| This month marks seventy years since the death of Henri Matisse, a painter deeply smitten with the sun, the sky, and the sea. For those who find solace in his paintings of the blazing Mediterranean, it is hard to imagine that viewers at the Salon d’Automne found his 1905 début work, “Woman with a Hat,” so objectionable that someone tried to stab it. The painting depicted a female face as “yellow as a lion’s ruff and with shadows on her cheek as green as jungle vines,” The New Yorker’s Janet Flanner wrote, in her two-part Profile of the artist, and it signalled the emergence of Fauvism, a color-focussed style that Parisian critics (and, later, Manhattanites) called monstrous—the work of “wild beasts.” (“Please tell the American people that I am a devoted husband and father,” Matisse protested, in self-defense, “with a comfortable home and a fine garden, just like any man.”) It took some real-life ugliness, and violence—the First World War—to put things into perspective. While Cubism’s jagged lines and dun colors evoked blitzes and bomb debris, Matisse’s gigantic and ferociously hued still-lifes of fruits and flowers somehow improved upon the visible world. What was at first an ocular shock registered, in the postwar period and the Roaring Twenties, as a fine refreshment. By the time Flanner showed up at Matisse’s sunny, elegant Nice apartment, in the nineteen-fifties, the painter was a bedridden, eighty-two-year-old insomniac, but he drew great pleasure from the fact that he had surpassed the popularity of his frenemy Picasso among art dealers and at museums. “What I dream of,” Matisse wrote, in “Notes d’un Peintre,” is an art that is “pure, and calm, free of disturbing subject matter,” and that can serve as “a means of soothing the soul.” He likened his paintings to a comfortable armchair, a place to recover from fatigue. Matisse fans today might agree. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment