The year of Matisse

Matisse – and friend

It was in early September last year, as a chill returned to the air and the shadow of longer nights crept across the light. Just a short while after our return from the Roussillon, I found a book that promised to include a reference to Collioure.

In which case, Hilary Spurling’s Matisse the Life seemed to offer a welcome way of holding on to the light and the warmth and the colour a little longer.

Collioure merited quite a lot of mentions – enough that I learned new things – but beyond that, the book succeeded in drawing me into the work of an artist whose creative explosion in the village in 1905 had proved a seminal moment in modern art.

And from there it was but a short step to wondering where I might be able to find some of his work in London.

At which point, it’s apt to explain that Matisse and I actually go back a long way.

As a teenager studying art for A’ level, part of the course covered the history of art.

Unfortunately, in those days, I could never ‘get’ modern art – and that included Fauvism, the name given sarcastically to Matisse and his fellow artists after critics viewed the artistic result of their stay in Collioure that year.

Red Beach (1905)

Indeed, it was only within the last couple of years that I even remembered that we’d been taught about Fauvism – although beyond remembering the name of both the school and Matisse himself, I recall no other detail, which rather illustrates my point.

Picasso I ‘got’ – at least in terms of comprehending that, when you can do what he could do at 16, you’re going to have to move somewhere very different or stand still and stagnate.

At around about the same time, a school-organised visit to the National Gallery produced my first experience of some van Gogh in the ‘flesh’, blowing me away with the colour and his use of impasto to such an extent that he became an instant favourite – in spite of not being even remotely photographic.

Philosophically, my tastes were all over the place: I loved the likes of van Eyck and, in terms of more recent art, the Impressionists – but Renoir far more than Monet, the latter being too ‘modern’ in his abstraction – and that was as far as I was prepared to entertain the ‘modern’, apart from Picasso, Lowry and photo- and hyper-realism.

Portrait of Greta Moll (1908)

Indeed, it’s possible that that liking for van Eyck – specifically, a love of the Arnolfini Wedding – was essentially because I could view it as a form of early photo-realism.

There were, I suspect, many reasons for all this, but suffice it to say that, in ways I had no comprehension of at the time, it seems likely that a very traditional unbringing contributed to a mental blockage when it came to anything ‘modern’ – particularly when it was ‘experimental’ and abstract (I had the same sweeping attitude toward modern serious music too).

Anyway, fast forward again to last autumn and the search for works by Matisse in London.

Initially, that took me to the National Gallery, which claimed online to possess Portrait of Greta Moll from 1908.

But on visiting, it was nowhere to be found and nobody knew anything about it.

A week or so later, with time to spend in the Aldwych area of London late one afternoon, I decided to make a first visit to the Courtauld Gallery.

The Viaduct at Arcueil (1898-1900)

I was fully prepared to see that institution’s Impressionist works, its Cézannes, its van Goghs and its Gauguins: I was not prepared to walk into a room and suddenly see, when turning around, Matisse’s Red Beach, from 1905 – and to see it just a few short weeks after sitting on precisely that spot at Port d’Avall.

In an instant, the colours made sense – perhaps mostly because my unprepared response was an emotional one, and an emotional response to a subject was precisely what Matisse and his fellow Fauves were attempting to convey on their canvases.

After all, with cameras able to make a photographic record, why try to do the same thing in paint?

There were a couple of other Matisse works in the same room, but that first sighting was, I think, the moment at which I fell in love with his work.

In late November, visiting the Walker Gallery while in Liverpool for work, produced another unexpected spot – this time, a very early Matisse, The Viaduct at Arcueil (1898-1900), which is an excellent illustration of the subsequent impact of the light and colour of the south on this northern artist.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté, (1904)

And right at the end of the year, the mystery of the missing Portrait of Greta Moll was finally solved when we walked into a room at the Tate Modern to see it hanging there, on loan from the National, presumably.

As for 2014, it brought with it the news that the spring and summer Tate Modern blockbuster was due to be Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs, covering the late works.

It  seemed to be an astonishing piece of good fortune to have such a major exhibition close at hand so very soon after starting to really appreciate the artist, and it proved to be close to a spiritual experience and one that had its own arty ramification, of which more later.

In the meantime, July’s trip to Paris afforded further Matisse moments.

Port d'Avall (1905)

First, the long-awaited visit to the Orsay saw another of those occasions of walking into a room to find an unexpected pleasure – this time, Luxe, Calme et Volupté from the year before Collioure.

Matisse, having moved from Fauvism to what was known as Divisionism, was already moving on again. But in a small side gallery, with few people around, the opportunity existed to really take in this beautiful canvas, both from distance and then up close to examine the brush work.

Like so much art, reproductions – no matter how good – don’t do justice to the actual work.

The Snail (1953)

The week also produced a number of gems in the Pompidou, and then further works – albeit it from the ‘difficult’ Nice period – at the Orangerie.

But when you’re really getting to grips with the lifelong work of a particular artist, it’s as valuable to see some of the less-successful works as it is to see the iconic pieces.

It was after Paris, though, that I decided to take out a Tate membership – with the initial intention simply being to revisit the cut-outs. Indeed, I returned for a third visit in late August.

And for all that each visit gave me something new – and I felt something like pain knowing that it would not be in London for much longer – it is with forehead-slapping irritation that I only now realise that, in standing so far back from this vast piece, I’d failed to spot the detail, in the top left corner, of the tiny snail cut into the paper.

Then September arrived and it was back once more to Collioure, where the reproductions hung around the village made more sense than before.

Taking a look around the new headquarters of the Fauvism Trail, with its welter of prints of the relevant works by Derain, I suddenly spotted something on the wall behind the desk and, completely ignoring the issue of whether that was out of bounds or not, dashed to see.

It was a print of a long, narrow painting from 1905: Le Port d’Avall, and for some reason, it’s not well known.

Matisse, photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson

It’s important – and this is what saw me hasten past the woman at the desk – because it’s as much a getting-past-Divisionism piece as Luxe, Calme et Volupté.

The Collioure paintings of Matisse that are regularly see are, like Red Beach and View of Collioure, along with the famous views through open windows.

But this was different: this was a link to the previous stage in the artist’s development: the great leap forward was just around the corner.

It was the perfect way to mark the end of a year when I finally got to know Matisse and really appreciate his work.

In her book, Spurling writes: “Discussing luminosity long afterwards with his son-in-law, he [Matisse] said that a picture should have the power to generate light.”

There’s more than one work I’ve seen this past 12 months of which that is most obviously true.

And when you finally ‘get’ that, you understand just why Matisse was so good – and so important in terms of the history of art.

It has been a remarkable year of learning and understanding – and sheer joy.

Mona Lisa smile – please!

Have you ever wanted to take a photograph in a gallery – and found that you couldn’t?

While many museums and galleries do ban any photography, others don’t. Still others allow some – Tate Modern, for instance, will allow visitors to snap the permanent exhibits, but not the special exhibitions.

But the announcement that, in future, the National Gallery in London is to allow photography has inspired indignation from some visitors, and allowed the Telegraph to provoke a small measure of ire, as well as agreement, in an opinion piece on the decision.

In one sense, it’s quite amusing that publicising a quiet decision – made in part because it’s increasingly difficult for staff to know whether a visitor is using an electronic device to photograph an exhibit or look for information about it – might actually increase the likelihood of people now taking pictures in the gallery by raising awareness of it.

The issue, however, is not really about photographing exhibits, but in many ways, about what galleries are for and how we look at art and what we expect or want from art.

There’s nothing wrong per se with photography in a gallery. Allowing photography doesn’t suddenly mean that every painting is going to be obscured by people taking snaps of it – with or without the added ‘selfie’ element.

Some might ask why you’d photograph anything in a gallery.  

I do so on occasion – almost always for later reference. Many galleries don’t have general catalogues or postcards of every single work. And that’s particularly true of smaller galleries outside major cities.

Sometimes I might make notes – on my phone or even (say it quietly) in a little, old-fashioned notebook. With a pen.

But sometimes, when it’s less likely that you’ll be able to find a reproduction online, a might take a snap.

As an interesting contrast, in Paris, photography is banned in the Orangerie and the Orsay, but not in the Pompidou.

On a personal level, it was helpful in July, in the latter, to be able to take a few photos – and I didn’t get in the way of anybody else and nobody got in my way.

I don’t think it made any difference not to be able to in the Orsay, but in the Orangerie, where there’s a specific effort to create a peaceful, almost meditative space around Monet’s vast Nymphéas canvases, it would have been totally out of place.

There is an element of snobbery involved in at least some of the complaints. Nobody, I suspect, grouches about a visitor sitting quietly in a gallery and sketching a work.

That, of course, has a sort of discipline about it – it was one aspect of a traditional art education, so has a certain ‘legitimacy’.

The big problem in major galleries, though, is not photography, but overcrowding. And I mean when it’s 10 deep near a famous work.

Scrum at The Night Watch

Then, as I’ve said before, I do start feeling irritated by the ‘selfie with Rembrandt’ syndrome, as it occurred when we were visiting the Rijksmuseum last year and you had no chance of really seeing The Night Watch and a bloody struggle to get near any Vermeer.

I actually had to get rather rude myself and push through a crowd, pulling The Other Half behind, so that he could actually get to see The Milkmaid, which he loves.

Equally, when visiting the Courtauld in London last year, I was revelling in being alone in the gallery of gothic and medieval works, when the door opened and a group of tourists flooded in and I was pushed out of the way so that people could start snapping the exhibits.

I fled upstairs, only to be interrupted by them again as their guide nearly sprinted them around the place, barely allowing enough time to cast more than a cursory glance at anything – oh, apart from taking pictures of each other in front of Cranach the Elder’s Adam and Eve, making crass gestures at the picture.

This is not a question of expecting people to genuflect toward works of art, but of basic good manners and a little bit of respect for the others you’re sharing a gallery space with.

In the Courtauld, I eventually sat it out in the Cézanne room. There are worse things in life.

But it begged a question that why people visit galleries – particularly in those sort of groups – and what art is for.

Is art simply another commodity – an attraction to boost tourism, for instance? Or does it have a value beyond that? In our price-of-everything-value-of-nothing world, I suggest that there is clash between these two.

If, as Picasso said, “art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”, then that implies the need for some sort of contemplation. In the Orangerie, with those Monets, it could hardly be truer.

I get the sense that, with the likes of that Courtauld group – and others I’ve seen being dragged around cities on tours, led by bored individuals carrying a brolly or a plastic flower aloft to identify themselves – this is tick-box tourism and has nothing to do with really seeing or experiencing what they’re looking at.

At the heart of this, ultimately, is the gross over-commercialisation of our society, with its attitude of instant gratification and the dumbing down that goes with that.

These are problems that spread across all sorts of realms of life, not just art, but one small illustration of it is the use of ‘selfie’ to describe a self-portrait by someone like Rembrandt, effectively removing any appreciation of the skill involved or even what self-portraiture is really about.

Not that this should be any surprise. After all, concentration camps are on tourists trails these days, while visitors stand grinning as they’re photographed next to the statue of Anne Frank outside the Westerkerk in Amsterdam.

And all this works in combination with the technical/digital revolution, leading to a world in which people visit cultural icons – not to look at them and wonder at what made them such, but, in effect, to digitally play a version of I spy, before moving rapidly to the next one.

There is another problem with that. Let’s shrug our shoulders and say that, well, if someone wants to race around a gallery and merely glance at stuff, then that’s up to them and they are free to do so.

Which is entirely true, of course.

But at what point does the sort of behaviour and crowd chaos outlined above become unacceptable where it impinges on the experience of other visitors?

You can ask the same question another way: why should someone have the right to play their music so loudly that all their neighbours have no choice but to hear it too?

Those are the problems: not photographing the exhibits in galleries.

Modern art in its pomp, I do like

Les Quatre Races, Ozenfant

Another day, another gallery. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, since we took a day off on the Thursday, heading for the Jardin des Plantes to amble among flower beds and the menagerie (I saw a baby vulture!), enjoy a decent lunch and, frankly, get absolutely toasted in the glorious sunshine.

But with rain promised for the Friday, we had planned for the Pompidou, which was a mere 10 minutes away on foot from the garret.

There was no need to fret about queues: a relatively short one disappeared quickly within minutes of the centre opening its doors at 11am, while we sat opposite supping coffees at a café.

Europe, de la Serna

On our previous visit, we’d seen an exhibition on architect Richard Rodgers, who had co-designed the Pompidou itself, and had also taken in some of the most modern exhibits.

Now to be quite frank, I have little memory of what we saw of the latter – other than a Jackson Pollock – because my feet were in the process of murdering me.

So this time, I was determined to see the key collection covering the 70 years of the 20th century.

Thus we headed to the top of the building to find ourselves at the start of a walk into artistic modernity.

It begins with two works by artists previously unknown to me.

First, straight ahead as you enter, is Les Quatre Races, a vast piece by Amédée Ozenfant from 1928, which uses highly simplified human forms and interesting, architectural textures to create an optimistic view of a post-WWI future.

Girl With a Black Cat, Matisse

The architectural aspect is not surprising when you read that Ozenfant was, with Le Corbusier, a co-founder of the Purist movement.

However, we then find Ismaël de la Serna’s Europe – painted in around 1935, as Spain was on the cusp of the civil war – and this is something altogether less hopeful: a view of a continent being handed, once again, to death.

It’s a disturbing canvas, brilliantly executed.

Beyond that, one of the next things to see was a Matisse canvas – Girl With a Black Cat (1910), which was posed by his daughter, Marguerite, and had been in a private collection until last year.

And through a door next to it was an entire room – albeit a small one – full of nothing but works by Matisse, including Portrait of Auguste Pellerin II (1916-17) and Portrait de Greta Prozor (1916).

Femme nue couché, Picasso

Beyond that was a larger room, hung on one long wall with a couple of dozen paintings, like the rooms of early 20th-century Parisian collectors such as the Steins.

High up were a couple of works by artists who were very clearly trying to emulate Matisse and, in effect, reproduce the likes of Luxe, Calme et Volupté and others.

The colours merely managed to look garish – providing an excellent illustration of just how good Matisse really was.

We avoided the one tour party that was breezing through and then enjoyed another Matisse.

Still Life With Arums & Mirror, de Lempicka

Luxe I, which was painted in 1907, provided an opportunity to appreciate what I’d learned when reading Hilary Spurling’s excellent Matisse biography.

In this case, the hills in the background are those marking the south of Collioure, while it was painted in the hills above the village, beyond the railway line, because the rather religious inhabitants would not have been impressed by nude models.

Moving through initial rooms, the art gradually abstracted, while The Other Half got vaguely excited by a replica of the Tatlin Tower.

And since the museum was so generally quiet, it was with great pleasure that we able to sit down and contemplate Picasso’s Femme nue couchée (1936) without interruption for some time.

Perhaps I’m wrong or simply linking the blue of the Blue Period rather too greatly with Picasso’s entire oeuvre, but the green background seemed to lend the work a very different tone to many of those I’ve seen.

The Journalist Sylvia von Harden, Dix

Since you cannot go wrong with a spot of Art Deco, I also enjoyed seeing works by Tamara de Lempicka, and while the portrait style might be familiar, It was nice to see Still Life with Arums and Mirror (1938), which showed the style in a less-familiar way.

We also found Otto Dix’s iconic and absolutely wonderful Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden from 1926, which seems to so utterly represent the Weimar period that it’s no surprise that it was recreated fleetingly in the opening titles of the 1972 film of Cabaret.

Henry Valensi’s Symphonie verte from 1935 and Symphonie vitale from 1952 are both non-figurative canvases that I took to instantly, simply because he makes the colours work so well.

These were works that further increase the question in my own mind of just what constitutes ‘art’, and I see no reason why decorative works are not, in some minds, considered as highly as figurative.

Symphonie Verte, Valensi

We found a Max Beckmann – an artist we’d first really encountered at a Tate Modern exhibition some years ago – and Édouard Pignon, whose paintings we’d discovered at the Museum of Modern Art in Collioure, just last summer.

If there was a disappointment, it was that we didn't see any of the Centre’s works by Léopold Survage – but you can't have everything.

In another gallery, we came across an industrial scene by Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949), a French fashion illustrator and society portraitist.

View of Pont-Aven, de Monvel

His View of Pont-Aven (1928) is hardly an obvious fit with that sort of portfolio, but it is a striking image that made me think of Metropolis. It has an interesting perspective and use of angles that creates movement in an apparently deserted – dehumanised – industrial landscape.

In the same room were two canvases by Alexandre Hogue (1898-1994), an American painter whose work focused particularly on landscapes during the Dust Bowl, with an ecological message at its core.

Drought Survivors from 1936 has a naive style that completely belies its theme, with signs of man-made life dead or rusting as the man-made ecological disaster rolls in.

Petrol in the Dunes (1944) may not have the same immediately haunting impact, but it’s still a striking and impressive work with the same underlying ethos.

Drought Survivors, Hogue

The entire floor has been recast in recent years under a heading of ‘multiple modernities’, which seeks to explore modern art from across the world and also by there: there is, for instance, a room dedicated to anti-fascist art.

Tarsila do Amaral – usually known simply as Tarsila – is considered one of the most important figures in Brazilian art.

Her A cuca (1924) is another deceptively naïve work, but stays in the mind – and is certainly shown off particularly well in a snakeskin frame that was made especially for it at the time.

A cuca, Tarsila

The way in which the works have been organised does create surprises.

It was more than a tad unexpected to round one corner and find yet another Matisse – this time, Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background (1925-26), which presented an opportunity to look at how the artist incorporated his love of decorative fabrics into his own works.

Brought up in a weaving area of northern France, Matisse later collected and carried around with him snippets of fabric that he had spotted and liked.

The final corridor, which takes you back to where you started, brings with it several pleasures – not least, Picasso’s Woman in a Turkish Turban (1955) and Giorgio di Chirico’s Il Ritornante (1918), which has all the typical strangeness of that painter’s metaphysical works.

Il Ritornante, de Chirico

Unfortunately, the light from the windows makes it difficult to really see one of Dalí’s myriad masturbation paintings. Perhaps that was a deliberate little joke on the subject matter?

And to finish, a pair of Chagall’s, one of which, Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1918) showed him ‘riding’ on the shoulders of his wife as way of showing how she made him feel.

We were delighted to be able to ‘get’ it without looking at the labels, on the basis of what we’d discovered at last year’s Liverpool Tate exhibition.

The Pompidou serves up a wonderful walk through the first 70 years of the 20th century – and three hours had been whiled away so easily and pleasantly.

And it also leaves the visitor with plenty to think about.

Portrait With a Glass of Wine, Chagall

To talk of ‘modern art’ is, really, such a dreadfully clumsy way of indiscriminately lumping together myriad different styles and approaches to myriad different subjects and questions.

That might not be what the Pompidou was attempting specifically to address with its exhibition title of ‘multiple modernities,’ but it is certainly one way of looking at such a wide range of artistic endeavour over almost three quarters of a century.

Picking just a handful of pictures of the works we saw to illustrate this post is evidence of the breath of ‘modern art’ – and that doesn’t even bring us slap bang up to date.

By the time we were ready to conclude our visit, we’d not seen anywhere near all the exhibits, but I had reached a point of recognising a Rothko but feeling no great need to go and examine it in detail. 

But while a stand-alone trip is hardly problematic, a visit to the Pompidou is a perfect way to continue an exploration of the modern that began with some of the art that’s on display in the Musée d’Orsay, given that Manet is seen as the painter who began ‘modern art’.