THURSDAY, JULY 22, 2010
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SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
GRAY GHOSTS: “Bathers by a River” began as a colorful mural in 1909 and became something much tougher, and grayer, by the time it was completed in 1917. The world has been dismantled, almost like photos cut up and pasted back together.
MoMA exhibit shows a Matisse who’s not as easily recognizable
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down beside a painter’s tools? Yet the as- tounding 1915 painting now titled “Gold- fish and Palette” has a huge slab of black right down its middle, almost as if cross- ing out the pleasure its artist had taught us to expect. The paletteMatisse depicts — the one we imagine being used in painting the picture itself — is a scratchy mess of grays. Even those poor fish are edged in black, as though pulled from an oil slick.
When Matisse’s “Bathers by a River”
started life, in 1909, it was as decoration for a grand house in Moscow. He imag- ined it as five nudes playing by a water- fall, in pretty pinks and blues and greens. By the time he declared it done, in 1916, he had reworked the giant canvas to fea- ture four figures like gray ghosts, barely touched with flesh tones. That same year, luscious oranges in a
crystal bowl become, in the hands of Ma- tisse, more like embers glowing on ash- es.
Even in printmaking, where paper- white is the natural timbre, Matisse managed to find a way to go dark. For just the four years covered in this show, he immersed himself in the new tech- nique of the monotype — and used it to produce 69 all-black rectangles, with their subjects barely present, in nega- tive, as a handful of white lines. As for the pleasing legibility of
“Dance” or “Jazz,” it’s mostly absent from this exhibition’s paintings. You must work hard to figure out the worlds they show. In the poignant “Piano Lesson,” again from 1916 — and another all-time-great painting — a boy practices while a wom- an looks on from a distance. Except that, studying a drawing Matisse made of the actual scene, you realize that you’re read- ing her wrong: She wasn’t a she, but a female portrait put up on the music room’s back wall. (That very portrait, now known as “Woman on a High Stool,” is one of this show’s gems. Matisse worked it and reworked it until it be- came yet another masterpiece in gray, with a bare few washes of color.) The al- most vacant face of the piano player — Matisse’s 16-year-old son, according to the sketch — is split by an orange blaze. We want to read it as a splash of sun but it looks just as much like a wound. (Dur- ing World War I, grossly disfigured young men were pouring back from the front.) The piano’s music stand is graced with the word “Leyelp” — utter non- sense, until you decipher it as the name of the great French piano-maker Pleyel, seen in reverse. Illegibility is almost this painting’s signature gesture, spelled out
SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
TOUCH OF COLOR: “Woman on a High Stool” was painted in early 1914. Note the way its grays touched with color evoke the tones and hues of a hand-tinted photograph, much like the tourist postcards we know Matisse owned.
ARCHIVES HENRI MATISSE, PARIS/THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
OUT OF AFRICA: The Moroccan details in Matisse’s paintings derived in part from shots like this postcard, acquired during one of his visits to North Africa.
right across it.
A photographic vision So there I was at thisMoMA show, en- grossed in its strangely solid blacks, its grays touched with thin color, its re- versed-out monotypes and backward writing, when it hit me: I’d seen all this before. It was there already, prior to and all around Matisse — in photography. Matisse wasn’t simply up against the world in these four years of great and profound painting, as any painter might be. He was confronting the photographic images that most deeply shape our view of it.
At just this moment, when cubism’s star was rising, Matisse had been ac- cused of being old-fashioned, arbitrary, a fashionista — like someone making neckties, as Picasso was supposed to have quipped, with just a grain of truth. For the four years covered in this show, Matisse makes art that shows that he can pull the world apart as well as any cubist could.
But his nods to photography let him
go even further, probing not just the real itself but the ideals of realism that even cubism still clung to. If photography most clearly repre- sents what counts as “real,” Matisse would undo its reality effects. He showed it up as nothing more than shapes on a flat surface. Whereas Picasso’s cubist decomposings seem to happen in 3-D, unpicking the world in depth, Matisse’s cut it up the way you’d take scissors to a magazine. The gray-on-gray figures in his “Bath-
ers” could almost be paper dolls. His “Pi- ano Lesson” is closer to a kindergarten collage than to the in-depth, pry-bar demolitions of cubism. The strangely in- dependent fields of “Goldfish and Pal- ette” could almost be multiple photos joined at their edges. Like everyone alive in his time, Ma- tisse, the great painter, was in fact im- mersed in a world of photographs. By 1913, newspapers had invested in presses that for the first time allowed them to overflow with photos. The new postcard craze was in full swing. The Kodak Brownie had made photographers of everyone. And Matisse bought into the medium’s potential. He had photos taken of his works,
sometimes in suites as they progressed. He used photographs to circulate news of finished paintings to patrons and col- leagues. As a cultural icon, he sat before the cameras of photographic veterans such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and young stars such as Edward Steichen, as well as total unknowns. Most telling, he occasionally used photos in the making of his art. At MoMA, a wall text for Matisse’s paintings of Moroccan scenes reproduc- es tourist postcards he owned, and could have used in coming up with some of his North African details. They were what triggered my eureka moment in this show. It’s not just that those postcards are black and white, evoking all the blacks and whites and grays so striking at this moment in Matisse’s career. Like so many of the era’s photos, they came
At Whitney Museum, a consistency in excellence MoMA has been turning out
plenty of fine shows. Before the splendors of Matisse there were excellent ventures into Marina Abramovic, Gabriel Orozco, the Bauhaus, Aernout Mik and others. It has also had its share of duds. A New York institution that seems to be pushing even further, harder, more consistently has been the Whitney Museum of American Art. Its surveys of Gor- don Matta-Clark, Dan Graham and Roni Horn already feel like landmarks in contemporary art. Its roster right now is typical of the Whitney’s pavement-to-roof excellence. The top floor has a show of the sound artist Christian Marclay, one of the best figures working to- day. In the world of experimental DJs, he’s best known as a pioneer of turntable tricks, but he also has made lots of spectacular, winning artworks: a four-screen compila- tion of Hollywood’s noisiest mo- ments; a moving video where Mar- clay drags a “live” electric guitar
behind a speeding pickup truck until it dies. Those aren’t in the Whitney exhibition, however. In- stead, its curators are taking chances on works that pretty much get made during the show. One wall of a huge gallery has been turned into a blackboard ruled as music paper. Visitors are invited to “compose” on it — with musical notes or any other kind of mark they want — and profession- al musicians then come in to play the bizarre scores that result. In another piece, the Whitney is showing Marclay’s collection of secondhand ties and sweaters and dresses that feature musical notes. Those scores, too, will be “played” by musicians, during a kind of fashion parade. This isn’t the side of Marclay
that is easiest to understand, which is a fine reason for the Whitney to give it such close atten- tion. The Whitney’s middle floor is
devoted to a touring show of the works of Charles Burchfield, the il-
lustrator, wallpaper designer and “regionalist” painter who hit his stride in the 1920s. He is a fasci- nating, disconcerting figure who sidesteps all the critical cliches that work for dealing with most art. The Whitney is showing sever- al of his later watercolor land- scapes, which are reworkings and expansions of expressive paint- ings he made as a young man. They are slippery even by Burch- field’s standard. And on its lowest exhibition lev- el, the Whitney is featuring “Off the Wall: Part 1—Thirty Performa- tive Actions,” pulled from its per- manent collection. Most such shows are built around a premise just strong enough to hold their miscellaneous works together. The Whitney’s version feels tight- er than that, truly exploring a cru- cial tradition in the history of art that had artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Vito Acconci performing their art as they made it.
—Blake Gopnik
SUCCESSION H. MATISSE/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY
SEEING BACKWARD: “Piano Lesson,” from 1916, is one of the greatest modern paintings. It takes a simple domestic scene and fills it with ambiguities. That woman in the background is in fact a picture of a Matisse painting of a woman.
hand-tinted with pale pinks and blues, muddied by the grays beneath, which ee- rily evoke the hues and tones in MoMA’s Matisse. His “Woman on a High Stool” has just
that gray-and-watercolor range, as does his “Bathers.” His “Goldfish and Palette” has a sense of having first been com- posed in black and white, as many Ma- tisses from this era literally were. And then you can imagine Matisse, the re- toucher, picking out its most important details in their iconic colors — in “gold- fish orange,” “sky blue,” “tangerine or- ange” and “leaf green.” One famous 1913 portrait from the
Hermitage that isn’t in this show pre- sents a woman whose clothing is all col- ored, with her face left absolutely gray — precisely as in one of Matisse’s Moroccan postcards, and in almost every other tinted photo he’d have seen. That strange, un-realistic collision of black and white and color matters as much to Matisse, I think, as photography when it is most true to life. Unlike Old Master painting, carefully handcrafted to be credible in every detail, photogra- phy, for all its automatic realism, also came loaded with unreal accident and artifice. Every photo, for instance, start- ed out reversed, in white on black, as a hard-to-read negative — an effect that’s strikingly evoked in Matisse’s mono- types. (Their very tight cropping is also notably photographic.) Flip a negative when you’re printing it, as often hap- pens, and its letters will read backward —as in Matisse’s “Leyelp” piano. Photography’s translation of a colored
3-D world into flat black and white can do as much to confuse space, light and
objects as to reveal them: A black object in the foreground can touch and become one with a black shadow that’s much far- ther back; an overexposed beam of light can read as a surface stripe that cuts a space, or a face, in two. Those are just the kind of confusions we see in Matisse. Even photos that tell us most about the world, like the stop-motion imagery of Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey— evoked in prints, paintings and sculptures in the MoMA show — can look quite unlike it. So, Matisse seems to conclude by the end of his four-year campaign, if photog- raphy can never reveal the world as it is, what hope is there for painting? You might as well go further into fantasy. Be- fore the war is done, he moves south, to the sun and sky of Nice, and begins his great suite of naked odalisques. “When you have exploited the possi- bilities that lie in one direction,” Matisse said at just this moment, “you must, when the time comes, change course, search for something new.”
gopnikb@washpost.com
Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917
is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Oct. 11. Admission is by timed ticket, and some slots could sell out. Call 212-708-9400 or visit
www.moma.org.
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM For more examples of the work on display in “Matisse: Radical Invention," visit
washingtonpost.com/style.
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