Art: Inventing a Sensory Utopia

"The grand object of travelling," said Samuel Johnson, "is to see the shores of the Mediterranean." The maxim had a special force among artists from the early 1900s to the eve of World War II. It applied to one particular shore: the Cote d'Azur, that strip of Provence that runs from Nice to Hyeres. If ever a littoral was changed from a place to an idea by the efforts of painters, this one was it. Paul Cezanne, a Provencal rooted in the limestone and red clay of his native Aix, had made backcountry Provence around Mont Ste.-Victoire one of the sacred loci of the modernist imagination. Among them, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard would do the same for the coast.

The image of the paradisiacal Mediterranean that still haunts our imagination -- despite its present-day reality of myriad gridlocked campers frying in the sun at the tepid edge of a half-dead sea -- was created by these painters and their followers. Their relations with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary pitch of imaginative precision in which mere fantasy had no role.

The maestro of this process was Matisse. He was a mature painter of 48 when he started his first working sojourn in Nice after 1916. Just as Gauguin had carried his style preformed with him to Tahiti, so Matisse took his to the Cote d'Azur. One would logically expect that given the tremendous efforts of ! abstraction and integration that had gone into his work from his fauve paintings of 1905-06 to The Moroccans of 1916, nothing he did thereafter would seem trivial to art historians. Yet such was not the case. Most accounts of Matisse's life treat his first 15 years on the Mediterranean (however much the public liked their results) as a slackening of his talent, almost a betrayal of its essence; he would not entirely recover, this version insists, until he began a new phase of abstraction in the early 1930s, one which would culminate 15 years later with the pure color silhouettes of his paper cutouts. Museums, up to now, have not shown us much of Matisse the Nicois. Of the gaps in our experience of any great 20th century artist, this was surely one of the biggest.

Now the National Gallery of Art in Washington has filled it, persuasively, radiantly and definitively, with a show of 171 paintings done by Matisse in his early Nice years, assembled by Art Historians Jack Cowart and Dominique Fourcade. It should dispel any lingering suspicion that between 1916 and 1930, even average Matisses got as complacent as most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris-New York abstraction. If you assume that art history culminates in abstract art, then you may feel betrayed if your hero's work goes from flatness to depth, from a space built from blocks of color to one evoked by the illusion of light, from schematic drawing to fuller modeling.