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Henri Matisse
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HENRI MATISSE
"Genius is just
childhood one can
return to at will" |
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Matisse Madame de Pompadour |
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"South Pole, North Pole":
thus Picasso is said to have defined the century's two most
illustrious painters, those who played the greatest role in 20th
century painting. Matisse and Picasso were indeed great rivals,
their relations over half a century founded on discreet
friendship if not indeed complicity. The poet of colour found
his counterpart in the breaker of forms. "I feel through colour,"
said Matisse, "so my pictures will always be organised by it.
Yet this requires that the sensations be condensed and that the
means employed be brought to their utmost expressivity."
One of the hallmarks of a truly great artistic ceuvre is that it
never stops at the discoveries it has made but immediately sets
out in new directions. A single arc, the product of a single
intention, this diversity can sometimes disorientate. When an
artist further uses all the forms of expression - painting,
drawing, and sculpture - simultaneously, the disorientation can
border on bewilderment. For Matisse, in his quest to refine form
and exalt colour, the end justified the means, and he offered
revolutionary solutions under the guise of classical appearances
in the best tradition of French painting. It is this apparently
innocuous revolutionary aspect that some still fail to perceive:
this poised art, full of purety and calm mastery, this "joy in
painting the beauty of the universe" stand out so clearly in an
epoch when the absurd, the unquiet, the "convulsive" reigned
supreme. The gouache cut-outs from the end of his life have also
been misunderstood. They have been taken for the last hobby of a
crippled old man, whereas they are, like Matisse's Chapelle
du Rosaire at Vence, "the end-product of an entire life of
work and the flowering of an enormous, sincere, and difficult
effort", of a life devoted to exalting colour and evoking the
happiness of living and painting, which were, for him,
inseparable. For the gouache cut-outs are continuous with a
purpose from which the artist never departed after he had found
himself as a fauve: the work is born of the untrammeled
confrontation of colours.
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Matisse in front of The Tree of Life
at the Chapelle du Rosaire, Vence, 1949
The
Tree of Life, Symbol of the Golden Age
The preparatory drawings
for the stained-glass windows were thus created using
gouache cut-outs. After long reflection, the theme was
drawn from the Book of Revelation: "In the midst of the
street of it, and on either side of the river, was there
the tree of life, which... yielded her fruit every
month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing
of the nations". The Tree of Life, symbol of the Golden
Age! The tree, the flower! Is there any more beautiful
leitmotif in the work of Matisse than this culmination
of his habitual themes?
Picasso was furious that Matisse was creating a church.
"Why not do a market instead? You could paint the fruit
and the vegetables!"
Matisse confided to a nun:
"But I don't care: I have greens greener than pears and
oranges more orange than pumpkins..."'
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Around 1943, in Cimiez and later at Vence, in the sunlit South
of France, Matisse felt that he had said all he had to say in
painting. And he found colour difficult to manipulate because of
his illness. It was then that he first had recourse to sheets of
paper precoloured with gouache which he could cut to the shapes
he desired. The result: the extraordinary Jazz
album (published in 1947), "improvisations in colour and rhythm"
- like those of a Louis Armstrong or a Charlie Parker - in which
Matisse's memories of the circus, of popular stories and of his
travels took form in vivid, violent images. To link them and to
mitigate the contrasts between them. Matisse wrote an
accompanying text, in a large, harmonious script, full of
striking phrases: "Sculpting the living colour reminds me of the
direct carving of the sculptors... My curves are not mad..."
Incredible man! He was now confined to his rocking chair or his
bed and was, it might be thought, lost to painting. Yet he again
found a way to transcend the art of drawing, grasping the
desired opportunity to work towards a perfect synthesis of
everything he had learnt. With nothing more than a pair of
scissors and paper precoloured to precisely the shades that he
had had prepared, he solved the problems of form and space,
outline and colour, structure and orchestration which he had
always sought to harmonize. Still more, this new enterprise at
last allowed him to accord full importance to line rhythms and
to forms, which he had often in the past had to sacrifice to
colours and tonal relations.
Here, realism and abstraction were reconciled at the end-point
of a long process that grew out of its own logic and not, as
some defenders of abstract art have impudently asserted, out of
carelessness or the temptation to climb onto some contemporary
bandwagon. Matisse laid all ambiguity to rest when he wrote that
he "drew in colour", and when he stated to Andre Lejard "I am
currently focusing on material more matt and more immediate, and
this leads me to seek a new means of expression. Paper cut-outs
allow me to draw in colour. For me it is a question of
simplification. Instead of drawing the outline and establishing
colour within it, I draw directly in the colour, which is more
exact for not being transposed. This simplification guarantees
precision as I reconcile two means now become one... It is not a
beginning, it is an endpoint."
Olympian amusement, twilight bedazzlement, the frivolity of the
sage... hasty remarks and judgements about the painted paper
cut-outs have proliferated. Indeed, Georges Duthuit acknowledges
that there may be some truth in them, a truth "equally
applicable to Goethe chatting with Eckermann or to the titanic
author of The Magic Mountain leaving an unfinished
picaresque novel". If there is, it is no less true to see in
Matisse one of those "great artists grown old" of whom Barres
speaks, artists who, "hastening to explain themselves,
contracting their means of expression as they shortened their
signature", have attained "the concision of enigmas or
epitaphs".
Despite the considerable international acclaim that greeted
Jazz, Matisse was not at first satisfied. It was some
time before he grew used to the transposition by stencil
printing to which his publisher Teriade subjected the cut-outs;
they could not otherwise be reproduced. The technique is not
perfectly accurate, but it has its use today, for some of the
cut-outs have since faded, and we now look to Teriade's stencils
for the truth of Matisse's colours. Matisse, in 1944, wrote to
Teriade about Jazz, that "this twopenny ha'penny
toy is wearing me out and my whole being revolts at its invasive
growth!"
Sculpting the Living
Colour
Jazz was published by Teriade Editeur
in Paris, in 1947, in a big infolio volume measuring 42 x 32.5
cm. The twenty colour plates were stencil printed in 170 copies
after the gouache cut-outs by Matisse, using the same Linel inks
as the artist. Jazz, offers a complete repertory of
forms. The many-pointed stars, the leaves, and the seaweed with
its deep undercuts; these recur throughout the plates like a
leitmotif. Curiously enough, these same forms, or their
ancestors, can be found in a 12th century illuminated
manuscript, the Beatus of Saint-Sever. We can be certain that
Matisse knew the Beatus, which Mourlot, his engraver, had
lithographed. There is no doubt that Icarus and other plates
from Jazz owe a considerable debt to the Beams, which
was, in its time, one of the major sources of Romanesque
sculpture.
Had not Matisse claimed that he wanted to "sculpt the living
colour"?
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Woman
Acrobat & Self-Portrait |
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Jazz
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Calligraphic title by Matisse for Jazz
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The
Wolf (Jazz)
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The
Codomas (Jazz)
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The
Lagoons (Jazz)
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The
Toboggan (Jazz)
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Red
Dancer (Jazz)
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The Clown (Jazz)
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Dance (Jazz)
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Matisse Henri
(see collection) |
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Matisse at
work in his Nice studio, 1952 |
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The Circus (Jazz)
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Icarus (Jazz)
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The Sword-Swallower (Jazz)
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The
Nightmare of the White Elephant (Jazz) |
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The Heart
(Jazz) |
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The Horse,
the Squire and the Clow (Jazz) |
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The Burial
of Pierrot (Jazz) |
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The Woman
Swimming in the Aquari (Jazz) |
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Destiny (Jazz) |
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The Cowboy
(Jazz) |
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The
Knife-Thrower (Jazz)
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Matisse Henri
(see collection)
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