Art
On display
John McEwen
'We're all too sophisticated, that's the trouble,' said the female guide at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as she wearily went through her paces in the Matisse room, 'now tell me what's the first thing you notice?' It was a large painting 'The Music Lesson'. The nose, the way the nose is blanked out.' Seer exclaimed the lady, 'You don't notice the NOSE! Do you? You notice the. . .?"The green?' Some other voice said tentatively. 'The GREEN! That's right. This big triangle of green.' In my three weeks in America, or more precisely the environs of New York for, as we are constantly reminded, America is a continent (last year the foreign tour for members of the Museum was to Texas), I was always pulled up short in collection after collection by yet another superlative Picasso, yet another extraordinary Matisse, totally opposite painters as they are.
Picasso is curious, imitative, inventive and omnivorous; Matisse quiet, singletrack, a spiritual voluptuary. Picasso does everything, masters everyone in a constant creative flux. There is a room at the National Gallery in Washington where, in three paintings done within a year of each other in his early twenties, he matches Manet with Fauvism, El Greco with Puvis de Chavannes, and, in a strange painting that harps back to the Florentines, predates Balthus by forty years. No wonder he said 'Balthus is one of us.' And, of course, his creativity hardly slackened. At the modern `Guernica' is so much more monumental than one expects, and opposite there is 'The Lady Crying', and at the Guggenheim an even later post-war crayon of a Muse that outdoes the Greeks. One snapshot of Picasso always haunts me. He is standing by a car holding an empty picture frame against one wheel to make an orphist painting of the hub-cap.
But Matisse is the reverse. And, along with Ct`zanne, the great show in America at present is of his cut-outs, first at Washington, now travelling coast to coast. Matisse's lifelong scrutiny of colour and form merged in the cut-outs, in the single action of realising the feeling of form while cutting into colour. In this action he lost himself so completely that it amounts to a mystical absorption, particularly after the illness he suffered in his sixties: 'before this operation, I always lived with my belt tightened. What I created afterwards represents me myself: free and detached.' Looking at earlier Matisses it is difficult to imagine how they could have been done by someone who felt burdened in any way, but there is no doubt that the cut-outs represent his lightest, and in his designs for the chapel at Vence, most spiritual work. To see Vence as he intended it one must go to early morning Mass when the only unstained light falls on the priest, in contrast to the serried rows of the blackhabited nuns at his back and the space around the altar veiled by the haze of colour cast by the stained-glass windows. To see the cut-out designs for this masterpiece separate from the realisation is like appreciating a flower through its dismembered petals. Many of the late cut-out pieces are pure decoration, flights of Moorish-inspired fancy, but some also contain great plastic force which has had an impact on all subsequent abstract painting. Some of these were included but the best, `L'Escarge, was not. It, fortunately for English art, is at the Tate.
Picasso once said it had taken him all his life to draw like a child, and both men groped in their extreme old age for some ultimate simplicity. Now schools the world over do Matisse cut-outs, and the day I went down to Washington the exhibition was filled to overflowing with children who clearly needed no lady to ask them what the most obvious things in these pictures were. Matisse's art always evades words, but in these final works he even by-passes adulthood and achieves the full circle with the innocence but not the ignorance of his own childhood.
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