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La Danse, by Henri Matisse
My old friend, Jon Carroll, of the San Francisco Chronicle
wrote the following column a while back. I was just going to quote it,
but it is such a good read (and so hard to find) I think I'll just
steal the whole thing.
Chronicle Books published a collection of Jon's columns a few years back, Near-Life Experiences.
I will tell you this: his column "How To Drive In Indonesia" is worth
the price of the book alone. I have read it so many times over the
years, laughing out loud starting about the third paragraph and on
through the rest of the piece.
In the eighties, I used to see Jon at the
M&M Tavern, at the bar, stack of magazines and papers, a drink, a
pack of cigarettes and an ashtray arrayed around him, deep in
concentration, reading, working. He hates me to say things like this, but he was a true hero of mine in my youth, along with David Bowie, Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, columnist Herb Caen, and, of course, Kojak.
Herewith Jon's Matisse column:
If you're going to read only one
thousand-page book about a French artist this year, make it "The
Unknown Matisse," by Hilary Spurling, in two volumes, winner of
many awards, filled with big fun, poverty, struggle, scandal and
lots of paintings. Cast of hundreds, many of them famous. Can't
miss.
I do want to direct your attention to the
color plates in the first volume, particularly plate No. 6. The
caption reads: "The Dinner Table,' 1896-97. (100 x 131 cm.) The
first in a long line of Matisse's works to outrage the public at
the annual Paris salons; the other three remained too disturbing to
show to anyone except friends in private."
Oh my; it's those naughty French artists
again, free and zany in Montmartre, painting things to shock the
bourgeoise. And what could it be? It is a woman arranging flowers
at a dinner table. The woman is fully clothed. The food on the
table is mostly fruit, including pears and lemons. The painting is,
if not precisely representational, entirely uncryptic -- a plate
looks like a plate, a chair looks like a chair, a wine decanter
looks like a wine decanter. There are no disemboweled rabbits,
watches floating in space, great smeary bits of color, glued-on
bits of hair and fingernails -- nothing like that.
Indeed, had I not known it was by Matisse,
an artist in whose life I have invested quite a bit of reading
time, I would not have noticed it at all. It's an early work, and
does not grab you by the throat and throw you on the floor and sit
on your face like, say, "Harmony in Red" (Google it), so maybe
it's to be expected that an amateur would not see the evident
genius in even a genre painting.
So what was so shocking? According to the
book, the color. The wine is red, the tablecloth is white, the
pears are light green, and nothing is vibrating like a plucked
violin string with super-saturated paint -- where is the shock? Why
were people fainting when they saw it? Why did old friends break
with Matisse over his experiments in 1897? Why were insults hurled
in the corridors of prominent art schools?
Part of it was economic. The academy had
an iron grip on the national notions of taste, and it determined
what was good art and how good art should be made. Conformity was
prized, and its absence considered a breach of decency, punishable
by poverty. Someone who did not please the academy did not sell
paintings, and Matisse (whose family had by this time disinherited
him because of his nonconformist ways) needed money. His mistress
left him because he wouldn't listen to reason and paint the way he
was supposed to and get commissions and maybe some hot water in the
winter.
But it was also passion. Henri Evenepoel,
a friend of Matisse's and a talented painter who had himself
caused a scandal the previous year with a painting of a lower-class
cafe, reacted like this when he saw "The Dinner Table": "I am
filled with doubt and don't know which way to turn for the truth.
Everything seems to be falling apart around me. ... What to
believe, what to do, what to think, how to see? All this is
worrying. ... One doesn't know where one is anymore. All the
painting you see, good or bad, starts dancing in front of your
eyes, it's in turmoil."
All this, I remind you, over a modest
representation of a Breton maid setting a dinner table.
Matisse and the artists surrounding him
were angry, promiscuous, anarchistic, playful, loyal -- but they
were not ironic. When Matisse proposed to the woman who would
become his wife and lifelong partner, he said, in all seriousness:
"Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting
more."
It was a deal she could live with. A few
years later, when they were still broke, Matisse saw a painting by
Paul Cezanne called "Three Bathers," priced at 1,500 francs. He
persuaded his wife to pawn an emerald ring she had gotten as a
wedding gift to get the down payment of 500 francs. The other 1,000
he made up in canvasses, 12 of them, each of them immensely
valuable within a decade. But Matisse was content; when he
eventually gave "The Three Bathers" to the French government, he
said:
"In the 37 years I have owned this painting, I have come to
know it fairly well, although I hope not entirely. It has supported
me morally at critical moments in my venture as an artist; I have
drawn from it my faith and my perseverance."
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