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0 I would be more impressed by Jack Flam’s delicacy, a standard compunction of Matisse scholars still apparent in the distinctly G-rated catalog texts of John Elderfield’s great MoMA show, if I thought Flam covered his ears and hummed when interviewees started relating the artist’s amours. I rather suspect he listened avidly. So would you, and perhaps for reasons besides vulgar curiosity—not that there is anything felonious about vulgar curiosity, whose most effective cure is in being satisfied. You might, like me, be fed up with an exaggerated discretion that seems compounded by the indignantly maintained immunities of bourgeois gentlemen and the old formalist horror of tainting art with life. You might feel as well that a certain fullness of meaning and a depth of reality are missing from your comprehension of this figure so fundamental to everybody’s initiation into Western modern culture.
After sizing up the breadth and complexity of Matisse’s art in the MoMA show, I do indeed want gossip about the artist. I do not mean piquant anecdotes. I mean what Matisse did with which models, how he treated his family, what people who knew him really thought of him and so on. You know the lowdown. Here was a man who agonized in the creation of apparently shadowless pleasure. There was a galley slave of delight. Concealment of emotion—even as he drew energy from emotion—was his method, more or less. Elderfield in his catalog essay theorizes ably on the psychological mechanics of Matisse’s work, but his account is frustratingly abstract for want of biographical grit. The how and even the why of Matisse’s sublimation are meager topics without the narrative nourishment of the what.
Start with Lorette, a smoking gun if ever there was one. Seemingly nobody knows so much as her last name. Matisse painted this black-haired woman, often with remarkable grimness, some 50 times in the years 1916-17. He was morbidly obsessed by her, it was obvious, during a time of decline from his period of greatest invention and also of the increasing domestic misery that he would flee when decamping to Nice. (Did he flee Lorette as well?) Elderfield helpfully hung a room at MoMA with nothing but Lorettes, including a full-length nude that is the most coarsely sensual of all the artist’s images. No reviewer I read picked up the cue. Face it. We have been as conditioned to overlook strange behavior in Matisse as children of a dysfunctional paterfamilias.
Matisse’s veiled private life is inevitably contrasted with the open book of Picasso’s. (Has anyone commented on the ethnic-class component of the difference? By being an arriviste Spaniard, Picasso waived a Frenchman’s privileged privacy; his monkeyshines were a fair public sport.) I believe that backstairs stuff actually would be more useful in Matisse’s case than it is in that of Picasso, whose emotional and sexual motives—or their pointed abnegation (not sublimation) in the intellectual gesture of Cubism—are right out front. The tales of Picasso’s mistresses serve us mainly as aides-memoir in tracking his periods. The cold, shifty, self-absorbed Matisse is something else again, with his Arcadian thematics that twist and turn in obedience to obscure pressures. With a rare exception like Bonheur de vivre, where he left dreamlike clues in plain sight, Matisse’s pictures never expose his personality, only his talent. This very opacity is loaded with personal import.
Of course, we should learn to take Matisse’s work, like that of any artist, in the way he meant it to be taken. But where is it written that we have to stop there? In wanting to know Matisse the man, I am seeking only a supplementary nuance, another point of access to the art—in this instance, the hidden term of dialectic, the troubling feeling that accounts for the intensity of Matisse’s sunny-side-upness. The need for biographical data grows more peremptory with time (even as it gets harder to come by). Each new generation is naturally more ignorant of the social codes, including artistic style, that carried tacit information to the artist’s contemporaries. Less and less about Matisse, as about any historical figure, goes without saying. For no end of reasons, then, let’s a dish.
Peter Schejeldahl
