The stuff of genius
Matisse filled his studio with objects to serve as props and inspiration. is thrilled to see them reunited with his paintings
A1946 black and white photograph, taken by Hélène Adant, shows an array of vessels, but also a small sculpture and an octagonal Moorish table. Henri Matisse annotated the photograph on the reverse – ‘Objects that have been of use to me nearly all my life.’
They are grouped casually, as you can see in the photo (facing page), but it is easy to pick out prime objects, familiar from his paintings and drawings. There is a two-handled green glass vase, 17thcentury blue and white Delftware, a lidded, fluted pewter jug, a silver jug, with a turned, wooden side handle, for making hot chocolate, and a celadon Qing dynasty vase with a flared base and top held together by a reassuring central knop.
Adant’s photograph is central to Matisse in the Studio, a show that complements and develops the Royal Academy’s dazzling 2005 Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams.
That exhibition was informed by the brilliant biographical researches of Hilary Spurling, in which she demonstrated the centrality of textiles to Matisse’s creative life. He grew up with them in the northern weaving town of Bohain-en-vermandois, and used the flat areas of colour and abstract tendencies of textiles as a defence against the sterility of academic art training.
‘I built up my own little museum of swatches,’ he recalled of his student days. Matisse in the Studio inevitably includes what Matisse called his ‘noble rags’, the catholic range of textiles from his collection. But it also takes in his informal museum of ceramics, glass, metalware, furniture, and African figures and masks; much loved things, taken from studio to studio, from home to home.
Their monetary worth did not interest Matisse. This was his working archive, a personal universe, beyond commoditised value. He noted that Rembrandt produced biblical scenes, using cheap goods from a Turkish bazaar as props, ‘yet they conveyed all of his emotion’.
Matisse’s engagement with his collection was similarly to do with emotion, fetishistic rather than analytical. But his jugs and vases suggest the power of decorative art, teaching him through their presence, their weight and heft.
In different paintings, their roles change. As Matisse explained, ‘I have worked all my life before the same objects… The Object is an actor. A good actor can have a part in ten different plays; an object can play a role in ten different pictures.’
Part of the pleasure of this show lies in simply matching physical objects and paintings. Take his lidded, fluted pewter jug, painted first, austerely, when Matisse acquired it in 1917. Twenty years later, the jug reappears in a series of paintings.
It sits in the left foreground, filled with flowers, on a Moorish table, holding together the multiplicity of patterns that swirl on and around his model seated on the right. Some five years later, Matisse makes fluent but precise ink drawings of the jug, investigating the hinge of its lid, with the forensic interest of a good product designer.
In drawings published in 1941, under the rubric Themes and Variations, the pewter jug appears again, sometimes as a bit player among other objects, sometimes dominating the table-top array, echoing the lobes of a gourd, seeing off a handsome Ming dynasty jar.
The global and temporal reach of parts of his collection – including that Ming jar – also introduced him to new kinds of formal and spatial awareness. In that sense, Matisse belongs to a wider world of early 20th century modernism. That world could hardly have developed without the inspiration of pre-renaissance and non-western art, taking lessons from unexpected sources – from Oriental carpets, from Sung and Persian ceramics, from the frescoes of Giotto and from African art in all its diversity.
The sections of Matisse in the Studio, focused on ‘The Nude’ and ‘The Face’, reveal the impact on his figurative paintings and small sculptures of his collection of African figure carvings and masks. The crossover is familiar enough from art historical discussions of so-called primitivism’s braiding with modernism. But it is made more vivid at the Royal Academy by the actual presence of his masks from the Congo and Gabon, and an image in the catalogue of his first African purchase, a little seated figure, hands and head raised, bought in 1906.
Perhaps less obvious is the subtle influence of his large collection of Kuba textiles, essays in abstraction from the Congo, made of plain-weave raffia and embroidered raffia pile.
Matisse rightly spoke of the ‘mystery of their instructive geometry’. If their influence is harder to pin down, the show’s curator, Ellen Mcbreen, suggests that they taught Matisse about pattern, offering a syntax that was rigorous but neither ordered nor consistent.
Chinese art also gave Matisse much to ponder. The Ming jar taught him how to represent the energy of trees. A Qing dynasty wood panel, into which are carved four powerfully gestural, calligraphic characters, remained a constant presence in his life from 1929 onwards.
In a 1951 photograph, Matisse works in bed on his cutouts, the panel hanging above, a drawing of a figure pinned beneath each character. In a 1952 photograph, the panel hangs on a different wall, surrounded by his cut-outs, suggesting the talismanic role of Chinese
characters, a new language of signs remote from the functionalist Western alphabet.
But, as we have seen, Matisse did not limit himself to a modernist canon of excellence or to high art over low. Alongside his pewter jug, he treasured his anthropomorphic chocolate jugs and later bought a transgressively playful Venetian chair with serpentine arms, its seat and back in the form of scallop shells.
‘It’s splendid. I’m obsessed with it,’ he wrote of the chair in 1942. It turns up in drawings and paintings, stripped of its stage-set vulgarity. It is the sole subject of his ‘Rocaille Chair’ of 1946, one of his last major paintings.
Matisse worked in studios full of objects he valued. Currently we are led to believe that this is a post-studio age. Certainly, there are artists who work nomadically, or who outsource production to fabricators, or who exclude making from their practice, researching and reordering existing collections or collaborating with communities remote from the art world.
Although the studio may no longer be a place in which to pursue the traditional genres of painting and sculpture, artists of all kinds still need a place to think.
The cost of renting those physical spaces has sent younger artists out of London – to Berlin, Leipzig, Barcelona, Warsaw and Athens. The studio might, in some cases, be the virtual world of a laptop or the miniature space of a sketchbook, a studio in your pocket.
If studios are often private spaces, photography has romanticised them. There are grainy stills of Bruce Nauman’s studio where, in the late 1960s, he recorded himself on film, executing simple actions like bouncing a ball or dancing in a square. Alexander Calder’s studio was a workshop, redolent of the hobby activities of a retired engineer. The faux squalor of Lucian Freud’s last studio has been recorded in depth. What might appear to be the resurgence of the grand studio, for a Künstlerfürst, or ‘artist prince’, is celebrated in the white cube aesthetic of Anthony Gormley’s studio designed by David Chipperfield, and in the purist studios for Edmund de Waal by the architects DSDHA.
Matisse might in fact offer hope to younger artists. His studio arrangements were, essentially, ad hoc, carved out of old buildings, part living place, part workspace. And the photographs of Matisse at work in apparently luxurious surroundings in later years detract from the intellectual struggles that went on there.
Matisse’s reputation has had to weather his dismissal as a mere decorative artist, cosily ensconced en vacances in coastal Provence for the latter part of his life, an Orientalist painting odalisques for the delectation of tired businessmen.
Although the art critic Clement Greenberg saw decoration as the spectre
that haunted modernist painting, he recognised Matisse as the greatest living painter just after the Second World War. Nonetheless, cubism was seen as marking the way forward and, by the 1980s, Norman Bryson could dismiss Matisse as a mere hedonist, ‘deposed and minor’.
Matisse certainly embraced the decorative – which raises another question: is Matisse in the Studio merely intended to bring predictable blockbuster crowds to the Royal Academy, drawn by a big, familiar name?
Yes and no. The exhibition works because its curators bring objects and art together in ways that are revealing and deeply thought. This exhibition helps us recognise that Matisse turned artistic hierarchies topsy-turvy. We have moved on from Bryson’s reductive view.
Matisse drew on a world of objects and textiles, the so-called applied arts, to make paintings that recast the world afresh. For that, he needed his collections, the world in parvo, and also, of course, his studio.
Today, the studio seems likely to remain an essential space – even if it may no longer function as a site of creation, home for the elusive and essentially secret moment between a dreamt work of art and its actual production.
Matisse in the Studio, Royal Academy of Arts, 5th August-12th November. www.royalacademy.org.uk