Art: Matisse The Color of Genius

(3 of 5)

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.