Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [102]
Matisse, “The Green Stripe (Madame Matisse),” 1905, Statens Museum für Kunst, Copenhagen. Matisse used color to transform a conventional subject into a vibrating, original design. Energizing the face, the unexpected streak allows the head to compete with the assertive background. Matisse stressed surface pattern, placing equal emphasis on foreground and background, and on objects and the space around them. “No point is more important than any other, ” he said, abandoning shadow and perspective for a flat, ornamental, “overall” effect.
Matisse, “Goldfish and Sculpture,” 1911, MoMA, NY. One of the most influential modern pointers, Matisse expressed the joy of life through powerful colors and simplified shapes.
Matisse, “Dance” (first version), 1909, MoMA, NY. Matisse used deliberately simplified forms and only three colors to portray the essence of joyful movement. The intensified colors (“The bluest of blues for the sky,” he said, “the greenest of greens for the earth”) were so vivacious, Matisse was startled when rays of sunlight striking the painting mode it seem to quiver.
Matisse believed painting should not only be beautiful but should bring pleasure to the viewer. He was master of the sinuously curved line called an “arabesque.” “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter,” he said — an art comfortable as an armchair after a hard day’s work.
Matisse came late to painting, having trained to be a lawyer to please his bourgeois father. While he was recovering from an appendectomy, his mother brought him a box of paints and a how-to book, and the world lost an attorney and gained an artist. “It was as if I had been called,” he remembered. “Henceforth I did not lead my life. It led me.”
Matisse left for Paris to study art, with his father shouting, “You’ll starve!” as the train pulled out of the station. He gained notariety as leader of the Fauves’ 1905 show. In 1917 Matisse began to spend winters on the French Riviera — first in Nice, then in Vence, where he donated a chapel of his own design that is one of the most moving religious buildings in Europe. Matisse was not a believer. His view of an afterlife was a celestial studio “where I would paint frescoes.” He had, however, what he described as “a religious feeling towards life.” After local nuns nursed him through a serious illness in the 1940s, the grateful Matisse devoted himself to every detail of the chapel.
THE ULTIMATE PAPER CUTOUTS. In his last years, Matisse was bedridden. Although arthritic, by fastening a charcoal stick to a bamboo fishing pole he was able to sketch huge figures on the ceiling above his bed. But his favorite activity was to cut fanciful shapes out of brightly colored paper to be glued into large-scale collages. These cutouts are the most joyous creations of any painter’s old age and injected wider scope and freedom into his art.
In “Les Bêtes de la Mer” (“Beasts of the Sea”), Matisse uses symbolic shapes to imply coral, surf, and sea plants and animals. The dissonant colors produce visual excitement and energy. Indeed, his colors were so bright his doctor advised him to wear dark glasses when working on the cutouts. From floor to ceiling the vivid shapes covered his bedroom walls. “Now that I don’t often get up,” he said, “I’ve made myself a little garden to go for a walk in.” The vivid collages were his most original work, the culmination of a lifetime of simplifying and intensifying art. The only difference between his earlier paintings and the cutouts, he said, was that “I have attained a form filtered to its essentials. ”
Matisse’s constant refrain was “Exactitude is not truth.” A subject’s “inherent” truth — “the only truth that matters,