One Hundred and Two Years Ago

Five small vertical paintings done in Nice this year.  8x6 oil on multimedia artboard.

I've read that when Henri Matisse first showed up in Nice in 1917, it rained for two solid weeks.   He decided to stay after the sun came out because he loved the light so much.  It's hard to believe that was 102 years ago, and that Matisse was almost fifty years old at the time.

Fast Canal and Nothing Is Only Itself.

A 9x12 pastel drawing.

Below is an excerpt from the poem "Camouflage" by Lawrence Raab.

... Reality, Walker Evans said,
is not totally real ...
... If reality
isn't totally real, how real is it?
In an old anthology of poems, beside a line
about the wind rising over water and the dark
engulfing the trees, somebody's written:
Ah, too true! A sigh: truer than merely true.
Sadder than a fact. And this person
needed to write it down in the margin,
as if to tell me, leafing through
that book as a boy, what I didn't know.
Wind breaks the water's surface.
Evening falls. Nothing is only itself.

"Nothing is only itself."   When I encountered that phrase I thought of Matisse painting his still lifes and odalisques, searching for 'true painting'.

Three Canals and Matisse's True Painting

Three canals: top 9x12 oil on mdf panel, middle and bottom, 9x12 charcoal and pastel.

I will try to define 'true painting' in a roundabout way.  The catalogue treats Matisse's work as a gradual progression.  He experiments successfully for the most part during the first 20 years of his career, but he always had doubts.   When he did Young Sailor II,  an early abstract/realist painting, he "told friends that [it] had been painted by the local postman."   I wrote the other day that his still lifes of the mid 1920's first approached 'true painting' with "simulated realism through abstraction," a kind of brilliantly composed, colorfully cartoony decorative depiction of objects.   In a section on the first odalisque paintings, which were like the still lifes, except they depicted women, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine writes, "Each canvas of this last series [with two models] shows a checkerboard, which not only signals the matrix at the core of any decorative grid but also serves as a metaphor for the game of painting, which begins over and over again."  

In the next section, a further development of odalisques, Jack Flam quotes Matisse: "Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation."   Here Matisse reaffirms that he was an idealist searching for something eternal, like the icons he admired, and the joy of a lost Eden, seen in his earlier work.  

In a later section that focuses on Still Life with Magnolia, a masterpiece that achieves Matisse's idea of 'true painting', Dorthe Aagesen quotes Matisse: "Every time I've done something successfully, I say to myself, 'that's it, I've got it, I understand'; but no, nothing has been learned.  The conclusion of the picture is another picture."   True painting involves a continual search.

Matisse appears to find 'true painting' in the final series of Vence interiors during the mid- late 

1940s.  These were done quickly, unlike the paintings of the previous couple decades, for which Matisse wanted to make everyone understand the endless stages of each painting despite their simple-appearing final version.  Again, another wonderful quote from Matisse in the section by Cecile Debray:   "What I experienced after the operation was a liberation.  I told myself that life was gratis from now on.  Up until then I had felt overwhelmed by Courbet's saying that 'one always had to be capable of doing a picture over again, to be sure that one was not just being played on by one's nerves and chance.'  So I would do my pictures over again to try and find the law that governed my work, and I destroyed them so as to be able to begin again.

It came to me like a ray of sunlight on my house, a kind of liberation.

Before, between my studio and the world outside, there was no complete continuity.  Before, I would change the spirit somewhat, there was always a slight gap between nature and what I did: for example, I would look at the sea, and in what I did, the breath one finds in the sea would be missing.  Now I no longer understand everything I am doing.  I don't know why."

It seems that Matisse found 'true painting' when he stopped looking for it.

A related quote:  in the section on Matisse's Moroccan landscapes Cecile Debray writes, "He had come to dread the landscape genre, which he had rarely practiced after  his Fauve period, because he found the mutability of nature incompatible with his attempts to simplify and stabilize his compositions."

I find this comment fascinating.  Nature can overwhelm the artificiality of painting if you let it.

Two Canals and True Painting Possibly

Two canals, top is 9x12 oil on mdf panel, and bottom is 9x12 pastel.

I continue on my journey in the land of 'true painting'.  Here's a quote from Cecile Debray from the catalog, regarding Matisse still lifes from the mid-20's:  " The still lifes with bouquets of anemones from 1924-25... stem not only from Matisse's reexamination of his earlier works,  such as the paintings of flowers from 1905-8, but also from Impressionism and its avatars.  Accompanying these influences was the artist's synthesis of an abstract (decorative) space and a realist (illusionist) one, what Pierre Schneider has termed a 'simulated realism through abstraction.'"

The phrase 'simulated realism through abstraction' is getting awfully close to 'true painting'.

Dark Canal, Dark Woods and True Painting Revisited

A 9x12 oil on mdf panel of the canal.

A couple days ago I was able to borrow the catalog Matisse: In Search of True Painting.  I saw the exhibition earlier this year at the Met.  I am now a third of the way through the book, and still haven't encountered a definition of 'true painting'.   The only reference so far is that Matisse once said he wanted to reach 'true painting'.  I suppose after I finish reading the catalog, I will have to define it myself.

Another Route 2

8x10 pastel.  Just like Matisse, I am in search of true painting, so I think I will do this one again.  I saw the exhibition at the Metropolitan this weekend.   Early on Matisse would do a second painting to advance beyond the first.  Later in his career, he would keep painting it over and over again until he was satisfied.  Presumably, he washed away what he did the day before, since the final version shows no evidence of earlier efforts.

Steep Hill

9x12 pastel of Sheep Hill, which is a steep hill.  This view is from the northern end looking back towards the Hopper from last Sunday morning.

Here's a comment from Arnheim: "In his travel diary Meerfahrt mit Don Quixote, Thomas Mann reports being struck by the unique trick of Cervantes, which I too, pondered last summer.  Writing a second volume of his work fifteen years after the first volume was published, Cervantes makes the first volume a book read by some characters in the second.  He thereby turns the story told as a reality in the first volume into a mere narration figuring in a secondary reality, which has taken over from the first.  This dizzying performance could be compared with, and clarified by, the practice of painters such as Matisse or Seurat, who showed their own earlier works hanging on the walls of their paintings of interiors."

Bergen and Washington

Finally, I just declared the Pierre Schneider Matisse book to have been read, even though I skimmed the last few pages.  I do think it's probably one of the great 20th century art books, but I just wanted to get onto something else.

Barber Pole Barn

This is an 18x24 oil of a famous barn in Hancock, MA on Route 43.  The other barn is in the background left.  The main barn is the distant one in the previous painting.

One more quote from the Schneider book on Matisse (I am almost done reading it): "...when myths are no longer viable, the process of identification remains the sole manifestation of the sacred.  To 'go out of yourself,' in order to become one with the model--be it a parakeet, a shell, or a woman--to feel ecstasy, is to know the divine: 'Do I believe in God? --Yes, when I work.'"  So said Matisse.

Evening Canal Sketch

Here's a key passage in the Schneider Matisse book describing the work of the 1920's in Nice: "The difficulty was that a return to realistic representation was at once necessary and impossible. Unless--and this was the solution Matisse was looking for--the abstract image could be made to look like a realistic representation. For Matisse was no longer satisfied with merely combining the two- and three-dimensional space to create effects which had so far been produced by three-dimensional space. It was no longer a question of skillfully combining realism with abstraction, but of getting abstraction to simulate realism."

Feeder Canal

This canal view, which is located at the end of my street, feeds my imagination constantly. This morning it was different than above. The canal's formal name is the Delaware & Raritan Feeder Canal, since it feeds another canal with water from the Delaware River. The above is a 12 x 24 oil.

I keep plowing through the Schneider book on Matisse. It is the best book on Matisse available today, but it's long, heavy, and somewhat repetitive. However, it's so unusual that I will keep on reading. Here's another excerpt: "Science can only move forward; art alone has the capacity to return to its beginnings. Through art, the primordial remains accessible to us. Art has a way of communicating that has not changed since the beginning (do we understand a Fayum portrait any less well than a portrait by Manet? has there been any progress from the former to the latter?), but this language has been drowned out by another language. The return to the sources of the sacred coincided with the reduction of painting to itself. Matisse recalled this fact at the end of his career: 'All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines and colors: if it is not religious, it does not exist. If it is not religious, it is only a matter of documentary art, anecdotal art, which is no longer art. Which has nothing to do with art.'"

Which words make me consider that many approach art as if it is science, always on some kind of progression, as if what you are doing today was done yesterday. So it's all been done already. Why bother making any more pictures? Because there's always something new to discover, something new that will feed your imagination, even if it's old.

Orange and Matisse

Pierre Schneider writes, " Matisse was probably the first artist to have elevated the orange to this rank [king]. (Cezanne and Gauguin had favored the apple.) There is a reason for this and it has to do with the physical nature of the fruit: unlike the apple, or Chardin's beloved peach, the orange has an even intensity of color which resists shading, modeling, and being put in perspective. Whereas the peach, for example is only partly pink, the orange is wholly orange. In the process of transferring this particular object from reality to painting, nothing seems left out, nothing seems added: the orange becomes a bright spot on the canvas without the painter having to do anything about it ... the orange is the fruit d'or, the golden fruit. Thus it has gradually come to replace the apple as the foremost fruit of the garden of paradise ... Thus the orange was to Matisse's personal cult of Elysium what bread and wine are to Christianity."

The above is a 5x7 pastel of an orange. I don't think I can find as deep a quote for the other pastels of garlic, onion, and pear that I have also done.

Quick Hopper and Sacred Matisse

A quick 8x10 pastel of the Hopper view.

Pierre Schneider in his book on Matisse repeatedly makes the case that Matisse is a painter of the sacred, a religious artist: In Notes of a Painter, he speaks of "my religious awe towards life." Elsewhere in the same text, he stresses the identity of the impression experienced and the pictorial expression. It is not to misrepresent Matisse to say that here he is glimpsing a religious art, and that he has been led to this vision by his recognition of the fact that decoration must speak and that it can speak only of one thing: the sacred.

Brooklyn a la Matisse

This is how Matisse would paint a Brooklyn scene. Maybe, maybe not. It's a 17x17 1/2 inch oil, the companion of Park Scene below.

Pierre Schneider quotes Odilon Redon, in relation to Matisse, "...let us at least try to give to seen color the pure and supreme beauty of felt color; all of modern art is there..."

Garbage Bags in Brooklyn and Matisse's Emotion

This is the corner of St. Marks and Grand when the garbage bags were out, as well as the sunshine.

Matisse said, "I do not create a woman, I make a picture." Pierre Schneider, comparing Matisse and Manet in terms of painting and the subject, goes on to write, "Yet the picture should not be painted to the detriment of the subject...This complete contradiction ["between the painting and the subject"] has to be--can only be--resolved by an act of intuition. Though Manet never expressed his thoughts on the nature of such an act, he would probably have agreed with the definition propounded by Matisse on numerous occasions: the identification of the subjective and the objective in the work, which expresses not the thing seen but the sensation--Matisse calls it "the emotion"--it triggers in the artist. For this to take place, the painter must renounce his acquired knowledge and let the unlooked-for enter into his picture. Decisive for Matisse was the role of what Mallarme, speaking of Manet, calls his "instinct" (and which he himself sometimes called the "unconscious").

Cannes View, More Matisse

9x12 pastel.

According to Spurling after several operations in 1942, when he almost died, he spent the last twelve years of his life with a colostomy. However, during that period he created some of his most colorful and joyous artworks.

I have started reading the Pierre Schneider Matisse book. Many illustrations and excellent text.

Here are some Matisse quotes from the Schneider book:

"Retain only what cannot be seen."

"That which can be learned is not worth teaching."

"He who wants to dedicate himself to painting should start by cutting out his tongue."

"Like all artists who have taken the trouble to use their minds, I am acquainted with all the known theories, but, as far as I am concerned, I have no theory when I am working."

Dean and Grand Again

This is a view of Dean and Grand looking in the opposite direction. Both 9x12. The oil is on a mdf panel.

Early in his career Matisse started wearing a suit and tie to confound his critics and public who expected to meet a wild man. He seems to have painted in a suit and tie as well. There's a famous 1918 self-portrait in which he is fully dressed for the office, except he is painting. He must have been a deliberate and careful painter, despite all the painting and re-painting he supposedly did. If I wore a suit and tie when painting, I would have paint on it within seconds.

According to Spurling, Matisse was also celebrated as the painter who best represented the philosophy of Henri Bergson in terms of dealing with reality and emotion. Matisse was suspicious of this claim because Bergson preferred dull, academic paintings. There's the thought and there's the reality that don't often coincide. Just like painting.

Tree with Sign

All I have is this morning's Walk-n-Draw. The sign on the tree does not say "Tree." It only says "No Parking."

John Jacobus in his Matisse book writes, "Very few twentieth-century painters have joined Matisse in perpetuation of the vision of a terrestrial paradise populated by gods in human guise, or humans in godlike attitudes. In projecting his imaginary studio and in working out the actual decorative canvases of Dance and Music for Shchukin, the artist had achieved a significant fusion of two elements in his work. He had found that the visions of a mythological harmony that he had expressed again and again in his large figure compositions of 1905-1910 could be expressively (and not just anecdotally) incorporated in his studio concept, a theme that reached back to his dark pictures dating from before 1900. Stretching a point, it might be contended that the whole of his subsequent work is predicated upon this illuminating insight."

This explains all those odalisques. The studio was the paradise where all his anxiety could find some resolution.

Washington Avenue

A 12 x 24 oil of a Brooklyn scene.

I read somewhere that Andrew Wyeth was outside once doing a watercolor. A couple people wandered over to peek. Wyeth overheard one tell the other that the painter was an amateur who didn't know anything about art. In the first volume of the Matisse biography, Spurling recounts that Matisse once met Madame Cezanne after her husband had died. She told Matisse that her husband had been an old fool who did not know anything about art.

Brooklyn Street Opening

This is an 11x14 pastel.

In case you are wondering why so much Brooklyn. My grandson, who was born almost a month ago, lives in Brooklyn. I expect to make many trips to Brooklyn, which is fortunate since I have wanted to do urban pictures for a while, and Brooklyn is an amazing place.

Matisse: Matisse invented modern painting. Here's an excerpt from the Matisse book by Lawrence Gowing, writing about the great period from 1910 to 1918 or so and the painting The Blue Window : "The supremacy that colour attained in these pictures was quite new and unparalleled. Colour was no longer put to any descriptive or expressive purpose. It was simply itself, the homogeneous primal substance. The development culminated in an inspired invention. Can anyone forget when he first became aware of La fenetre bleue? In a moment one knew one of the simplest and most radiant ideas in the whole of art, the idea that the shapes of things are immaterial except as fantastic vessels -- a dish, a vase, a pot like a chalice, a tree like a bunch of balloons--to contain the airy brightness of the world."

This comment stuck out at me because this very painting I did contemplate many a time years ago.

Here's another comment from John Elderfield from the 1992 retrospective catalog: "Throughout his work, that which separates and connects does not receive light but gives light. His paintings are not windows onto an external nature. They are not windows through which light passes, but mirrors that return light, and with a transformed nature. Matisse thought of his paintings as emitting a beneficent radiation."

We may take Matisse for granted these days, but in his day, when he was first creating the magnificent paintings of the 1910-18 period, he was much maligned. Spurling writes that for years he suffered from intense anxiety attacks and insomnia. We read about a lot of artists who didn't make it because of the physical/emotional/spiritual difficulties they encountered, and Spurling indicates that Matisse, no matter what one may think of some of his art, was a stubborn survivor.