But the antique mold was a perfect receptacle for some of his plastic obsessions, such as the human back, and for the Arcadian vision he inherited from the past and shared with other avant-gardists like Stravinsky.

One wonders what the long-term effect of this show will be. With luck, it will be at least equal in its impact on artists in the '90s to the one Picasso had in the '80s. We are at present surrounded with art of depressing triviality -- the detritus of late postmodernism; with art that lays claim to remedial social virtue and yet "addresses" social issues in a depleted conceptualist language that is as socially ineffective as it is aesthetically boring. Artists are scared by the past and don't believe in the future.

Such is our fin-de-siecle. On every side, the idea of quality is ritually attacked, so that many young artists have come to doubt the most basic experience involved in comparing one artwork with another -- namely, that there are differences of intensity, articulateness, radiance, between works of art; that some speak more convincingly than others; and that this is not a political matter. Fifteen minutes in any room of this sublime exhibition is enough to blow such stale and peevish trivia away. Matisse did much, at the beginning of this century, to dispel the mustiness of academic art. At its end, he may still do the same to the mingy products of end-game academic modernism.