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owever one judges Matisse’s achievement, nobody can gainsay its multitudinous nature. In Henri Matisse: Modernist Against the Grain, Catherine Bock-Weiss characterizes his output as “varied, uneven, and to a large extent incoherent in style and media,” and speaks of the “brilliant and fractured patterns” in his life and work. My sense is that Bock-Weiss is excited by these complications, which seem to her to underscore the inadequacy “of our received notion of modernism, our overdetermined and prescriptive notion of which art merits the title ‘modernist.’” She devotes an entire chapter to André Levinson’s essay on the two Matisses. Even Clement Greenberg, a critic always eager to engage the central issue and clarify a situation, was impressed by Matisse’s magisterial ambiguities. In a little book about Matisse published in 1953, Greenberg comments that the artist “has never been able to come to rest in any one solution.” He argues that the fact “that Matisse strove for serenity and at times condescended to elegance and erotic charm ought not to deceive us as to the doubts underneath.” These observations are hardly disinterested. For Greenberg, Matisse’s “doubts” and “questioning” are somehow to be celebrated, whereas “serenity,” “elegance,” and “erotic charm” are more of a problem. Greenberg aims to resolve this dilemma, observing that “in this constant questioning of his own work . . .we recognize the type of the great modern artist.” But the exploration that leads to “elegance” and “erotic charm” is not the sort of search that generally holds Greenberg’s attention. Behind all the talk about Matisse’s divided self—whether from Levinson, Greenberg, or Bois—looms a larger question, about the nature of artistic evolution. When Greenberg, in 1957, wrote that “like any other real style, Cubism had its own inherent laws of development,” or Bois, in his essay “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” included in Painting as Model, speaks of “the task that historically belonged to modern painting (that, precisely, of working through the end of painting),” they are embracing—and in Bois’s case simultaneously contending with—what Isaiah Berlin described as the perils of “historical inevitability.” Certain of Matisse’s works—the Fauve landscapes, The Red 54
Studio (1911), the Shchukin and Barnes Dances, and the final paper cutouts— are seen by many of his admirers as fulfilling a historical imperative. They are not so much individual statements as they are contributions to a larger historical drama, involving the steady, inevitable dissolution of the self-enclosed, illusionistic world of easel painting. For those who embrace this evolutionary model, much of Matisse’s work of the 1920s can appear reactionary, as if the artist were taking a stand against art’s inevitable forward flow. Matisse, by this logic, was rejecting precisely what Berlin condemns as “impersonal or ‘trans-personal’ or ‘super-personal’ entities or ‘forces’”—and thereby revealing, at least to Bois’s way of thinking, his lack of relevance or significance. Judged by these standards, Matisse’s
over nature of Matisse’s best works.” The virtue of all-over painting, as Bois sees it, is that each area is accorded if not an equal then a commensurate value. This arguably “democratic” approach to composition is embraced as a rejection of older “hierarchical” systems, whereby (to give but one example) the figure of Saint Jerome is accorded more visual significance than the surrounding landscape. It is clear why a painting such as Moorish Woman holds far less interest for Bois, rejecting as it does the all- over effect in favor of a layering and knitting-together of variegated patterns and tonalities, with the figure’s imposing head and torso having a central, stabilizing force. Bois favors those Matisse canvases that he believes are “tensed to a maximum, like the
literary friends. These images highlight gifts for naturalistic or hyperbolic characterization that some may be surprised to find coming from the hand of an artist often praised for his ability to be succinct on a grand scale. Matisse sometimes seemed to take as much interest in the smallest rococo amusement as in the largest austere decoration. In a 1946 essay, “How I Made My Books,” he observed, “I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting, and I always proceed from the simple to the complex, yet am always ready to reconceive in simplicity.”
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riters who believe that their preferred artistic ideas or ideals are ratified by history have a built-in rhetorical advantage. Bois’s standing among art historians has much to do with his ability to convince his colleagues that history is on his side. He has not worked alone, aligned as he is with Rosalind Krauss and others who have been important contributors to October, the scholarly journal that has consistently argued for a theoretical approach to the history of art. Back in 1996, Bois and Krauss joined forces to organize an exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris entitled “L’Informe: Mode d’emploi.” It was their riposte to Greenberg’s formalism, their declaration of the next stage in art’s evolutionary drama. In the accompanying book, published in English in 1997 as Formless: A User’s Guide, Bois began with the renegade Surrealist Georges Bataille and his interest in Manet. Bois proposed, in prose that is as aggressive as it is opaque, that modernism now be “grasped against Matisse’s first major mural, The Dance (1932–1933), commissioned by Albert Barnes in 1930 the grain,” that modernism and installed at the new Barnes Foundation museum building in Philadelphia in 2012. “start . . . shaking,” with purity reBelow are works by William James Glackens, Matisse, Picasso, and Maurice Brazil Prendergast. placed by impurity, an embrace of “the scatological dimension of base materialism,” and “a disavowal of membrane of a lung ready to explode.” development becomes a conundrum. modernist sublimation.” But doesn’t Moorish Woman have its At times he is in the stream of history, Together with two other colleagues— own kind of tension, albeit an inwardat other times apart from it. For those Hal Foster and Benjamin H. D. turning tension? Bock-Weiss believes who want to align Matisse with the triBuchloh—Bois and Krauss produced in that Matisse’s work of the 1920s is inumph of abstraction, his last major text, 2004 a vast text, Art Since 1900, which teresting particularly for its exploration published to accompany a book of his is a catechism of their historical prefof “instinct,” for a rejection of “essenportraits, can be an embarrassment. In erences and prejudices. In an incisive tial qualities, universal values, or timethis essay he focuses on the importance critique published in The Times Literless verities,” and perhaps also for a of achieving a likeness of the sitter, and ary Supplement, the English painter search for “modernist origins,” meanpraises the verisimilitude of the Reand writer Timothy Hyman observed ing the spirit of Courbet, Renoir, and naissance masters Holbein, Dürer, and that this 704-page book presents “a Manet. And why not? Couldn’t an art Cranach. The apostle of abstraction twentieth century without, say, a Max that wound back have its own inalienends his life with an exploration of the Beckmann triptych or a Bonnard selfable virtues, as convincing in their way enigmas of appearance. portrait; where Douanier Rousseau as those of The Dance? and early Chagall both go unillustrated; Visitors to “Graphic Passion: Matisse n his studies of The Dance Bois where Balthus and Edward Hopper reand the Book Arts,” at the Morgan Lipursues themes from his earlier essay main resolutely unmentioned.” What brary and Museum, were able to explore “Matisse and ‘Arche- drawing,’” which doesn’t fit with their historical scheme precisely those ambiguous byways of focuses in part on another major work might just as well not exist. Matisse’s imagination. While a couple at the Barnes, Le Bonheur de vivre When taste is shaped by a faith in of Matisse’s book projects—the illus(1905–1906). In the background of historical inevitability, facts tend to be trations for Mallarmé’s poems (done Matisse’s Arcadian vision there is a interpreted in particular ways, to make at the same time as the Barnes mural circle of dancers that prefigures The sure they accord with the theory. And and discussed by Bois) and the portfoDance, while the foreground is domiwhen the theory begins to pale, a new lio Jazz—have been widely admired, nated by languorous nudes, women and theory is promptly invoked, so that in the full range of his involvement with men dreaming their dreams. The arguBois’s “Painting: The Task of Mournliterary sources and the literary imagiment of “Matisse and ‘Arche- drawing’” ing” all the old talk about the death nation has been underappreciated. is that in Matisse’s greatest work the of painting is reinvigorated with a bit The Morgan exhibition was based on function of line is not so much to make of game theory, the argument being the collection of Frances and Michael form as to measure or delimit areas that modern painting, as a “specific Baylson, who have acquired not only of flat space. This leads to what Bois performance” of the game of paintMatisse’s most luxurious illustrated dubs the “quantity- quality equation,” ing, can die, while “the generic game” books, but also more casual and inwhereby the arrangement of areas of formal works, to which he occasionof painting can probably proceed. Bois color across the canvas fuels the “allally contributed vigorous portraits of performs these theoretical operations The Barnes Foundation
and tacitly disavowed the first, whose discoveries were epoch-making.” In the capacious pages of the threevolume catalog of the Barnes Matisses there are certainly many sympathetic observations on his work of the late 1910s and 1920s, even efforts to bring together the two Matisses. In a penetrating essay on The Venetian Blinds Claudine Grammont argues, for example, that through the plangent naturalism of this radiant interior Matisse “expanded his field of visual possibilities” in ways that “prefigure the search for immateriality” in his work on the stained glass windows for the Vence Chapel at the end of the 1940s. Of course for Grammont, Matisse’s idiosyncratic realism is mostly significant as a prelude to what many regard as the more radical or experimental works he did later on.
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