How Easy Is It Anyway?...How Hard Can It Be?

Matisse started as a painter who was very much tied to the things he saw, but steadily he moved to the point where he wanted much more than that. Colour and all the elements of art needed to be distanced from the 'simpler' act of seeing, while somehow still grounded in 'experienced' reality. It's this duality that still gives such strength to his work. And if we think that this was an easy victory, and not really much of a step, fairly familiar terrain already explored previously by Gauguin and Cezanne just to name two who were at least in the same ballpark, we should think again.

I am mightily surprised by the actual record because the Fauve works produced in Collioure in 1905, seem, on the face of it, such a joyous release. But not everything is as easy as it might at first seem.

" More than forty years later, Georges Duthuit described the state in which his father-in-law [Matisse] approached the act of painting, a tension so extreme that those closest to him risked being sucked in with him to the verge of breakdown or vertigo. "The obvious forebodings experienced by the painter-who is at the same time so prudent, and so orderly that people call him 'the Doctor'---made him tremble. During the few years when he was able to endure this vision, Matisse spent whole nights without sleep, nights of desperation and panic." From now on Matisse would never again be free from the insomnia that had first attacked him on Belle-Ile. Amelie helped him through the interminable nights by reading to him, sometimes until dawn. The novel Matisse remembered reading in 1905 was Alexander Kuprine's Yama, an account of life in a provincial Russian brothel which deeply disturbed him. In fact, he could not have read this particular book (which was not published in French until 1923): it was a freak of Matisse's imagination that transposed Kuprine's powerful images of brutality and exploitation in a nocturnal underworld back to the summer at Collioure, when the stable, familiar daytime appearance of normality seemed to be blown apart before our eyes.

It is not easy to understand today how paintings of light and colour, mediated through scenes of simple seaside domesticity----a view of fishing boats above pots of scarlet geraniums on the studio windowsill, Amelie wrapped in a towel or seated barefoot on the rocks----could have seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and colour. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries, going back to painters like Michelangelo and Leonardo, and before them to the Greek and Roman masters of antiquity. He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a twentieth-century art that would draw its validity essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses. "

Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse, Volume 1, Penguin, 1998

Matisse, On Originality

Matisse became very interested in Maupassant's ideas on artistic originality, which grew out of lessons the writer learned as a young man from Gustave Flaubert.

"What you have to do is look at what you wish to express long enough and with enough attention to discover an aspect of it that has never been seen or described by anyone before. There is something unexplored in everything, because we have grown used to letting our eyes be conditioned by the memory of what others have thought before us about whatever we are looking at....To describe a blazing fire and a tree on a plain, we must stay put in front of that fire and that tree until for us they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. That is the way in which you will become original."

There are problems caused by not looking carefully enough at those who came before you, of being ignorant of the discipline (95% of the enterprise is learned....there is no need to even attempt reinventing the wheel every time) and then there are problems caused by looking so closely at examples that you cannot see past what has already been done.

-The Unknown Matisse, Hilary Spurling, book 1 in her 2 part biography of Matisse.

If you read nothing else on Matisse.....

Matisse the Master, A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, by Hilary Spurling.

A certain large percentage of those who went through art schools in the last 40 years see Matisse as THE pivotal artist of modernism and the key proponent of central ideas still directing much contemporary practice. Surprising then that so many misconceptions persist. Long popularized photos of Matisse cooing to exotic birds, playing the gentle professorial role to Picasso's badboy pose, standing like a wellgroomed shopkeeper next to pictures and rooms full of uplifting colour, suggest a person of perpetual calm. Just a misconception. Or perhaps the serenity achieved in the paintings came at great personal cost. We didn't imagine Matisse as a long-time insomniac struggling against nervous tension at every turn. What he achieved through 2 wars, family breakups and grave medical problems was hard fought. Spurling lays out a life of a gentle but driven man in a fascinating way. Much that is new is revealed. If you love Matisse, you may love him even more by the end.

I should have read it first...but didn't....so next up is, The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse; The Early Years, 1869-1908, by Hilary Spurling.