Great Leap Forward: Matisse in Chicago

Art During Wartime

These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War I. Rejected for service — he was 44 when the war began — he went on working in a Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother left stranded behind enemy lines and his brother sent to a prison camp. In Paris on many nights, the booming of German artillery was audible in the distance. (See the top 10 art accidents.)

These were the conditions under which Matisse began to produce pictures based on what he called the "methods of modern construction." Struggling to mount a personal response to the challenge of Cubism, he approached the very edge of abstraction. Things and people were reduced to concise signs of themselves, but in the end Matisse always remained attached to the visible world. Just look at Goldfish and Palette, from 1914, in which light and shadow, form and space, are distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black, white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers, structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish bowl, the highly abstracted orange fish and, to the right, the painter's white palette with his thumb stuck through it.

Even in his portraits, like The Italian Woman, Matisse could almost entirely transform the sitter, because he was confident that feeling in a painting was conveyed not by physical appearance or facial expression but by the sum of the impressions created by line and color. Often he began a picture with something like a realistic scene, then distilled it repeatedly. This is what happened with his magnificent Bathers by a River. When he started the large wall painting in 1909, it was a panorama of voluptuous women in bright colors. When he finished it seven years later, the women were angular and anonymous, the setting radically flattened, and the river had become another of those vertical black bands, with a stark white snake shooting upward along it like a bent poker.

In 1917 Matisse relocated to Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his work over the next three decades he would return — you might say retreat — to more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments. Color-field paintings, for example — the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler — would emerge directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him too quickly after all.

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