80
PARTISAN REVIEW
painter, the interior he chooses to explore is his own studio, more often
than not. The fantasized nymphs of his early years, the Arcadian person–
ages of
Le
bonheur de vivre
and
Le
luxe,
the maenads of
Dance,
soon re–
vert to frankly posed models, but the theme remains unchanged: flesh
displayed not for delectation but for aesthetic scrutiny, flesh turned into
image, often played against sculpture - man-made images that mediate
between reality and art.
The wholly absorbed artist of Moreau's studio recurs in overt self–
portraits, or, more frequently, by implication, when Matisse forces us to
recapitulate mentally his intuitive decisions about picture...making. He
leaves evidence of the picture's evolution, elisions, and omissions,
scratching out and painting over - a record of intense, wordless decisions
made in solitude. He convinces us of an absolute inevitability of structure
based, paradoxically, on fleeting visual relationships that lay bare the
artist's thought processes.
The most provocative of the self-portraits comes later (1918, Musee
Matisse): a bourgeois gentleman in coat and tie, chunky body restating
the rectangle of the picture itself, sits at an unseen easel; his extended
brush touches the edge of the canvas, as though he were painting the
picture we see while we watch - an intensely serious visual pun made
more complex by the self-portrait's clearly being a mirror image. Mirror
and painting exchange places; the viewer becomes the artist. (What are
we to make of the umbrella, the prudent man's prop, hung on the
washstand?) Ravishing pink floor.
Color has not yet announced itself in
The Studio of Gustave Moreau.
That will take a few more years and exposure to Signac's theories and
example, but an important part of Matisse's immensely complex and
ul–
timately mysterious iconography is stated. That's the pleasure of the early
work - it allows us to watch Matisse becoming Matisse. The Boston
Museum of Fine Arts'
Carmeiil1a
(1903-04), for example, presages what is
perhaps Matisse's essential preoccupation: a lifelong effort to resolve the
tension between the figure as corporeal, carnal mass and the painting as
an expanse of stuff on a surface. The voluptuous young woman pushes
towards us "through" the surface of the canvas, boldly confrontational
and alert, against tightly organized rectangles and squares that emphasize
her swelling forms. The mirror conflates depth and surface, actuality and
fiction, captures the artist at work (reasserting both artifice and the flat
surface) and, at the same time (homage to Velazquez), shifts the viewer
into the presumed space of the maker.
