THE FRENCH GREAT’S ART IS ‘JUST WHAT WE NEED IN THIS ANXIOUS, DARK TIME’

 

Like most of Henri Matisse’s work, The Romanian Blouse appears deceptively simple. A woman smiles pensively, blossoming like a flower. Her face and dark hair are mere line drawings.

When Matisse painted it in 1939-40, France was paralysed by the so-called phoney war that preceded German invasion. Turned sideways, the blue, white and red canvas is a French tricolour. With this painting, “Matisse gave France a jolt of happiness and a coded message”, says Aurélie Verdier, commissioner of Matisse: Like a Novel, at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until February 22nd. The exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of Matisse’s birth.

The Romanian Blouse became a cheery mascot to occupied France, its modern Mona Lisa. Postwar film-makers adored her. Jean-Luc Godard stuck a postcard of the painting on a bedroom wall in Pierrot le Fou. Éric Rohmer decorated Pauline’s room in Pauline à la Plage with her poster.

Matisse had planned to flee when the war started, but then reconsidered. “I felt like I was deserting,” he wrote to his son Pierre. “If everyone who has any value leaves, what will remain of France?”

Matisse spent the war in Nice and Vence, under virtual lockdown. His wife Amélie and daughter Marguerite joined the Resistance in Paris and were arrested by the Gestapo. “My life is within the walls of my studio,” he wrote to Pierre.

Yet the only brooding work of art in the entire, 2,000sq m exhibition was painted at the beginning of the first World War, not the second. A black rectangular void covers two-thirds of the canvas in French Window at Collioure (1914). Faint lines seem to hint at a balcony in the darkness.

The poet Louis Aragon spent 30 years writing Henri Matisse: A Novel, from which the title of the Paris show was taken. Aragon said French Window at Collioure was “the most mysterious painting ever painted”. It was an obvious metaphor for the war, and an exception in an otherwise radiant oeuvre.

He wrote euphorically of ‘almond trees in blossom amid silvery olive trees, and the blue, blue sea, so blue one could eat it’

“Matisse is often called the painter of happiness, and for once the legend is true,” says Verdier. “Matisse’s goal was to give happiness to people who looked at his work. His art is just what we need in this anxious, dark time.” As Aragon put it, “The optimism of Matisse is a gift to our ailing world.”

Art saved Matisse from a career as a lawyer, the fate his merchant father had chosen for him. And it revived him in old age, after near-fatal surgery.

Aged 20, Matisse was convalescing from appendicitis. He was dreading going back to his job as a law clerk when his mother surprised him with a paint set. “The mere act of painting made me interested in life… It was paradise found. I was free, alone, calm, confident, whereas I had always been a little anxious and bored,” he said.

Matisse began as a conventional painter. Despite initial success – he sold a painting to the state in 1895 – he felt dissatisfied and determined to break the mould. He purchased Cézanne’s Three Bathers. The painting became a talisman that Matisse said gave him “faith and perseverance”.

Matisse was born in cold, damp northeastern France and fell in love with the Mediterranean during his honeymoon trip to Corsica in 1898.

He wrote euphorically of “almond trees in blossom amid silvery olive trees, and the blue, blue sea, so blue one could eat it. The dark green orange trees with fruit like encrusted jewels, tall eucalyptus trees with foliage spread like dark blue cockerel feathers. And almost always, the backdrop of high snow-capped mountains.”

Matisse painted neo-impressionist still lifes, visibly influenced by Cézanne and shimmering with luminosity. Colour and light would be the hallmarks of his oeuvre, windows a favourite theme.null

After early flirtations with pointillism and fauvism, Matisse rejected theory and forged his own path, establishing what Aragon called “an incessant requirement of invention”.

In his 1906 Self Portrait, Matisse wears a striped sailor’s jersey and stares defiantly at the viewer, his face painted incandescent, fauvist green. For the fauves, Matisse’s fellow painter André Derain said, “colours became sticks of dynamite. Light exploded from them.”

SELF PORTRAIT (1906). IMAGE COPYRIGHT SUCCESSION H MATISSE

Early in the 20th century, Matisse’s work was snapped up by Russian and American millionaires, giving him international recognition. It was slower to find favour with the French.

One of Matisse’s wealthy patrons, the American writer Gertrude Stein, said the Self Portrait was “too intimate to be exhibited in public”. The British critic Charles Lewis Hind found it almost “radioactive”.

Matisse painted his daughter Marguerite – sitting regally, her high collar and brooch hiding a scar from a tracheotomy to treat a childhood illness – with a black cat. He gave a similar portrait of Marguerite to Pablo Picasso, his friend and rival for the status of greatest painter of the 20th century.

MARGUERITE AU CHAT NOIR (1910). IMAGE: COPYRIGHT SUCCESSION H MATISSE

Georges Duthuit, the art critic whom Marguerite later married, compared the 1910 portrait to a Byzantine mosaic.

Hind said Matisse painted “as a child might have painted in the dawn of art, seeing only the essentials in form and colour”. That was exactly what Matisse aspired to.

In Luxury I (1907), Venus stands on a beach, attended by nude women, one brandishing a bouquet, the other arranging drapery at the goddess’s feet. The painting prefigures the giant frescoes of Music and Dance that Matisse would paint for the Russian Sergei Shchukin and the American Alfred Barnes.

Not all Americans were Matisse fans. When Matisse exhibited in Chicago in April 1913, students at the School of the Art Institute staged a mock trial for “artistic murder and theft, pictorial arson, degenerate colour”. The students burned three Matisse paintings in effigy, including Luxury I