Henri Matisse's the Italian Woman, by Pierre

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Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

PART 1

THOMAS M. MESSER Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the third lecture within the Hilla Rebay Series. As you know, it is dedicated to a particular work of art, and so I must remind you that last spring, the Museum of Modern Art here in New York, and the Guggenheim, engaged in something that I think may be called, without exaggeration, a historic exchange of masterpieces. We agreed to complete MoMA’s Kandinsky seasons, because the Campbell panels that I ultimately perceived as seasons, had, [00:01:00] until that time, been divided between the Museum of Modern Art and ourselves. We gave them, in other words, fall and winter, to complete the foursome. In exchange, we received, from the Museum of Modern Art, two very important paintings: a major Picasso Still Life of the early 1930s, and the first Matisse ever to enter our collection, entitled The Italian Woman.

The public occasion has passed. We have, for the purpose, reinstalled the entire Thannhauser wing, and I'm sure that you have had occasion to see how the Matisse and the new Picasso have been included [00:02:00] in our collection. It seemed appropriate to accompany this public gesture with a scholarly event, and we have therefore, decided this year, to devote the Hilla Rebay Lecture to The Italian Woman.

Naturally, we had to find an appropriate speaker for the event and it did not take us too long to come upon Pierre Schneider, who resides in Paris and who has agreed to make his very considerable Matisse expertise available for this occasion. Let me just remind you of one or two pertinent points in Mr. Schneider's curriculum. He is presently editor of ARTnews [00:03:00] Paris, or former editor of Paris ARTnews, and is currently the critic for L'Express. He has written and published abundantly, particularly about French painters, but for the purposes of this evening's lecture, the most important thing of course, is his consistent and intensive and knowledgeable involvement with Matisse. He organized an exhibit at Bielefeld in Germany, then the great centennial exhibition in 1970, is co-author of a catalogue which accompanies a current exhibition in Zurich, and is about to complete, he tells me he has for all practical purposes, completed an important monograph on Matisse, to be published in 1983. So, we are naturally grateful to Pierre Schneider [00:04:00] for making himself available, for sharing with us, what he will tell us about The Italian Woman oil painting. Pierre. (applause)

PIERRE SCHNEIDER Thank you, Mr. Messer. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a doubly paralyzing honor to be following, in this lecture series, such distinguished people, and also to be speaking in the presence, or almost in the presence of one subject. That presence of course, may have seemed to many of us, as surprising as say that of Mae West in a nunnery. However, while there was no [00:05:00] direct tie between the Guggenheim Museum and Matisse, there have been, I should say, a number of indirect ones. The first one is of course Picasso himself. Picasso and Matisse had each other on their mind throughout their lives, and the reciprocal influences can be detected practically all along their careers. One interesting example right here would be Picasso's Sleeping Woman of 1931, in the collections, and Matisse's Le rêve, [French], but one could cite many more.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

Another is Kandinsky. In 1919, Guillaume Apollinaire called him, "Matisse's last disciple." Kandinsky, as we should have occasion to see, was one of Matisse's earliest, and certainly his most perceptive critic. [00:06:00] Then of course, there's Mr. Thannhauser, whose collection has found shelter here and who organized Matisse's last retrospective in Germany, 1930, and it was not until 1981 in fact, that another one took place there. One of the greatest pictures in the Thannhauser Collection in fa t, may be regarded as a prophecy of Matisse's central concern. It is Manet's Before the Mirror. Now, mirrors in art reflect not so much the painter's model, as his conception of painting. The woman in Manet's picture is clearly a woman, but what we see in the mirror on the other hand is paint, pure paint. The mirror therefore illustrates that progressive disassociation between the painting of reality [00:07:00] and what one might call the reality of paint, which is one of the guiding motors, one of the driving forces in the development of modern painting. The history of this disassociation can be read as the evolution, one might say, from differentiation to divorce, or if you wish, from contrast to conflict. It's a confrontation that was eventually to be solved by the elimination of one of the protagonists of that struggle.

Matisse's time, Matisse himself, formulated the conflict in striking and well known terms. He said, "I do not create a woman, I paint a picture." The Italian Woman here on the left, is one of the most significant embodiments of this [00:08:00] modernist credo, as formulated by Matisse. It represents a professional model whose first name was Lorette, and who was either Italian or of Italian origin. She began posing for Matisse in December, later in December, 1915, and continued to do so through 1916 and 1917, and in fact slightly into 1918.

The Italian Woman began in December, 1915 and finished several months later, was probably the first portrait Matisse did of Lorette. I say portrait, because the essence of a portrait is its identifiability, that is to say, its resemblance to the model. The Italian Woman is recognizably Lorette: the bony fact, the heavy brows, the longish nose, the fleshy cheek, [00:09:00] the somewhat both pointed and rounded chin, and also the long black hair, as well as that solemn, almost dour look, that Anna Magnani look, definitely hers, and we meet them again and again, in dozens of paintings which she inspired to Matisse. I shall simply show a few, one is on the right, a fairly unknown one. Let is simply... Here are some more. All these paintings are done within those two years, and the styles, as you can see vary, but the identifiability is always there.

Next, please. [00:10:00] That's a bit further. Now, resemblance is something that can only be obtained within an aesthetic of imitation, of mimesis, which believes that to paint a woman is to create, or at least to recreate her realism, in other words. Realism relies on perspective, on modelling, shading, highlighting, and local color. To be sure these are conventional means, but their conventionality is unobtrusive. Realism does its best to render the artist's intervention invisible, and to give us the illusion that what we see belongs not to the painter, but to the model. Matisse sets out to use the devices of realism in that part of the figure of The Italian Woman, where the clues to resemblance are most numerous and most concentrated, that is to say the face. But is not long [00:11:00] before he abandons them, the figures shown with the rigid, quasi, symmetric frontality that is iconic rather than lifelike. The realist painter seeks to erase the traces of his activity to make us forget that the picture is a painting, rather than a mirror or a transparent windowpane.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

Far from eliminating the traces of his activity, Matisse underscores them here. The pentimenti in the arms for instance, and in the shoulders, are carefully preserved. Even in Lorette's face, realism is undermined by the insistence with which the main lines are simplified, exaggerated, geometricized — thus, for instance, the complex structure of temple, cheekbone and cheek, which become a segment of a circle. This insistence calls the viewer's attention away from the recreated [00:12:00] woman, to the process of what Matisse called "making a picture." There, another aesthetic, which Matisse called sometimes decoration and sometimes abstraction, has taken over from realism, of this which The Italian Woman offers an even stranger illustration. On the sight side of Lorette's head, her hair hangs, you might say correctly, between her greenish and whitish shoulder, and the greenish ochre background, which could be a wall. But on the left side, the hair, which falls massively on her bosom, has drawn the greenish background into the foreground with it, as if it were indissolubly attached, glued to it, a device which in terms of realism is totally observed, but which in terms of picture making is quite [00:13:00] acceptable. It is acceptable because it is an act of honesty. It summarizes, and probably confesses, the dual conflictual nature of the work.

The conflict wasn't limited to the work. It also spread to the relationship between the artist and his sitter. [French], Matisse used to say, "To do someone's portrait is to have a fight with them." A revealing instance of the problem of this sequence of events occurs in 1946 when Paul Léautaud, an old French writer, something of a poor man's Voltaire, one might say, sat for Matisse. He commented on the proceedings in his journal littéraire, and this is what he has Matisse say. He, Matisse, explains, that, "It isn't the resemblance that matters, but the effect upon the painter's [00:14:00] mind, of all these attempts, drawings of the possession, scrutiny, knowledge and familiarity with the model." And the he goes on to quote Matisse again. He could very easily, he said, "do a portrait of me like Léautaud," this is [Konta?] Léautaud. And again, he quotes this warning from Matisse to him as a sitter. "It is probable that it will be more a Matisse than your real portrait." Now elsewhere, Matisse has defined what he means by real portraits. He says there are those in which the component part seem to come out of the model, and as for the real Matisse, there are those whose — and I quote him again: "whose essential expression depends almost entirely on the projection of the artist's [00:15:00] feeling."

Now, Matisse's warnings proved vain in so far as Léautaud was concerned. Léautaud was scandalized by his portrait, which he found "without the least detail of resemblance," as he said. And he told a friend that he far preferred the pastries Matisse used to bring him to his drawings. The episode is concluded, in fact, with this entry in Léautaud's journal a few weeks later. "I took great pleasure in selling my portrait by Matisse." The conflict between a real portrait and a real Matisse illustrates the incompatibility between realism based on three-dimensional space, and abstraction, which relies essentially on two-dimensional space. It is in fact, an extreme case of that incompatibility. The ingredients of still life, for instance, are not completely individualized. Guitars or apples don't bear [00:16:00] first names; their identity, therefore, is less endangered by their translation into a non-realist style. On the other hand, the human figure, the portrait, needs that, what Léautaud called least detail of resemblance, vainly looked for by Léautaud. It was quite logical therefore then, to regret that his wife couldn't pose like an apple, and first to come to grips with Gustave [Loiseau's?] suit or with Ambroise Vollard's shirt, leaving the face to the last. What was difficult for Cézanne became after him, impossible.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

Matisse was in no means the only painter to be confronted with the incompatibility between modernism and portraiture. It struck Picasso, as you know, while he was working on his Portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1906. He was to be able to overcome the paralyzing awareness [00:17:00] only by substituting a non-realist mask for the model's recognizable features. That incompatibility became still more flagrant with Picasso's cubist portraits of Vollard, Uhde, who is present here, and Kahnweiler. There's nothing wrong with dissolving an anonymous man or woman into the myriad facets of cubism, but to sacrifice the identity of Picasso's three protectors was intolerable. The solution was to graft a least detail of resemblance, a minimal clue so to say: Vollard's broad face, Kahnweiler's well-groomed, undulating hair. Unto the — this is Kahnweiler. Onto the cubist grid. The clues thus tacked on. In fact, one might say they prefigure collage, a stenographic, identificatory signs such as those used by cartoonists. Picasso's three portraits of 1910, 1912, are, one might say, the uneasy marriage between Plato and Daumier. Not surprisingly, Picasso was not to return to portraiture until he returned to a more realistic style.

Now, while Picasso faced the undoubtable predicament of portraiture only fairly rarely, as long as he worked within a non-realist style. Matisse chose to be confronted with it again and again. As long as he continued to remain fundamentally faithful as his masters, the impressionists and the portraitists had been to the conventions of realism, portraiture proved relatively easy, as in this Portrait of Madame Matisse. [00:19:00] It became a problem in 1905, when the full configuration abruptly and thoroughly changed the character of the work. Two pictures allow us to pinpoint the cause of this radical change and its effects. The unfinished study on the left, for a portrait of the artist's wife, which is now at the Matisse Museum in Nice is still a real portrait, that is to say a largely realistic representation of the model. At this point, however, the work is plunged into the crucible of red-hot color and when it reemerges, it is no longer a real portrait but a real Matisse. This is the Portrait of Madame Matisse now in the royal collection in Copenhagen, 1905 both.

No one [00:20:00] has described what this means, what this change means, better and earlier than Kandinsky. Here he is talking about Cézanne. "He treated objects as he treated man, for he had the gift of discovering inner life everywhere. He takes them and turns them over to color. From it, they receive life, inner life, and then essentially pictorial sound. He imposes on them, a form reduceable to abstract, often mathematical formulas, whence emanates a radiant harmony. It is neither a man, nor an apple, nor a tree, that he wishes to represent. Cézanne uses all that to create a painted object rending an imagine, rending a wholly inner sound called image." And here he goes on to say, "It is also by this name that one of the greatest living [00:21:00] French painters, Henri Matisse, calls his works. He too paints images." He seeks to reproduce "the divine." The divine is in quotes, which means that Kandinsky obviously was referring to something he had heard Matisse or someone quoting Matisse say. The unfinished study in Nice is a representation. The final portrait in Copenhagen is an image, or if you wish, an icon. In the representation, color and line exist only insofar as the object which they simulate allows them to. They speak, so to say, in indirect discourse. In an image, it is the object that exists only to the extent that color and line will let it. they are signs that designate themselves to our attention, before and often rather, than they signify the object. In an image, color and line speak [00:22:00] to us in direct discourse, and just as the indirect discourse of realistic perspective representation

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 is best suited to profane subjects, so the direct discourse of flat abstraction befits what Kandinsky calls the divine.

The study of Madame Matisse in Nice represents the artist's wife. The portrait in Copenhagen presents a priestess of fire. Thus, from the very beginning, that is to say from 1905 onward, Matisse could measure the unbridgeable gap between the two aesthetics, both of which however, were required, if he was to paint a real portrait that would also be a real Matisse, or as he put it, to an American journalist in 1912, a "decorative portrait." Yet, it did not keep him from persevering. To the end of his life, he was fond of quoting Rembrandt's phrase, "All my life I've painted [00:23:00] only portraits." Portraits, in face, was the title of the last book of reproductions of his work in which he personally had a hand. Partly, this attachment to portraiture is due to the deep and lasting impression made on him during his youth, by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, whose finest portraits were preserved in the Saint-Quentin Museum and frequently shown to the students of the city Côte d'Azur, which Matisse himself attended. But there are other reasons. The face is the guardian par excellence of the particular, the individual, the unique, the unique character which realism alone is able to capture. However, it is also the vehicle par excellence of the sacred. "What interests me most," writes Matisse, "is neither still life, nor landscape, it is the figure. It is the figure that best allows me to express the religious, [00:24:00] so to speak, feeling, of life which I possess." It is precisely this dualism that attracts Matisse.

Pointing to a version of Antoinette With Plumed Hat, Matisse tells a visitor, in 1918, "I want to render both what is typical and what is individual, a summary of all I see and all I feel in front of a subject." Yes, it is precisely because the contradiction between objective two-dimensional observation and subjective three-dimensional feeling, attains its highest degree of tension in portraiture: that Matisse paints portraits. Describing the two methods, as he says, one from nature and the other from imagination, in his notes on painting in 1908. He notes, "For me, I do not believe that one need recommend the one method [00:25:00] to the exclusion of the other. It happens that both are used in turn, by the same person. The conflictual situation embodied by portraiture, appeals to the dualistic structure of his personality." "His dualism of feelings," as he said, "was perfectly clear to him." In a letter to his friend Camoin, he once described himself as half romantic and half scientific rationalist. To some extent, this dualism is a sign of Matisse's generation. The previous one, that of the impressionists, shied away from abstraction. The following one, that of Kandinsky and of Malevich and Mondrian, severed its ties with reality. The generation of Matisse and of Picasso was torn between these two extremes. Matisse defined one of his gouache decoupage, the snail, escargot, as an abstraction enracinée dans la réalitée, [00:26:00] "an abstraction rooted..." you might say, "... in reality." That was, one might say, the program of his entire generation.

However, Matisse's dualism has still deeper, still more personal roots. It is not altogether unlikely, wrote his son in-law, Georges Duthuit, that there were in him, two persons who couldn't get alone, indeed who often quarreled. These two persons were the airs respectively, to his father and to his mother. His father was a solid, serious rationalist. His mother was sensitive, artistic, romantic. The two had opened a grocery store in Bohain, which included a paint department. When the seed department prospered, the groceries were abandoned, but Madame Matisse, the artist's mother, insisted upon keeping her collar department. It was the father who

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 wanted Henri to study law, and it was his mother who gave him the paint box [00:27:00] that turned him into an artist. The father accepted his artistic career, as long as he remained orthodox academic, and cut off his allowance the moment he fell into avant-gardeism. But, when a doodle, unconsciously executed while Matisse was waiting in a post office, revealed to him the other, the subjective way of drawing. It was his mother's face that showed up on the paper.

"Pity us, who live this long quarrel between ardor and adventure," wrote Apollinaire. Matisse felt equally loyal to both paternal order and maternal adventure. He demanded of his art, that it embody that quarrel, but also of course, that it solve it. In painting, he says, in every work, he told a visitor in 1941, [00:28:00] "What one must achieve is to reconcile the unreconcilable," and more bluntly still he said, "I have always wanted to do two things at the same time." Often, the two methods could not be employed at the same time. Matisse then used them, as he said, "in turn." Through much of his career, he was addicted to the strange, indeed unique to my knowledge, practice, of painting two totally different versions of a subject, one you might say in a more realistic, the other in a more abstract style. The first version of Luxe, the second. The two versions of the sailor, the two versions of the studio, the pink and the red studio, [00:29:00] and the two versions of the portrait of the art critic George Besson. But, are these pairs really two versions, or are they not rather two moments of the same vision? The two moments are so to say, are represented not simultaneously but successively. They have to be read, so to say, they strive, you might say, to complete each other in our memory, for the first one is merely obliterated but not altogether obliterated in our memory by the second, unless of course a photograph has kept a record of it as for instance here. On the extreme right, if one could move that — the right side, a little bit [00:30:00] in, so the — I think it's the curtain.

That, on the extreme right, is The Italian Woman, in an earlier — at an earlier moment of its execution. Matisse concerns himself with the human figure to the end of his life, but he ceases to do portraits toward the end of the First World War, at the very same time that he ceases to use the members of his family as models. Now that isn't just a coincidence. Let's remember the problem he has said himself. To paint a real portrait that is also a real Matisse, that works both as a realist representation and as an abstract icon. [00:31:00] Now, that is precisely what the artist's wife, as well as his children, enable him to do. They are not really outsiders that must be approached objectively. They are accomplices, extrapolations, projections of the artist's subjectivity. You might say they are collaborators, not models. Not only do they accept the radical transformations to which he submits them, but they actually beg for them. They consent with a kind of martyr-like joy.

Here, Madame Matisse, whose portrait began as a [French] bourgeois portrait of the 1890s, goes up in flames, not without some apprehension. The ability to function simultaneously, on the plane of everyday reality and on the level of the sacred of myth, [00:32:00] is a privilege of the family. Perhaps this is because all beginnings are sacred. The family unit plays in the life of individuals, the inaugural founding role, which the gods play in the life of the race. This capacity to function on both registers, the profane and the religious, is demonstrated by Luxe, Calme et Volupté, the picture, which was painted in 1904, in which Matisse tries, for the first time, to formulate the mythological, or religious subject matter, required by his new non-realist style, the definitive formulation of which was to come the following year, in La Joie de Vivre. The treatment of the right side of the picture is almost hieratic, timeless, [00:33:00] immemorial.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

The left-hand side, on the other hand, is historically dated, it is more bourgeois, more prosaic. It is a picnic on the beach, and we know that this is the initial nucleus, this picnic is the initial nucleus of the picture, for it was preceded by another dealing with only that prosaic motif. This is sometimes known as Le Golfe de Sainte-Tropez or By the Sea or [Le Gute?].

Here we see the scene which we saw on the left side of Luxe, Calme et Volupté; the woman sitting in it is Madame Matisse. Madame Matisse's appropriacy to both representation and icon, appears nowhere better than in her portrait of 1912 in Leningrad. The stately features, the delicate [00:34:00] arching eyebrows are unmistakably those of Emile, but the face has been simplified, abstracted, almost to the point where it becomes a mask. Indeed, one thinks of one of those white [fine?] masks which Matisse loved. Masks however, are portraits of gods. If the divine were to take over the picture entirely, it would no longer be able to function as a portrait of a real woman. To reintroduce the profane, Matisse subtly tilts the face sideways, thereby breaking, or rather easing, the hieratic spell. The solemn tiara, reverts to the state of an elegance hat, vestment is again shawl, and the picture you might say, hovers between divine grace and Parisian gracefulness.

The artist's children have also played this dual role of incitement [00:35:00] to abstraction, and recalling of reality in a number of key pictures, either singly, in this case the artist's daughter, played perhaps the most dramatic role indeed. Marguerite Duthuit, was her father's most exigent critic. This portrait started out as an extremely charming realist portrait and it was enough for Marguerite to say to her father casually, for him instantly to go into a rage and to rework the picture until it became the Tête Blanche et Rose. Or, they worked together, or they helped him together. This picture of 1912 foresees the pattern painting of the post-war years in a way which could only have been obtained [00:36:00] through the consent of the entire family, which is sort of a guarantee of the entire family present there.

Again, here we have the son in the piano lesson, unmistakably it is Pierre, recognizable even, Pierre Matisse, recognizable even today. Unmistakably too, this does not present an obstacle to the picture becoming an abstract work. This is the last time in fact, that Matisse's family works on these two levels simultaneously. I say it is the last time, despite the existence of The Music Lesson, because what we see in The Music Lesson, where the family is gathered for the last time, this is a picture of 1917. The two sons were to go to the army shortly after. Because here, the old complicity between painter and family has [00:37:00] obviously disappeared. The children are now adults and they're about to go their own way. Henceforth, they will be outsiders and as such, they will only be able to be represented from the outside, that is to say objectively. Matisse wrote to Camoin in 1918, "My children are with me, Marguerite and Pierre. It is very pleasant. Nevertheless, I work better when I am alone. The intimate bond in which the family privilege was rooted has been loosened and with it, the possibility of making a model function both realistically and decoratively, and by the same token, the possibility for the painter to do two things at the same time without too many difficulties."

Of course, the family was by no means the sole source of surprise for sitters. Matisse drew, also, upon two other reservoirs. The one was that [00:38:00] extension, one might say, of the family circle, close friends — people who were sympathetic to his artistic endeavor. Their acceptance of him, at his most supernatural, proved that there was something supernatural in them, and it is

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 this deeper, more sublime self, that Matisse strove to unveil. Greta Moll was a student when she at for him, George Besson, whom we saw earlier, was an art critic, close friend of Marquet and sympathetic to Matisse at that time. Greta Prozor, here, was the wife of a former student of Matisse's, and according to Max Jacob... I must have made a gesture. According to Max Jacob, the actress who best declaimed modern painting, in actors, the real person is the persona, the theatrical mask, and it is the persona, [00:39:00] rather than the person, that Matisse portrayed here.

Sarah Stein, the wife of Michael, here, Sarah Stein, Gertrude's sister in-law, was Matisse's earliest and steadiest pre-war supporter. She was also an ardent spiritualist. It is the stout woman that, in his preparatory drawings, Matisse begins to show, but it is the taut, flaming spirit which he is after. It is a view determined not to incur the reproach made by St. John, to his disciple, Lycomedes, who secretly had a portrait painted of the evangelist. “You've painted my carnal envelope, not the figures of my soul,” said St. John. You have painted the portrait of a corpse. The final [00:40:00] portrait is a portrait of these figures of the soul. It is curious to note that this transformation is achieved in part, by the same strange device used in The Italian Woman. The two bands, initially representing the real front of Sarah Stein's blouse, dress, extended non-realistically upward, thereby forming a halo-like background. We find this device used again in another picture, closely related in style to The Italian Woman, the Portrait of Auguste Pellerin. Now, the first version of that portrait here, is still realistic. It is the somewhat forbidding effigy of a businessman and businessmen, as we can see from the Portrait of Michael Stein on the right, businessmen clearly didn't inspire Matisse much.

As we can see from his portrait [00:41:00] of the second version, however, of the second version of Pellerin, something has happened, something drastic has happened. The figure has been schematized, the features simplified, the same segment of a circle as in The Italian Woman, for instance. The colors have become more austere. Matisse has closed in on the sitter and in the process, the wild, indecipherable picture hanging behind him has grown in importance. It has come closer. In fact, it spills partly into the room, again that strange device binding three- dimensional and two-dimensional space, and thereby forming a kind of nimble behind Pellerin's head. The first version was the representation of a businessman, the second is an icon, showing a saintly martyr of modern painting. The most distinguished collector of works by the painter whom Matisse considered as his god, Cézanne. [00:42:00]

In the preparatory drawings of Yvonne Landsberg, Yvonne Landsberg too, looks unattractive and plumpish and rather awkward. In the final portrait here, she's awesomely powerful. Yvonne was the sister of Bertie Landsberg, who had been introduced to Matisse by his friend Pritchard, a Byzantinist and aesthetician, and the only man, with the exception of Kandinsky, to have comprehended the nature of the revolution brought by Matisse's art in those years. On the shy girl's unenergetic face, Matisse imposed a decisive mask, and he made a network of dramatically unnatural lines radiate from it, "lines of construction," he said later on, "with which I surrounded the figure, to give it greater amplitude in space." It is, in short, a portrait of the bold, decided person [00:43:00] Matisse wished Yvonne Landsberg to become, and sought to help her to become, through precisely, this portrait.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

If the portraits of Sarah Stein and Auguste Pellerin are diagnosis, you might say that the portrait of Yvonne Landsberg is a prognosis. Bertie Landsberg has described the gradual metamorphosis of the representation of the timid girl, into a savage goddess, a process also evident in, as we saw from the photograph, in The Italian Woman. I shouldn't gesticulate. In a letter which he wrote later on, "At the end of the first session, the old portrait was an extremely recognizable portrait of the model, but it became more abstract with every session, more and more like a Byzantine icon in my opinion. With every session, the portrait looked physically less, but without a doubt spiritually more like [00:44:00] my sister." Landsberg points out an essential factor in Matisse's procedure: time. Two contradicting objects cannot occupy the same space, unless it is at different moments, at different successive moments. It takes time to pass from representation to image. The painter must, as he says, "seek out," among the lines of her face, those which express the character of high gravity, which persists in every human being. Only familiarity enables the painter to discern the few essential lines from the multiplicity of inessential ones, and only familiarity enables him to pass from the outside to the inside of his model.

There are, he said, "There are two ways to describe a tree. One is by imitative drawing, such as is taught in European schools. The other is by the feeling which its approach and contemplation suggests to us, [00:45:00] as do the Orientals. I have been told that Chinese professors told their students, when you draw a tree, you must feel that you are growing with it. Passing from conscious identification of the model, to unconscious identification with the model, requires the gradual sentimental interpenetration," as he said, "of artist and model. It requires, in other words, time."

Matisse describes his way of working as a kind of unending film. With drawings, the films of the successive phases can be preserved. In the paintings, the preceding stage is erased at every new session, erased from the canvas but not from the artist's unconscious memory. Before 1918, incidentally, Matisse usually scraped. Later, he tended to wipe off the paint with turpentine. The picture of like a phoenix, continuously being reborn from its ashes. The ashes, [00:46:00] however, the pentimenti, are not altogether removed. Matisse wants us to know that time is the fourth dimension of his work and where the image came from, at what time. The time to traverse the distance that separates the artist's self from the model's. Without that distance, there is no time, and without time, the process of interiorization, cannot take place. Hence, the uneasy status, not to say the failure, of all but one or two of Matisse's self-portraits.

Something strange happened there. Well yes, could you go back one please? Yes. Either the artist coincides totally with himself, in which case he becomes a ghost in the picture, a kind of ectoplasm. Here, he is present only by thumbs sort of [00:47:00] hovering in midair, with the palette. Or, here again, where the most ghostly presence in the studio is the artist himself, or again here, this is probably a self-portrait, where again, it is impossible for Matisse to portrait himself objectively, or on the other hand, he's totally outside of himself, somebody he sees in the mirror, and in that case, he is a solid, impenetrable stranger. Laurette, however, was neither a member of the family nor a friend, but one of that third class of people from which Matisse drew his sitters: professional models. With them, he was at least assured of one thing: he would incur no reproaches for having sacrificed the sitter's resemblance. The professional model was indifferent to what the painter [00:48:00] put her through. However, portraiture implies not

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 indifference but difference, the difference between the particular face and all others. The professional model —

PART 2

PIERRE SCHNEIDER The sentimental interpenetration, as he said, could thus operate, because it was given the time. All the more, since after 1904, all the professional models used by Matisse were women. In a sense, the lack of personal uproar, such as one has with close friends or members of the family, proved they help. It made it easier to Matisse to pass beyond individual appearances, and to reach the universal life beneath, what he calls the character of higher gravity, which persists in all human beings. One might call these portraits inspired by professional models, generalized or generic portraits. The Italian Woman is probably the most successful example of that type.

To select from the mass of banal lines, the few significant ones, that turn a woman into a picture, that turn a representation into an image, [00:01:00] is to simplify. God is simple, says Plato, Socrates. Conversely, one might say that the simple is godly. Simplification, such as that undergone by The Italian Woman, between the phase shown in the studio picture, in the studio photograph we saw earlier, and the final state, iconizes. Matisse did not really believe in God, but for him painting, and I quote him, "Is either religious or it doesn't exist," because for him, art had to be simple. You should simplify painting, his teacher, Gustave Moreau, had prophesied to him.

Now, to simplify, that is to say to single out the essential lines is to exaggerate them. This simplification didn't make things simpler for Matisse, however. On the contrary, it reduced the component parts of the painting to the point where only the irreducible was left. [00:02:00] However, the irreducible proved to be not one, but two. Simplification, thus did not heal the dualism, the conflict in his work, it actually exacerbated them. Painting is always very difficult for me, Matisse wrote to Gertrude Stein in 1912. Always this struggle, is it natural? Yes. But why can't it ever end?

Simplification, exaggeration, and contrast, are the principles underlying Matisse's practice. He told his students, "The mechanism of construction consists in establishing the oppositions which create the equilibrium of directions, the need to do two things at once," which accounts for his interest in portraiture, is clearly visible in a great many of his paintings.

The basic conflict, as I've said, is between three-dimensional realism and two-dimensional abstraction. By trusting the [00:03:00] mission to champion depth to a human being, or as in this case to a sculpture, and making a barren background or a piece of textile stand for surface, Matisse sets up — this is Figure décorative sur fond ornemental, 1925. This sets up a confrontation between figure and ground, between the organic and the inorganic. The contrast between them is clarified by the simplificatory process which tends to boil down ambiguous polymorphous shapes, to the primary geometric or quasi geometric forms. In the organic, curves predominate, in the inorganic, straight lines do.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

Thus, the opposition between the living and the lifeless, is expressed by [00:04:00] a confrontation between curves and straight lines. This confrontation is what makes such pictures as Girl with Tulips a moving, subtly dramatic picture. Jeanne Vaderin, the model, is herself, a kind of plant. Her fragile organism rising sinuously is in mortal danger of being nicked by the harsh horizontal lines which it meets along the way and yet outlives. The opposition of curve and straight line is all Matisse needs to express the confrontation of life and death, human and inert. As a result, even when he uses these basic elements in less sublime contexts such as still life, the dramatic richness of meanings which they have served to convey, now connote more prosaic configurations.

This you know of course. [00:05:00] Here, Apples on a Table, formerly in the Chrysler collection, and finally, this extraordinary icon of oranges, painted in 1916, about the same time, the same period as The Italian Woman. He was again and again, to use this method of contrast, in the most varied situation. Everything can be stated through this basic polarity, even the individual identity, which is the aim of portraiture. As he said, "Resemblance in a portrait stems from opposition, from the opposition which exists between the model's face and the other faces. In a word, it stems from its particular asymmetry." Asymmetry is deviation from symmetry. Opposition, thus, is a form of relation. Matisse would [00:06:00] fully subscribe to the axiom of his contemporary, Wittgenstein, we cannot imagine any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other objects. Everything in short, is relationship, as Matisse himself said.

In fact, relationship precedes the things which it relates and determines them. As another Matisse's contemporaries, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure put it, "The link one establishes between things exists before those things themselves and serves to determine them." Naturally, the principle of relating by opposition was at work in painting before Matisse. What he did was by simplification and by exaggeration, to explicit, intensify, and activate that principle, and this activation is what lends Matisse's paintings their urgency. We can disregard in fact, [00:07:00] when two people express hostility toward each other by glaring at each other, if we so choose, but when they come to blows, we cannot remain unconcerned. Much as Matisse craves for the conflicts, however, the conflicts resulting from this dualistic attitude, from the dualistic situations he gets himself in, he also, at the same time, feels the need to overcome them and again, reconciliation, once achieved, rekindles the need for conflict.

One of the most original devices for achieving the coexistence of contradictories is instanced by such paintings as The Red Dessert on the right and The Conversation on the left. Now, in the — what we see in The Conversation, which is literally a series of variations on curves and straight lines, [00:08:00] which might, so to say, be summarized and symbolized by the ironwork of the balcony, is that it is based on total conflicts between the straight lines of Monsieur Matisse in his pajamas and the curved lines of Madame Matisse in her [French]. If we call — for instance, Matisse A, contradicts B, or Madame Matisse, just as the tree trunk outside, call him A Prime, contradicts the flowerbeds, call them B Prime. Now, A contradicts B, A Prime contradicts B Prime, but A is related to B as A Prime is related to B Prime. Moreover, since A and B stand for objects in the foreground, and A Prime and B Prime for elements in the background, the kinship [00:09:00] which the repetition of this opposition establishes between them, provides and effective articulation between illusionist depth and real surface, between close up and far away. The same thing can be said and is exactly true of The Red Dessert. Incidentally, these two

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 pictures are proofs also, of the capacity for family subjects to work on both levels at once. These are perhaps, with music and dance, the most intensely, you might call them numinous, or sacred, pictures, yet on the left, what we have is Monsieur Matisse, as I said, and Madame Matisse, you might say, on a Sunday morning, in their villa in Issy-les-Moulineaux, what could be more prosaic. You might say, there is — and yet, Shchukin, who owned the picture, recognized that it was, as he said, an icon. [00:10:00] This is true too of, on the right. You might say where's the family. The clue to that is that the picture is a remake of an earlier one, La Dessert of '98, and that in turn, is an expansion of a yet earlier picture which is called [La Servante bretonne?], in which if you look hard or if your eyes are very good, you will see a pentimento. Between the servant and the table there's a little child which has been erased later on, and that child is the artist's daughter.

Matisse is striving to paint pictures in which three-dimensional depth and two-dimensional surface, are both opposed and reconciled, has led to the invention of an even stranger device. It is the one we have already seen at work in the portraits of The Italian Woman and of Auguste Pellerin, a form that switches allegiance [00:11:00] in midcourse, so to speak. We can see it at work in Nature Morte En Rouge de Venise. It is the fabric hanging vertically on the wall, which gradually changes direction, until it functions as a horizontal tablecloth. In its vertical position it is frontal and abstract, in its horizontal position it asks to be read in perspective. One object that does function in two different spaces. The device of this multidimensional rug is used again in Nature Morte en Camaïeu de Bleu, where the attraction of the vertical, the decorative view is so great that Matisse counterbalances it by showing the meeting of wall and floor in the corner of the picture.

Again, in [Bronze et Fruit?], where Matisse provides a similar counterbalance, by introducing a sculpture, the image of a [00:12:00] sculpture of his own, to prevent the table rug from taking flight altogether. Or in Nature Morte [French], the multidirectional textile changes its course and its nature, not twice but three times. It's flat on the wall, then as it comes downward, it narrows and falls into voluminous folds, and is it flows off the table, it turns again, into flat pattern surface.

As I said earlier, it is an awkward solution to the insoluble conflict, but Matisse did not want to provide a solution that would eliminate the conflict altogether, no more than he wanted to eliminate altogether, the previous states of The Italian Woman, once the final composition was established. One of the most convenient tools for simplifying and exaggerating is geometry. Matisse knew and used it ever since [00:13:00] simplification and exaggeration became his working method, that is to say at least since fauvism. Even earlier in fact, he is told repeatedly how, when painting Le Bois De Boulogne here, 1903, he prevented himself from drowning in the maelstrom of ephemeral sensations, by clinging for dear life to the verticals of some tree trunks, and to the main branches shooting out from these, at an angle of 45 degrees.

Even earlier, around 1900, as in this view of the Pont Saint-Michel. This use of geometry is evident. Again, later and very much so in Morocco, where the harsh contrasts of sun and shade, and the preciseness of the architecture, allow him to bring in geometry, so to say, naturalistically. One must remember these structural traits [00:14:00] of Matisse's personality and of his work, to deal fairly with his relation to cubism. More than once, his work of the war years, to which The

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

Italian Woman belongs, has been described as indebted to cubism. John Golding speaks of his cubist phase of 1915. Alfred Barr calls Goldfish and Palette, which we saw earlier, cubistic. Matisse himself described the relationship with cubism somewhat differently towards the end of his life. He was asked whether he had been grazed by cubism and he replied, "grazed is the word." And he went on to say that he had talked often with Picasso. When was he asked? Shortly before the war, he replied, in 1912 or 1913. Our oppositions were friendly, sometimes our points of view would strangely converge. [00:15:00]

The points of opposition... You might as well put The Italian Woman back on. Yes. The points of opposition are obvious enough. Analytic cubism was still, as Matisse correctly diagnosed, a form of realism. Depth and the objects in it were geometricized, but they continued to be seen and rendered in perspective. In its extreme form, moreover, analytic cubism broke up, pulverized, the objects represented. Nothing could be more repugnant to Matisse than this practice. To nick, slice, cut through a living organism, or even object, was to kill it. What Matisse disliked in Rodin, for instance, was his habit of working with fragments. He no longer loved the trees in his gardens after the gardener had convinced him that they should be pruned. [00:16:00] Compare Matisse's Still Life After de Heem's 'La Desserte,' 1915, on the left, with the cubist works closest to it, those of Juan Gris here, la monte, are — Le Lavabo, The Wash Board, of 1912. Incidentally, Gris should have been the cubist closest to Matisse is not surprising. They met in Collioure in 1914 and became friends. Matisse helped the destitute Gris, they exchanged pictures, argued for days on end, while as Gris said Matisse shuffled his feet, and Gris even became the first art teacher of Matisse's daughter, Marguerite. In both cases, the picture is scanned by insistent hardlines that almost laminated into parallel bands. [00:17:00] In the pictures by Gris, these geometric bands have precedence over the objects represented.

In the canvas by Matisse, they do not. No object is split by any line. The assertive diagonal that crosses the picture takes care not to run through the glass on the table. For the cubist Gris, geometry was an end, or at least a higher value, for Matisse it was merely a means. Nevertheless, the points of view did, as Matisse noted, converge. For the perspective vision of geometric objects in analytic cubism had, around 1912, given way to a geometric treatment of flat surfaces to synthetic cubism. Reduction to the picture plane invariably implies the reappearance of decoration, and it was on that plane that the cubists and Matisse were able to converge and to trade certain aspects of their work. [00:18:00] Picasso's and Gris' windows probably bare the influence of Matisse at the time, and Matisse himself may have been encouraged by the widespread triumph of cubism, to lend his works more explicitly than before, a geometric look.

This is Femme Au Tabouret, Woman on a Stool, the wife of the cubist critic Germaine Raynal, and here Courseulles, the woods near — another picture of 1916. While the influence of cubism on Matisse was, let's say at best tangential, that of the spirit of the times was considerable. After World War II, Picasso said, "I did not paint the war, because I am not the kind of painter who goes out in search of a subject like a photographer, [00:19:00] but there is no doubt that the war is present in the paintings which I made then." Exactly the same could be said about Matisse's work during World War I. It was for him, a time of great anxiety. His mother was trapped in German occupied Bohain, his brother held as a hostage by the Kaiser's troops. His friends, like Duthuit and later his sons, were in the army, which he himself vainly tried to join. Thus, the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 customary anguish provoked by his work, was amplified by the anguished caused by the war. Indeed, Matisse used the former to understand the latter. His work became, you might say, a response to the horrors of the time. It was, so to say, his contribution to the war effort.

Paris est noir, wrote the poet Max Jacob, to a friend, in 1914, "Paris is black." At the last minute, when [00:20:00] Porte-Fenetre a Collioure was practically finished, Matisse literally blacked out the balcony and the landscape visible through the window. This is a picture of 1914. Black was to remain the dominant tone of his painting until 1918. Black, or else a spectrum of muted, austere, almost funereal browns, ochres, greens and violets. It was a period of drastic restrictions, or as Matisse put it at the time, "of a diminution of means." To restrict one's colors, one's forms, to a kind of minimum vital survival ration, you might say, was to show oneself attune to the needs of the day, but it was also, in the case of Matisse, to advance one step further toward the extreme simplification, which had been his goal since 1905.

War became the art of Matisse; he knew it. [00:21:00] During the most tragic days, he wrote his friend and former student, Hans Purrmann, "This war will bring its rewards. What gravity it shall have given to the lives, even of those who did not take part in it." Now, gravity, the character of high gravity residing in every human being, was precisely, let us remember, what he wished to express in his portraits. Thus, the tragedy of war heightened that essential character in his models and helped him bring it out in his numerous portraits, for never did he paint more of them. Through their presence, Matisse fought against the absence of those whom the war had swept away from Paris. The rapprochement between Matisse's art and cubism may be problematical, but the rapprochement between Matisse and the cubists was very real. All those who belong to the milieu of art, and who still remained in Paris, closed ranks. [00:22:00] The solemn grandeur achieved by Matisse in his work during the year 1914-1917, may be ascribed, if such explanations have any meaning at all, to the conjuncture between personal procedures, rooted in the depth of a self, and historically thence.

The war provided Matisse's private structures with the historical or public meaning which they needed to attain their greatest capacity of conviction. This is true for color. Black had been discovered by him in Morocco, but it was after 1914 that it took on its full significance, and it is also true for form. Geometric, schematized, geometric schematization, which enables one to economize, to spare forms, is the method most appropriate to austerity, but it is more than that.

I quote Matisse. "In the darkest [00:23:00] moments," he noted toward the end of his life, "I have always believed in shelters, in refuges." The invulnerable stability of geometry offered such a refuge against the blood, sweat and tears that were the fate of men in times of war. This was the time when Paul Klee wrote in his journal, "The more terrifying the world, as precisely today, the more abstract art, whereas a happy world breeds a worldly art." Of late, the [gland has bled?]. I thought I would die of it, war and death, but can I die, I who am crystal, I crystal. Against death that threatened the realm of flesh and blood, more than one artist sought shelter in the realm of crystal. Klee, Mondrian, Duchamp, Malevich, and Matisse.

This was the only time when [00:24:00] he was tempted by the solution of the closed circuit painting about painting, pictures using elements that echoed the material structure of the canvas, pictures which excluded all elements not belonging to the studio. In a word, tautological art, that

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982 would function without reference to the tragic mortal world outside. It was, in a way, the same response as that which caused Ludwig Wittgenstein to write the closed circuit tautological system of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving on the front. For Matisse, however, the crystalline refuge was only a passing temptation, so [monistic?] a solution was too opposed to his dualistic temperament, to his need for always doing two things at the same time.

As we've seen, simplification, schematization, had to lead not to one, but to two basic elements: the curve and the straight line, [00:25:00] the arabesco of human figure pitted against inhuman orthogonals, either harsh objects in the canvas or the harsh rectangular shape of the canvas itself. In Matisse's world, life was sinuous, the crystalline was deadly. The most ambitious pictures of that period are built on this conflict between sweet life and deadly geometry.

Matisse had only one subject, The Joy of Life, paradise, but he did not hesitate to expose it to the dangers of hell when the world around him became infernal. “I noticed,” he wrote, "that the only refuge is the quite tenacious memory of happiness which I have kept." The Moroccans, painted in 1916, is a souvenir de Morocco, [00:26:00] you might say. The memories of bliss are all there, the scenes seen in Morocco are all there, but they have to cope with the horrors of the day, blackness and geometrical harshness. If one may sort of say, turn about Matthew Arnold's phrase and say that the Moroccans are tranquility, recollected in passion, in tragic passion. Like the Moroccans, Bathers By the River was painted in 1916. It was certainly projected, and probably begun at the same time as Dance and Music, around 1909, 1910, to which this watercolor, the date to which this watercolor stems back. It was meant to stand for the third nirvanic stage of happiness, of which Dance and Music represented the lower stages. Matisse abandoned it primarily because there are only two floors in Shchukin's home, and therefore the third [00:27:00] stage proved not needed, Matisse abandoned it, but perhaps resumed working on it from time to time. Now, in 1916, he resolved to finish it. Like The Moroccans, however, Bathers By the River shows a paradise beset by evil. In fact, the serpent has found its way into it and it is a threatened, dislocated paradise, a paradise in which each figure is trapped in its own geometric stripe, trapped but not destroyed.

"Painting is either religious or it doesn't exist," Matisse said. Happiness was his religious doctrine. When the war broke out, he did not abjure it. He plunged it into darkness. It is still the same sacred content which he paints, but so to say in the negative. Just as the Madame Matisse, The Green Line, [00:28:00] was the high priestess of that sacredness in its bright, positive phase, so The Italian Woman may be seen as the priestess of Matisse's sacredness in its somber negative phase. In 1909, Gertrude Stein wrote a portrait of Matisse in which she defined him as "a great man and one clearly expressing something, and greatly expressing something being struggling." It is the last — it is, I think, that we have seen increasingly, since Matisse's time, that we have increasingly tended to sacrifice the difficulties, the tensions of conflictual aspirations. The history of recent art has been made and written by people who either created women or painted pictures. Matisse's greatness is of another order. He said, "woman or picture," but what he wanted was [00:29:00] woman and picture. This of course was impossible, but that impossibility had more rewarding results than those derived from sticking to the possible. The dialectic, the oscillation, the unceasing shuttling between two visible material pulls, stakes out an invisible and immaterial territory between and beyond the measurable, quantifiable, terms of the antinomy.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection Hilla Rebay Lecture: Henri Matisse’s The Italian Woman, by Pierre Schneider, 1982

It makes for a density, for a tension, quite absent from the elegant literal solutions devised by [monistic?] art, which has tended to prevail since the '60s, an art that is perhaps the first to turn away from that European, or western tradition, that was first formulated 15 centuries ago, by the Council of Chalcedon, when it defined the dual natures [00:30:00] of Christ as both impossible to fuse and impossible to separate. I thank you for your patience. (applause)

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Henri Matisse's “The Italian Woman” / Pierre Schneider. 1982/11/22. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York