Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling

Author:Hilary Spurling
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241984055
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

It would take sixty years or more for this hidden emotional residue—the disturbed and disturbing feelings described in Matisse’s correspondence at the time—to become palpable in paintings that portray on the surface a carefree existence of ease and leisure. The Matisse of the 1920s and ’30s, for so long dismissed as facile and complacent, looks very different today. “Canvas after canvas is filled with images of boredom, claustrophobia, alienation and sexual yearning,” wrote J. D. Flam in 2003.68 The models lounging in make-believe harem costumes on improvised divans in the studio were drawn from the tide of human flotsam washed up in Nice between the wars, transients or immigrants often struggling to earn enough to pay for rented rooms or keep families afloat with short-term jobs as film extras, dancers or musicians. Many of them were harassed, distracted, unreliable. One fell sick and spat blood. Another was unable to raise her train fare back to Paris. All were in some sense seeking asylum, like the painter himself. “In these Nice portraits of a handful of models, he recorded the restless anxiety of women gazing at the sea, pining at open windows, neither dressed nor nude, going nowhere, twisting in their chairs, inert on their couches with unread books and unplayed instruments in their hands, never facing themselves in the omnipresent mirrored vanity table, indifferent to bouquets, absorbed in their own mute presence,” wrote Catherine Bock in 1986. “These are the women one finds in postwar novels, the women described by Jean Rhys or Paul Morand, available, bored in their self-absorption, and adrift.”69

But the underlying ambivalence of these canvases remained invisible to Matisse’s contemporaries, who saw only a return to comfortable, familiar methods of ordering reality. By progressive Parisian standards, the wrong people now increasingly admired Matisse. He was made a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in the summer of 1925, going on to be voted one of France’s most popular artists by L’Art Vivant, and included in English Vogue’s hall of fame the same year. This kind of success sharpened the responses of those who detected the taint of moral cowardice and culpable self-indulgence in Matisse’s paintings of women and flowers. Former admirers responded with more or less embarrassed disclaimers. Picasso’s dealer Daniel Kahnweiler elaborated a philosophical programme for Cubism that made “decoration” and “ornament” dirty words, writing off Matisse’s work by implication as not proper painting at all. Breton issued a public recantation in La Révolution surréaliste, denouncing all painters who had strayed from the true path to succumb to the snares of bourgeois reaction, and famously singling out Matisse and Derain for the full force of his anathema (“They are lost for all eternity to others as to themselves …. I should bear a grudge against myself if I paid any further attention to such a dead loss”).70

Georges Braque, brought by Halvorsen to the apartment on the Place Charles Félix in April 1925, made no attempt to conceal his discomfort. “Braque didn’t condescend to look at what I’ve

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