Matisse: In Search of True Painting— An Exploration of Matisse’s Painting Process at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York by Adrienne Garnett

I f you are an art-lover, artist, parent, teacher, student of aesthetics or of human perception, you must go to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as soon as possible! Multiple viewings are indeed advisable. This exploration of Henri Matisse’s painting process is a great gift to all lovers of art offering an opportunity to peer through a keyhole into the creative ways of a Master. If you miss the show, certainly obtain the excellent catalog. The reproductions are beautiful and comprehensive, and the essays, to which this writer is deeply indebted, are insightful and educational. The catalogue is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Matisse’s work is often misunderstood as being “fast, facile, and almost glib.”His actual practice was usually unsure and questioning; he was always assessing and counter-assessing his progress. Working in two-canvas pairs, trios and series, he used earlier paintings to spring-board current work and “push further and deeper into true painting.” Other artists before and after Matisse have used similar approaches, but Matisse proactively used this system to progress methodically into subsequent works. To him, the creative journey was as-or-more important than any finished product.
Matisse appears to have begun most of his “pairs” working first from observation of scenes, objects, and/or people as he experienced them. These paintings are often quite literal and are usually time and place specific,
After intently studying the first work in a pair, he would begin a new study using canvas of similar size and shape to explore the same or similar content in new ways. Building on his own growth of insight from the first study, he would proceed to winnow down details and temporal relationships to find more universal and eternal expressions. Remnants of memory and visceral impression would interact with his inherent sense of composition.
However, scholars are not in full agreement about which of the paintings in each set came first. An alternate interpretation could be that he did a rough sketch first and then made a more detailed, “finished” (appearing) work. Some of Matisse’s letters actually describe his process at that time. He often (though not always), made the first of his pairings based upon his observations, and followed with the more expressive or intuitive painting. He always used the earlier canvas to “spring-board” into the next one. Eventually he expanded his system of pairs to make series of three or more works, always exploring possibilities and pushing his boundaries.
Throughout his working life Matisse obsessively explored polarities relating to interior and exterior (both literally and metaphorically), time and timelessness, and light (particularly bright light) and color. His Interiors and exteriors became ambiguous and interpenetrated one another. Some painted forms that seem ponderous, seemingly anchored deep in the ground, become lighter than air, rising like Gaston Lachaise’s “Floating Figure”and Aero Saarinen’s “Womb chair,” massive forms that levitate like helium balloons on a string. Matisse used color as a means of expression, not description, and experimented with Paul Signac’s theory as stated in Signac’s treatise: “Light and color will be clearly separated, and the painter will give dominance sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other…”
Matisse had a local teen-ager pose for “Young Sailor I, 1906.” Still operating within his Fauvist style, the artist blocked in the figure using thin, repetitive pencil lines then painted black over some of them. He filled in some areas with loose, brightly colored gestural marks and left others bare. As the freely applied thinned paints ran down, they emphasized the two-dimensionality and painterly quality of the work.
Trying an experiment, he painted a second version on a canvas of identical size using flat color and permitting deformation of the figure and setting. This radical change unsettled him enough to initially disown authorship of the second painting saying that it was done by a local postman. This was the first known time that he tried forced deformations in a painting. His aim was to “condense the meaning of [a] body by seeking its essential lines.” In “Young Sailor II, Matisse decided to eliminate all narrative information in the background by painting it a monochromatic pink (a pink popularized at the time in works by Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain).
Matisse rented a studio on the quai Saint-Michel with windows overlooking the Seine and the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. He loved that view and was inspired to paint it many times and from different aspects, so the two paintings here are part of something larger and more diffuse than a series. As this subject was so familiar, it gave him room to explore the formal roles of color, his style of representation, and how to determine when a painting is finished (an eternal question for artists).
“Notre-Dame, 1914” is a light-filled, breezy rendition of Matisse’s window view. It seems more like a quick, gestural water color sketch than an oil painting; details, such as figures, are barely notated, entire areas appear to be unfinished. Matisse took a quantum leap forward with his blue “Notre-Dame, 1914. It is the same scene but now contains only a simplified tree, abstract references to the bridge and canal, and the cathedral (or rather, essence of the cathedral). The canvas size is slightly elongated, and the two color schemes bear some resemblances, but the similarities end there. A feeling of timelessness exists in this thinly painted, scraped down, and layered field of blue. Under close examination, we can detect pentimenti (echoes of underlying images that have been largely painted over) in the blue field: cathedral towers, bridge, canal and multiple other details. Because of the evidentiary scraping and scuffing, the layers and repositioning of marks, we can almost experience the intensity and duration of the painting process. In 1912, Cubist artists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, derisive of “decorative painting” perhaps provoked Matisse into exploring a somewhat cubist approach to “no-time, no space” with his beloved scene.
Another interesting polarity is at play with the anti-gravitational ascent of the huge towers as they seem to levitate. At about the time of this painting, Matisse was experimenting with the problem of weight and weightlessness. He seemed to be anticipating Rudolf Arnheim’s theories of weight and implied “balancing centers.” (see Rudolf Arnheim, THE POWER OF THE CENTER: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, the New Version, 1984) . As Rémi Labrusse says in his exhibition catalog essay, “There is nothing heavier than this Notre-Dame…and there is nothing lighter than this Notre-Dame…The black above the towers acts as a restraint, preventing a definitive drift…”
While all Matisse’s paired paintings have the underlying theme of “Time,” that subtext is particularly evident in “Interior with Goldfish” and “Goldfish and Palette.” A specific atmosphere and moment in time pervade the first of these while the second plays with the ambiguous relationships between time, space and identity. The same studio and same view as the Notre-Dame paintings provides the ground for both of these interiors but with totally different outcomes.
Placement of the goldfish bowl in front of the window in “Interior with Goldfish” punctuates the transition from living space to the public outside. Matisse had an on-going fixation about windows as thresholds between interior and exterior spaces. Jack Flam, Matisse scholar and biographer analyzes the composition of this painting in his catalog essay “Time Embodied”: “The curve of the jar’s waterline is repeated in the arch of the bridge, just as the curve of the jar’s rim is echoed by the bowed plant fronds that lead the viewer’s eye to the steps of the distant quay…The goldfish bowl is pivotal to the painting. Transparent and placed near the window, it mediates the transition from the room to the view of the city. But at the same time, it extends some of the opacity of the colors within the room over to the windows and out into the city; the opaque blues from the bowl are echoed in the lower part of the window and block our view of what is immediately below us…A few months later, in autumn 1914, Matisse painted ‘Goldfish and Palette,’ this time zooming in on his subject in order to more fully explore the interior space.”
Matisse had intended “Goldfish and Palette “to include a visual reference to his person, just as he had drawn himself in a postcard illustration he sent to a friend. Reworking the painting, Matisse reduced this “presence” to the artist’s palette on the right with his thumb sticking through the hole. The two angular forms underneath indicate his bent legs. Time does not exist. Please explore this painting; it is a particularly powerful image with profound implications.
Matisse talked about the “silver clarity” of the light in Nice; the light of sea, beach and sky in Nice is extraordinary. He strove to capture the essence of his light-filled hotel room, first by painting two slightly varied versions of his impressions, then in a third and larger canvas in which he claimed to use “black to paint light” He reworked this painting many times pushing further and further into new territory. In his final version of “Interior with violin,” Matisse dramatically cropped the scene eliminating the ceiling, top of the window, the magenta carpet and most of the yellow baseboard that can be seen in “Interior at Nice (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, 1918). The plump green armchair became angular and hosted an open violin case. Predominate use of black in the over-painting as well as the edgy angularity of most contours brilliantly heightened the contrasts. Dorthe Aagesen says in her catalog essay, “The light seemed to penetrate the room precisely because of the black color.”
In the 1930’s, Matisse hired a photographer to document several of his paintings at critical or plateau states in their evolution. As a departure from his practice of pairs or series, Matisse continued to work over his existing canvas while referencing the photographs of preceding stages to assess his degree of progress. He embraced this idea of studying the evolution of a work and wanted to share it with the public as evidence of his laborious process and critical acuity. In 1945, The Galerie Maeght in Paris displayed six Matisse paintings, each surrounded by many of its large framed documentary photographs.
The Metropolitan Exhibition recreates three walls of that Paris show including “The Dream” and its related photographs. Matisse worked on “The Dream” for almost a year. He told his son that this painting was originally “very realistic, with a beautiful woman sleeping on a marble table amid fruit, [and it] has become an angel sleeping on a violet surface.” The evolution of its iterations was seen in photographs accompanying the painting at the Galerie Maeght exhibition. That installation is replicated here at MMA. Matisse said,” Every time I’ve done something successfully, I say to myself, ‘that’s it, I’ve got it. I understand’; but no, nothing has been learned. The conclusion of a picture is another picture.”
Matisse made his final paintings from 1944 to 1948 at the Villa Le Rêve in Vence, France. The two small studies of Matisse’s Vence studio culminated many of his attempts to reconcile opposites. “Interior in Yellow and Blue, 1946” and “Interior in Venetian Red, 1946” continued to probe interior and exterior, still life and landscape, straight lines and curves. Here drawing is especially plumbed as it is given equal yet separate status with color. Both paintings pique our inner sense of order, time and space with the artist’s prescient use of lines and color fields.
“Interior with an Egyptian Curtain, 1948” virtually sizzles with energy, light and pattern. The exploding palm tree outside is drenched in a light that pours through the window overwhelming the foreground tabletop and pomegranates. Black punctuates light. Details seem barely etched into the black background, and are balanced on the right by the dramatic curtain and the potent black shadow cast by the bowl.
“Interior with Black Fern, 1948,” is unnerving. A small faceless and fading woman is threatened by the agitated black fern that is about to engulf her. Her anonymity as well as her vulnerability is confirmed by the table leg thrust between her knees. Conversely, there is a light pervading the scene that comes from the brilliantly yellow patterned floor and chair, not from the dull and blocked upper-right window. Note the black tablet at the woman’s feet with Matisse’s name, location and date etched into it, almost like a memorial stone. Critic Clement Greenberg said, “Matisse is at the present moment painting as well as he ever has painted before, and in some respects perhaps, even better.” Matisse himself may have concurred; he relinquished easel painting soon after to make paper cut-outs, book illustrations and designs for the Vence Chapel–all equally enormous achievements that were built upon his seventy-odd years of pushing “true painting.”
“Matisse is Search of True Painting” is organized at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Rebecca Rabinow, Curator in the Museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Earlier presentations of the exhibition were held at the Centre Pompidou, Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris (organized by Cécile Debray, and at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, organized by Dorthe Aagesen.
This exhibition is made possible in part by Vacheron Constantin. Additional support is provided by the Jane and Robert Carroll Fund, the Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund and an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
“Matisse in Search of True Painting” continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC through March 17, 2013. www.metmuseum.org. u

Adrienne Garnett is an arts writer, artist and arts educator in the New York and North Carolina areas.