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To endow Emma Bovary with his feelings, Gustave Flaubert endowed objects with her feelings. When Rodolphe reneges on his promise to elope, Emma is prostrated by “brain fever.” The trappings of sainthood substitute for erotic satisfaction: “She bought rosaries and wore holy medals. She wished to have in her room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might kiss it every evening.”
“Take that table, for example,” Henri Matisse (1869-1954) said to the American painter and writer Clara T. MacChesney in 1912. “I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.” Matisse’s teacher, Gustave Moreau, had told him that he was destined to “simplify” painting. But condensing and clarifying brought new intensity and candor. Why, MacChesney asked, were Matisse’s tomatoes blue? Why did he cherish a statuette of a “dwarf from Java” with a head too big for its body? How, we still ask, did he do it?
Matisse in the Studio is a study in the secret life of objects and the magical candor of Matisse’s art. Curated by Helen Burnham of the Museum of Fine Arts, Ann Dumas of the Royal Academy, and Ellen McBreen of Wheaton College, the exhibition presents more than 80 artworks—paintings, drawings, bronzes, cut-outs, and prints—with 39 objects from Matisse’s studio. Some of the paintings are held in private collections. Many of the objects are loans from the Musée Matisse in Nice and have never left France before. The five rooms of this magnificent exhibition reveal more about Matisse than a mountain of monographs.
“A good actor can have a part in 10 different plays,” he said in 1951, “one object can play a role in 10 different pictures.” The first room, “The Object as Actor,” traces the career of a silver chocolate pot. The pot was a wedding gift from the painter Albert Marquet following Matisse’s marriage in 1898 to Amélie Parayre. In the watercolor Still Life and Heron Studies (ca. 1900), never previously exhibited, Matisse gets to know his new companion: Miniature sketches of the pot are washed in yellows, brown, blue, and mauve—a kind of audition.
In the early oil Still Life with a Chocolate Pot (1902), the pot poses with an orange on a red book. The orange turns the globed belly of the pot dark red and green; the tonal resonance is so forceful that the pot and the orange seem to be held in a gravitational dance, like the sun and the moon. In Dishes on a Table (1902), the pot stands again on a red ground, this time a tablecloth. But without the orbiting orange, the pot turns racing green and silvery white.
In Bouquet of Flowers in a Chocolate Pot (1902), the pot is swollen and its wooden handle protrudes like a proboscis. Life is not still in a still life: It is as though the pot is eating the bouquet. Yet in Interior with Young Girl Reading (1905-06), the pot is a placid companion to Matisse’s daughter Marguerite. Washed by soft pink in the bourgeois setting for which it was designed, the pot extends its neck gracefully and retracts its handle by turning its back.
In Still Life With Blue Tablecloth (1909), the pot is flaming red, as though combusting within. It turned out that Matisse was more faithful to the chocolate pot than to Amélie. She divorced him in 1939, but the pot, doughty with age, retains its fascination in Still Life with Seashell on Black Marble (1940).
Yet there are rivals for Matisse’s affections, especially a pewter jug. In Still Life with Lemons (1914), the jug is a picture within a picture and a theoretical guide to the eye. As a black-on-white sketch on the wall, it is the flattest object and plane in a picture of flattened objects and planes. Again, when the Woman on a High Stool (1914) bobs uneasily in a sea of gray, the sketch of the jug anchors both composition and color. In Vase of Anemones (1918), the jug supports and amplifies the delicate vase, like a chaperone to an ingénue; but now the jug is ripely curved.
In reality, the side of the physical jug is entirely flat. Matisse has not imposed an abstract ideal of flatness but responded to its actual expression. This pattern recurs in the second room, “The Nude.” Matisse collected African sculptures and ethnographic nude photographs because of their “broader meaning”—a sculptural language that broadened his visual response. In the oil Standing Nude (1906-07), a photograph from a French catalogue of poses, Subject evoking the idea of surprise or modesty (1906), acquires massive buttocks and shoulders and a mask-like face. In Four Studies of a Nude (1910), the abstraction develops from an académie (a representational Western nude), passes through a pair of figures with longer and more rigid lines, and then arrives at a self-contained, upright posture close to that of a Fang reliquary figure from Gabon or Equatorial Guinea.
That posture recurs in the primitivized brothel study Seated Figure with Violet Stockings (1914). As Matisse moves between forms and media—from European to non-European, sculpture to painting—the object comes to life. In the pagan Eden of Bonheur de Vivre (1905-06), Matisse posed a classical nude. She acquires a twisted torso and callipygous buttocks in the sculpture Reclining Nude I (1907); then she enters the oil Blue Nude (1907). She is now an odalisque with a face and a biography, and her subtitle, Memories of Biskra, and the palm trees behind her allude to her Algerian birthplace. In the reddish oil study Bronze Figure (1908), she is back in Matisse’s studio, turning her head as the neck of a jug strokes her waist. In Goldfish and Sculpture (1912), Matisse completes Pygmalion’s artifice and closes the historical circle, rendering her as a peach-toned nude.
The third and fourth rooms, “The Face” and “Studio as Theatre,” contrast two methods of staging and characterization. “The Face” pairs African masks with Matisse’s oil portraits and sculpted heads. In Portrait of Madame Matisse (1913), Henri paints Amélie as a white mask of blank-eyed, tight-lipped accusation. The formality of the mask exposes the “true character” of his subject; the “true character” requires the mask as an intermediary. Meanwhile, in Self-Portrait (1906), Matisse grants himself the expressed features of the European tradition.
When Emma Bovary falls into the clutches of the draper Lheureux—a handler of textiles whose surname promises happiness no deeper than the surface of his products—she becomes a northern odalisque: “She abandoned herself to this easy way of satisfying all of his whims.” In his lifetime, Matisse was accused of shallow decorativeness and sensual pandering, especially after abandoning Paris in 1921. It was nice in Nice—all those bright mornings and languid afternoons—and nicer still to construct fantastical Arab interiors in his studio.
In “Studio as Theatre,” perspective dissolves. Hanging haitis (pierced and appliquéd cotton textiles) from Egypt color the sunlight that filters through their fretwork. The “sympathy between objects” blends flesh, furniture, and fabric in a single decorative plane. In Odalisque on a Turkish Chair (1928), the brown frame of an octagonal chair takes on flesh tones so that the model’s right arm appears to be joined at the elbow to one of the chair’s spindles. In the drawing Seated Odalisque and Sketch (1931), the crook of the model’s raised leg and the ripple of her stomach are echoed in the arcade opening between the chair’s legs.
Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet lack intrinsic qualities and create each other in costume: “They had put on smocks, like medical students in operating theaters, and by the light of three candles they were working on their bits of cardboard.” The “emotion” that Henri Matisse seeks is not that of false appearances but accurate perceptions. To capture “the environment which the object creates” he creates an environment that places objects in tension. “I am afraid,” he admitted to his son Pierre in 1940, “of getting down to work tête-à-tête with objects that I myself have to animate with feelings.”
In 1946, Matisse gave a photograph to Louis Aragon. The photograph, taken by Hélène Adant, was one of several documenting the objects in Matisse’s studio. His jugs, bowls, tables, and African sculptures line up before a curtain, as though taking a bow. On the back, Matisse wrote: “Objects which have been of use to me nearly all my life.” In the cutouts in the final room, “Essential Forms,” the house lights are up. The artist joins his objects in an encore.
Dominic Green is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
