84
PARTISAN REVIEW
painted figures, that appear so frequently in Matisse's still lifes can, in
turn, be read as metaphor piled on metaphor: flesh turned into paint,
into three dimensions, and back into paint again.
Perhaps the most extreme transformation is to be found in the
magnificent
Corner of the Artist's Studio
(1913, Pushkin Museum of Fine
Arts, Moscow) - the one with the striped deck chair, and the cascading
plant and amphora pulsing in a way that tests the limits of vision. Space
is walled off by a patterned fabric - overscaled pink curlicues on satu–
rated blue - that we recognize from other pictures, thrown over tables
and sofas, hung over screens, and generally tossed about the studio as a
convenient, visually arresting prop. But in this painting, which once
hung as a pendant to the second version of
Nasturtiums with "Dance"
(1912, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow), the figured drapery (a
deliberately chosen description) takes on a new role. Its curvilinear pink
pattern on deep blue becomes an abstract surrogate for the whirling pink
bodies and blue sky of
Dance.
(The amphora stands in for the vase of
nasturtiums.) As if to underscore the likeness between art and object, a
corner of
Le
luxe
is visible, upper left.
When the process is simply one of second thoughts, of an alternate
version, Matisse is equally inventive. Second versions usually bring subject
matter into sharper focus. The poses of the dancers become more dy–
namic as their bodies arch more sharply and legs are raised higher, as
though in sympathy with the increased brilliance of their color; the
nymphs of
Le
luxe
come closer to us, fill the canvas more fully. Matisse
does something similar when he alternates between painting and sculp–
ture, making sculptures of "painting pose "; the body's implied trajectory
through space is intensified, the articulation of parts heightened.
Matisse's struggle to come to terms with Cezanne's bathers lasted
most of his life. It's arguable that the cut-out blue nudes and the disem–
bodied figures of
The Swimming Pool,
of his last years, are his final word
on the subject, but he perhaps met the challenge most fully in what is
surely one of his very greatest works,
Bathers
by
a River
(Art Institute of
Chicago), which he worked on in a series of campaigns in 1909 and
1910, 1913, and 1916. Like
Bathers with a Turtle,
it is a puzzling picture.
Each figure is trapped in her own vertical band, stretching from top to
bottom of the canvas, like that standing model in the 1895 painting of
Moreau's studio. Dense vegetation on the left, zones of black (river?
memory of the waterfall at an early stage? void? light?), brushy white
(wall? space?), ethereal blue (sky?). Is that a snake coming up from be–
low? What about the headless figure second from the left, at once like
the wading woman in Matisse's Cezanne and a regal seated presence?
The boundaries between figure and not-figure are more fluid than usual,
