Living with objects
The Royal Academy’s new exhibition reveals how the items Matisse collected and treasured informed his own creations, says Caroline Bugler
Artists are always particular about the objects with which they surround themselves. this was especially true of Matisse, who formed passionate attachments to the private things he saw every day, taking old favourites with him whenever he moved studio and continuing to add to his collection, magpie-like, throughout his life. the royal Academy’s exhibition, which places 35 of these objects side by side with 65 paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures, reveals how these statuettes, masks, collectables and vessels all helped mould his art.
Matisse was not a traditional collector or connoisseur who purchased things with a specific agenda. He acquired objects almost at random simply because he liked them, rather than for their monetary value or scholarly importance. His enthusiasm for some of his acquisitions is palpable.
shortly after he bought an exuberantly Baroque Venetian chair with a shell seat and serpent armrests, he wrote in excited tones to his friend Louis Aragon: ‘When i found it in an antique shop a few weeks ago, i was bowled over. it’s splendid. i’m obsessed by it.’ in the exhibition, the chair sits enthroned beside a number of drawings in which it appears as the sole subject.
Although the chair was unashamedly theatrical, many of Matisse’s most treasured possessions were the kind of unremarkable things that households gradually accrue over a period of time: a hand-painted jug from the south of France, an Andalusian green-glass vase with unmistakably feminine curves that was picked up in spain, a silver chocolate pot that was a wedding gift and a pewter jug incised with swirling lines.
All these objects on show feature in his work and all of them mattered to Matisse, both for their ornamental features and for the emotions and associations they aroused. they were constant companions that could be arranged in various ways like actors on a stage to play different parts in different ensembles.
He was also captivated by the art of non-western cultures, whether it was Chinese porcelain and calligraphy, Korean pottery or samoan bark cloths, viewing such items in his collection not as an anthropologist might, delving into what they might have meant to those who made them, but for their poetic resonance and visual appeal. One day, in 1906, he was in a shop on the rue de rennes in Paris when he saw a Congolese statuette of a ‘little seated chap sticking out his tongue’. it caught his eye and he bought it on the spot, then took it round to Gertrude stein’s apartment. Picasso was visiting and he was immedi-
ately taken with the small statue.
It was the start of a fascination with African art that was to have a lasting effect on avantgarde art in Paris and helped to transform the way Matisse represented the human figure, stripping away the detail and outlining it with bold, dark contours.
Matisse eventually extended his collection to include more than 20 African masks, a number of which are exhibited here. He loved them partly because he felt they tapped into the inner soul, expressing the unseen qualities of the person wearing them, although he probably knew next to nothing about the cultural context in which they were made.
However, their simplified forms chimed with a tendency in his own portraiture to reduce his sitters’ features to an almost mask-like state, with schematic arched eyebrows and blank eyes.
Islamic art held a particular appeal for its abstract patterns. When he moved into a studio in Nice in 1921, Matisse arranged it like a theatrical set, with Islamic hanging textiles and North African decorative objects and furniture. They were reminders of the Islamic interiors he had seen in Spain and Morocco, although his aim was not to re-create such rooms faithfully, but to use the fabrics and furniture as props to evoke the right atmosphere for his paintings of women or as backgrounds for his still-lifes.
The reclining women pictures on show may be a continuation of the earlier tradition of Orientalist paintings of ‘odalisques’—voluptuous naked slaves or concubines—yet they are not strikingly erotic. It’s almost as if Matisse was more concerned with the abstract potential of the human figure than overt sexiness and, in some of his paintings, he used his own inanimate sculptures of nude figures as models, posing them as you might a living person.
Indeed, when Matisse painted human figures in interiors, they often seem engulfed in a profu- sion of pattern and ornament rather than the most important element in the composition. That was presumably the intention, as he stated: ‘For me the subject of a picture and its background must have the same value, or to put it more clearly, there is no principal feature, only the pattern is important.’
Patterned objects from farflung cultures helped him as he gradually moved away from Western notions of pictorial perspective towards a depiction of space that was flattened and more abstract. It was a move that would eventually lead to the paper cutouts of his later years, when he created mesmerisingly bold and colourful compositions with nothing more than paper and scissors.
‘Matisse in the Studio’ is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1, until November 12 (020–7300 8090; www.royalacademy.org.uk)