The mastery of Matisse

Matisse, by the agency of Pierre Schneider, new edition, of recent origin York, Rizzoli, 2002; 752 pages, $100

The exultation of Life: The Idyllic in French Art, circa 1900 through Margaret Werth, Berkeley and London, University of California Pres 2002; 330 pages, $60

Matisse Picasso, by the agency of Elizabeth Cowling, John Golding, Anne Baldessari, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, John Elderfield and Kirk Varnedoe, exhibition catalogue, London, Tate Modern; Paris, Musee National d'Art Moderne; novel York, Museum of Modern Art, 2002; 400 pages, $60

Matisse and Picasso, by means of Yve-Alain Bois, Paris, Flammarion, 2001; 271 pages, $35

Matisse and Picasso: The Story of Their Rivalry and Friendship, by the agency of Jack Flam, Cambridge, Mass., Westview Pres 2003; 276 pages, $2750

The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse; The Early Years, 1869-1908 by the agency of Hilary Spurling, New York, Knopf, 1998; 480 pages, $40

Matisse: Father and Son by dint of John Russell, New York, Abrams, 1999; 415 pages, $3995

Pierre Matisse and His Artists, by dint of William Griswold, Jennifer Tonkovich et al., exhibition catalogue, novel York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 2002; 317 pages, $50

Ruthles Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse, by dint of John O'Brian, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Pres 1999; 284 pages, $45

Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors; Masterpieces from the Late Years, ed Olivier Berggruen and Max Hollein, exhibition catalogue, Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle; Munich, Berlin, London and of recent origin York, Prestel Verlag, 2002; 176 pages, $70

Half a hundred after his death in 1954 Matisse's central position in classic modernism--to which he was at one time rocketed by his sensational Fauve paintings in the 1905 Paris Salon d'Automne--remains certain in the view of informed critics and the general public alike. in the way that much is testified by the many major exhibitions (of which the international Matisse/Picasso extravaganza lately in fresh York is the most recent) (1) and a continuing spate of publications. still Matisse remains a problematic figure, a seemingly incongruous mixture of revolutionary and conservative. Educated opinion lay bys its highest esteem for the extraordinary achievements of the dozen years after the 1905 breakthrough, and for the semi-abstract works, largely paper cutouts, of his final decade. Critics are decidedly les favorable to the lush productions of the Nice period following World War I and their following thematic and formal prolongations. on the contrary it is precisely these latter works that have endeared Matisse to the mass public and are endlessly replicated upon postcards, calendars and the like. Their ostensibly innocuous subdue matter--still lifes, domestic interiors, complaisant studio nudes--perpetuated from late 19th-century academicism and Impressionism, strike one as beings unaffected by modern historical catastrophes and socio-cultural transformations. of the like kind subjects, so congenial to bourgeois tastes, and the luxurious indulgence with which they are ofttimes treated, have understandably alienated other, and not single Marxist or feminist, observers. There is little trace here of the apocalyptic intensity manifest in earlier and later works, in which the heightened demands on one's capacities of perceptual integration threaten the traditional equilibrium of spectator-object relations. on the other hand chronological distinctions do not entirely account for such contrasts; rather, they are endemic, running in les obvious fashion end Matisse's entire oeuvre.

greatest in quantity readily legible are the conflicting tendencies toward representation and abstraction. upon the subjective level, these correspond to sum of two units types of emotional involvement, single with some particular referent in the external world, the other with that world's surrogate and rival, the picture itself, organized according to its have a title to internal necessity. Paralleling this opposition is another, that between public and private meanings. Matisse was at no time an abstract painter (though more [i]or[/i] less of his most adventurous works, like as the View of Notre Dame of 1914 or the gold-colored Curtain of 1916 come close) The motif is always recognizable, if sometimes solitary vestigially, and the tension between it and the internal formal economy of the painting is a central mechanism of the work, an unstable balance tipping sometimes this way, sometimes that. The "abstract" constituent predominates in the years following the crystallization of Matisse's distinctive pictorial a whole in 1905. Recent studies have elucidated the mechanics of this a whole based upon the artist's discovery of the convertibility between quality or intensity of color and its quantity or distribution over the picture, and correspondingly between color and shape, and on the circulatory dynamics consequent from this. (2) by the agency of 1917, however, and for above a decade thereafter, Matisse "retreated" toward a more traditional mimetic vocabulary of tonal modeling and perspectivally fabricateed space, in which the illusionist nearness of the represented subject, itself more conventionally imagined than before, receives greater emphasis. (This evolution can be seen as part of a larger lessening from prewar modernism: this was the period of the rappel a l'ordre and Neue Sachlichkeit, and of Picasso's and Stravinsky's neo-classicism.) on the contrary however strong the libidinal investment in of the like kind images (whether seemingly innocent still lifes or publicly alluring female nudes), Matisse not ever wavered in his conviction that they--like all pictorial images--were not in the way that much iconic representations as signs. It is the index of an artist's succes he vieed that he can impose a sign combination of parts to form a whole forged from his own subjectivity on the imagination of his contemporaries as their vision of the world. (3)