Art: Matisse The Color of Genius

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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.