KAREN WILKIN
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the other; the satyr's shape could (will) be perfectly congruent with the
nymph's shape, once he achieves his goal.
More remarkable still, the near-heraldic opposition of male and fe–
male in the astonishing
Conversation
(1908-09,1912, Hermitage Museum,
St.
Petersburg), a picture that constantly provokes speculation about
marital discord. I'm never sure why. Matisse relegates his pajama-clad self–
portrait and the seated figure of his wife to opposite sides of the
empyrean blue canvas, separating them by a window that opens on a
blooming garden, but he links them by what he may have regarded as
the most potent of the senses, sight. There's something Jamesian about
the stillness of the figures, their contemplative gaze, their distance; it's as
though they were caught in a moment of unspoken but significant com–
prehension. (Echoes of Piero della Francesca, who had greatly impressed
Matisse on a recent trip to Italy?)
A
male friend who lives alone once
declared
Conversation
to embody his idea of life as it should be lived: a
sunlit garden, a wide-windowed house, leisure in the morning, a shared
life. The ambiguity, of course, is what makes the picture fascinating.
(That and the overwhelming, seductive color, the taut poses, the fragile
surface, the evidence of thought and effort.)
Most enigmatic of the pared-down figure compositions of this pe–
riod:
Bathers with a Turtle.
The seated woman on the right would tower
over the others if she stood. Ferocious concentration on, of all things, a
turtle - classical allusion or equivalent of whatever it is Cezanne's bathers
sometimes reach for? The swelling geometry of Giotto, the contained
stillness and solemnity of Piero, seen on that Italian trip, are very much
on Matisse's mind. So is his colleague Picasso's
Les demoiselles d'Avignon,
itself a deliberate challenge to Matisse's
Le
bonheur de vivre.
The landscape
and the individual spaces occupied by these bathers exist by default,
carved out by the viewer's willing suspension of disbelief in the otherwise
unequivocal flatness of the bands of blue and green, and carved out, too,
by the fullness of the bather's bodies, the embracing curves of broad pink
drawing. (An echo of Rubens's transparent red line that brings flesh to
life?)
Matisse quickly distances himself from his nymphs and bathers, using
his pictures as the basis of other pictures, either by making alternative
versions or incorporating them undisguised, cropped, or further adjusted,
into other paintings. (This habit of self-quotation persists until the last
years.) The Modern's version of
Dance
turns up frequently, playing a
double role of anecdotal reference and metaphor. No doubt the large
canvas was a conspicuous presence in Matisse's studio, but the painted
figures, bodies already translated into art, function as actual models might
have, but at one remove. The sculptures, themselves often derived from
