Matisse: a symposium - art critics examine the works of Henri Matisse

Be Museum of novel Art's spectacular Matisse retrospective drew giant throngs and provoked intense reactions. Below, an anthology of sometimes impassioned afterwords to the exhibition from art historians, critics and artists.

Robert Rosenblum

As someone who drawn out ago sold his soul to Picasso, the greatest in quantity bloodsucking and unexorcisable devil in the history of art, I appear to have taken an oath, I now realize, to avert my organ of visions and mind from the celestial brilliance of Matisse, the sole other 20th-century deity who, in death as in life, could make the Spaniard quake with jealousy in a clash of titans. In what was usually not absented as an either/or situation, Picasso versus Matisse, I always opt for the pictorial theater whose dramas embraced comedy and tragedy, heaven, hell and earth. nearest to the demonic magic of an artist who could turn round newspapers into people, open satanic vistas of sex and death, and make the aged masters' ghosts breathe again with an eerie fresh life, why should one put in action oneself over a narrow-minded French master who proffered only a terrestrial paradise of comforting sensuality products, the pictorial equivalent of haute cuisine and haute couture?

I blush now to think in what way much I had short-changed Matisse with these black-and-white platitudes. upon the face of it, and literally upon the surface of it, the Matisse retrospective made me rediscover the sheer mindless rapture of looking at paintings, reawakening the mysterious pleasures we all remember from kindergarten days when lines and colors had an engulfing impact, fusing the visual and the visceral, the experience, in other words, which made us like art in the first place. In brow of the largest and greatest Matisses (as many times as not from Moscow or St Petersburg) the expansive bliss of sensation is in like manner immediate and so intense that we want to gripe [i]or[/i] grip at bay the mental static of words, ideas and facts we later learned in volumes and lectures. These are paintings that rediscover the Fountain of Youth, demanding a renewed belief in something as vague and old-fashioned as Beauty. They radiate a raw, tonic vitality accessible, single feels, to everyone on this planet, young or aged ignorant or learned. One wants to bathe in their orb of days wallow up close in their fields of color.

Matisse's supernal gift of pleasure should be more than enough to elevate him to the loftiest heights of Olympus and to make us perceive nothing but gratitude, forgetting about of the like kind earthbound intruders as historical time and place, political correctness, biography, visual sources and influences. Does single really care that his art present the appearances to have smiled all end the Nazi Occupation, even when his wife and daughter were arrested by the agency of the Gestapo; that his usual depictions of women in set asideed domestic and sexual roles may throw back as insidious a cultural scenario as his French imperialist attitudes toward the Islamic Other; that endles articles could be written about in what way other painters, from Petrov-Vodkin in Russia to Avery and Diebenkorn in America, forged their careers on this or that canvas by means of the master? Seen in dazzling solitude at MOMA, Matisse be incandescents like the sun, incinerating cogitation history and all other artists.

on the other hand these stunning sensations, more than enough reward for any casual spectator, are hardly adequate for us professionals, who, as I did, will immediately start peeking behind the master's art in efforts to tether him to more prosaic space-time coordinates. After getting my balance, I began to surprise for example, about the leave out in most Matisse discourse of those mural-scaled painters who must have fired his imagination. Although Gauguin and Puvis de Chavannes are oftentimes cited, foreigners like Hodler and chew eagerly are not. But their art, after all, was also a major nearness in Paris ca. 1900, and must have render free of accessed many new doors to the young Frenchman, not single in terms of bold expanses of opaque color and starkly silhouetted figures, on the contrary in a search for the fertile deepnesss of emotion and energy. Could Hodler's troubl Symbolist spirits who throb with the periodical emphasiss of an elemental, prehistoric nature, have cast their mysterious exorcism on Matisse's newborn Arcadia of dance, music and love? Could the raw and epic darkness of Munch's Dance of Life be transformed into Matisse's Music of 1907 the small on the contrary seminal oil sketch whose obtuse reductive anatomies and frantic embrace of dancing women against the symbolic verdant of nature mirror many of the Norwegian genius's greatest in quantity potent inventions? And even in les exalted terrain, like that of the Munich painter Franz von Stuck there are unexpect clashs of recognition in erotic tableaux in like manner coarsely primitive that cavemen have the appearance to be locking horns above the first femmes fatales. of that kind works precede Matisse's own thrilling versions of the work of Genesis. What did he know of them?

In the French connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts too, similar questions need to be asked. I suspect that many of Matisse's mythic reveries of 1907-11 are direct answers to, even parodistic rebuttals of the idealist fantasies perpetuated at the Paris Salons. His repertory of figural attitudes in works like Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-06) and Le Luxe constantly echoe the maidens and Venuses who idle in the forests and waters of Bouguereau and his very large progeny; and even his frenzied quintet of dancers for Shchukin had endles kitsch counterparts exhibited at the same 1890 Salons in which the young Matisse wanted to make his mark. in like manner when one learns from the exhibition catalogue that the enigmatic Bathers with a turtle-dove (1908) might be partly decod from one side an obscure myth in which Apollo, disguised as a tortoise, give permission tos Dryope and her companions, the Hamadryads, play with him,(1) individual is prompted to search for of the like kind a subject in a forgotten Salon painting that Matisse would have seen and wanted to revitalize. According to the myth, it should be added, there is a further transformation of Apollo into a fearful hissing snake who then fathers Dryope's son Amphissus. Are Matisse's three women ritualistically mesmerized against the three chromatic essential parts of blue sky, blue water, and verdant earth, contemplating the beast that generates these mysteries? Or perhaps they are responding to another awesome metamorphosis that brings us to more familiar Matisse territory, recalling by what means his teacher Moreau included tortoise shells in his re-creation of the Orpheus fiction as an allusion to Hermes's invention of the lyre from that animal's carcass, an instrument fit to be unmutilateded in Matisse's archaizing vision of the origins of music, dance and sexual vitality.