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| Three portraits of Laurette (1916-17), a favorite Matisse model
NY TIMES By ROBERTA SMITH Published: November 29, 2012
The great French modernist Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was not a joiner. In the early 20th century he led the brief blitz of the Fauves — those “wild beasts” of fiery colors and blunt textures — but otherwise abstained from the signal movements of modern art.
He communed with artists of the distant or not-so-distant past, from Giotto to Cézanne, and periodically brushed shoulders with Cubism and the work of his chief rival, Picasso. But his main desire was, as he put it, to “push further and deeper into true painting.” This project was in every sense an excavation, and he achieved it partly by digging into his own work, revisiting certain scenes and subjects again and again and at times also making superficially similar if drastically divergent copies of his paintings.
His rigorous yet unfettered evolution is the subject of “Matisse: In Search of True Painting” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the most thrillingly instructive exhibitions about this painter, or painting in general, that you may ever see. As ravishing as it is succinct, it skims across this French master’s long, productive career with a mere 49 paintings, but nearly all are stellar if not pivotal works.
Organized at the Met by Rebecca Rabinow, a curator of modern and contemporary art, this exhibition, which is in previews for members through Sunday and opens to nonmembers on Tuesday, sheds new light on Matisse’s penchant for copying and working in series.
To this end, the paintings proceed in pairs or groups aligned by subject: two still-life arrangements with fruit and compote, from 1899; two versions of a young sailor slouching in a chair, from 1906; four views (1900 to 1914) of Notre Dame seen from Matisse’s window across the Seine; three portraits (1916-17) of Laurette, a favorite dark-haired model, seen from various distances in a voluminous green robe from Morocco.
The textbook simplicity of this format is irresistible. The visual self-schooling particular to looking at art kicks in, and almost before you know it your eyes are off and running, darting back and forth, parsing differences in style, brushwork, color, detail and overall effect, the expression of emotion that Matisse said he was always after.
Spread through eight galleries whose spaciousness aids concentration, each pair or group forms its own mini-seminar. Together they show Matisse restlessly roving between extremes, relentlessly rethinking and revising his way to greatness with radical ideas about economy and finish that changed the course of painting. His palette is rarely less than audaciously original. Attention should be paid to his habit of painting dark colors over bright ones to create a subtle underglow and his frequent emphasis on blank canvas as a source of light and texture. Always he sought an implicitly modern directness and rawness that created a brave new intimacy among artist, object and viewer. He claimed to work “toward what I feel; toward a kind of ecstasy.”
Matisse’s practice of copying grew out of his academic training, which by long tradition involved copying old masters in the Louvre. But he shifted this exercise toward the present, copying far more contemporary works, trying out different, mostly Post-Impressionist styles. The first gallery includes a still life homage to Cézanne (1904) and another work depicting the same arrangement in the Pointillist-based manner of Paul Signac (1904-5). Even more interesting are two 1899 still lifes with compote and fruit. One is richly painted, an encompassing Post-Impressionist tribute (van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Vuillard) cast in a honeyed light. The other is spare, almost skeletal: the fruit and vessels are denoted by flat silhouettes of bright color, the cabinet on which they rest by mostly unpainted canvas. Natural light as such is absent, but the seeds of all Matisse’s great economies are here.
....Matisse was already beginning to use copying as a way to take the same motif to different pictorial conclusions, shifting from opulent to austere, or austere to opulent. In the case of two 1906 “Young Sailor” paintings, the first can be read as an overworked farewell to Fauvism, while the second cuts to the chase, conveying its subject with consummate abbreviating ease against a flat pink background as if dispatched in a single work session. (Its simplicity apparently made Matisse a little uneasy; when he showed these canvases to the collector Leo Stein, he dissembled briefly, saying that the second [above] had been painted by a rural letter carrier.) Meanwhile he seems almost to have abandoned the 1909 “Seated Nude,” with its patchy color, flurries of pencil and disturbing doll-like face, for its more robust twin of the same year, “Nude With a White Scarf,” more conventionally fleshed out in paint and thick black lines.
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And it is almost shocking to see that the Modern’s great, sketchily painted, nearly all-blue “View of Notre Dame” (1914) has an unlikely fraternal twin from the same year: a relatively realistic view of that cathedral that might almost be a blowup of a postcard except for the daring brevity of its watercolor-thin pastel colors and frequent passages of exposed canvas. Both paintings challenge conventional notions of finish, though from almost opposite directions.
But there is much more on offer. Two relatively comfy views of Matisse’s first hotel room in Nice are traduced by the grandeur of “Interior With a Violin,” [above]a larger third version whose prevailing shades of black dramatically highlight the bit of sunbaked beach visible through the louvered shutters. Three views of the beach at Étretat, on the coast of northern France, revisit a scene beloved by Monet, presenting different catches of the day while experimenting with deep space and variously notational ways of indicating pebbles, bluff and water.
In the 1930s Matisse began having black-and-white photographs taken of his paintings at regular intervals as he worked on them. This was clearly another way to preserve artistic ideas for future use, but he also sent photographs to clients and further valued them as proof against critics’ claims that his paintings were casually dashed off. In 1945 he went so far as to exhibit six paintings, each surrounded by its matching photographs, at Galerie Maeght in Paris. The seventh gallery of the Met show presents three of the Maeght canvases amid their evidentiary pictures. They establish that Matisse’s progress was often grueling and yet, especially with the ornate vessels and shell in “Still Life With Magnolia” [below] (1941) and the sleeping model in peasant blouse of “The Dream” (1940), [above] he worked through his difficulties to a final image that exudes consummate freshness and ease.
By the time you reach this point in this astounding exhibition, it is clear that Matisse’s paintings are almost always hard-won distillations, but it is nonetheless marvelous to see the process so forthrightly chronicled.
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