Art: Matisse The Color of Genius

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He was less interested in "locked" and unified structures than one thinks. The ring of figures in Dance (II), 1909-10, refers back to a long tradition of representations of Bacchanalian dances, from the ancient Greeks through to Poussin. The color is almost as simple and emblematic as that of an Etruscan vase: blue sky, green billowing earth, red flesh inflected with deeper, Indian-red drawing. It could not be more vivid or explicit, or better attuned to the fresco-like scale of the canvas. And yet how provisional these dancers seem, compared with their ancestors; how deliberately imperfect, within the brusque signs for arched back, swollen belly, prancing, dragging, reaching. One clue to this is the complicated knot formed by the crossing legs of the second figure from the left, and the hands of the two dancers in front of her. There the circle of the dance breaks; the hands have come apart, they do not touch. Classical art would not show this. Choreographic "imperfection" matches the brusque details of visual depiction.

Matisse was the heir to an entire, and in his time still viable, tradition of European painting. Conversation is, on one level, an intimate interior -- the painter in his pajamas chatting with Mme. Matisse in her chair. But its hieratic grandeur irresistibly puts you in mind of an Annunciation, with angel (though wingless) and Madonna. In particular Matisse inherited the pastoral mode, replete with allegory. He refers to the poetry of his time -- Baudelaire, Mallarme -- with the same sense of possession and community that Renaissance painters like Lotto, Giorgione or Titian did to Ovid's Metamorphoses. As the figures in Venetian Renaissance pastorals tend to be generic rather than specific -- "a nymph" rather than Egeria or Daphne, "a warrior" rather than Alexander -- so are Matisse's scenes of Hesiodic primitive life. We will never know what mythological event the standing nude in Le Luxe (II), 1907-08?, with a crouching woman drying her feet, represents: Matisse didn't know himself. But the antique mold was a perfect receptacle for some of his plastic obsessions, such as the human back, and for the Arcadian vision he inherited from the past and shared with other avant-gardists like Stravinsky.

One wonders what the long-term effect of this show will be. With luck, it will be at least equal in its impact on artists in the '90s to the one Picasso had in the '80s. We are at present surrounded with art of depressing triviality -- the detritus of late postmodernism; with art that lays claim to remedial social virtue and yet "addresses" social issues in a depleted conceptualist language that is as socially ineffective as it is aesthetically boring. Artists are scared by the past and don't believe in the future.