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. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 1 of 16 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. Transcript © 2018 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. Page 2 of 16 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.