To Mark the 150Th Anniversary of the Birth of Matisse and the Upcoming

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To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Matisse and the upcoming exhibition of his work at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2020, this art documentary invites us to retrace the voyages Matisse made that influenced his art, especially his last trip to Polynesia in 1930, which took him to the threshold of contemporary art with the invention of his gouache-painted cut-outs.

In 1930, at the age of 60, Matisse feels the call of the sea, the lure of elsewhere, one last time. He decides to embark on the longest possible journey: to the antipodes, to see Polynesia. The voyage to Tahiti takes several weeks, giving him time to look back on the distance he has travelled in his lifetime. He reflects on the many journeys that he, a man of the North searching for bright light and colours, has continually made throughout his life and career as a painter: to Corsica, Collioure and Nice, where he finally settled in 1917, but also to Algeria, Morocco and the United States. Each time, these trips have been a stepping stone to something else. His Corsican experience led him to Fauvism, his sojourn in Morocco to modern painting; Polynesia will permeate the last 25 years of his creative life and take him to the threshold of contemporary art. This lifelong artistic quest for other lights, colours and shapes has also, above all, been a search for himself that has driven him tirelessly and passionately to pursue the great journey of his life.

Polynesia, the sea (1948)

Note : The works presented in this dossier are all signed by Henri Matisse and their rights belong to Les Héritiers Matisse (© Succession H. Matisse), as well as the photographs unless otherwise indicated. The reproductions of the works have been made without Les Héritiers Matisse’s prior monitoring.

March 2020

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019 2

Present-day scenes of the north and south shores of the Mediterranean (the French Riviera and the Moroccan coast around Tangiers), intercut with scenes of modern Polynesia. Gradually, archive shots from the 1920s and 30s blend into these pictures, culminating in footage dated March 1930 of the aptly named RMS Tahiti, a rusty old steamship that looks more like a freighter than a passenger ship. On board this uncomfortable vessel is Henri Matisse, aged 60, bound for the United States on the first leg of his journey to French Polynesia. He has set forth on this adventure in some haste, leaving an unfinished painting on his easel in Nice, driven by an urge to go travelling alone in search of something. What is he hoping to gain from this journey?

Matisse (right) aboard the RMS Tahiti (1930)

Aboard the ship, Matisse asks himself the same question. Has he made the right decision? Should he be traveling so far? And yet, he has been mulling over this trip to Polynesia for nearly twenty years. He has always been a traveller, lured to elsewhere. Born in Cateau-Cambrésis, a small town in the Nord département of France some thirty kilometres from Belgium, he has always roamed farther and farther south in search of light. As a budding young artist, he had already been to England, Spain, Italy, and even Russia, but he regarded most of these trips as “working visits”. To his mind, his only “real” journeys before 1930 had been to Corsica, Algeria and Morocco. Leaning on the ship’s rail, watching the coast of Europe recede, he thinks back on that first big journey to Corsica with his wife Amélie, just one month after their wedding. Back then, in February 1898, Matisse was still a struggling young artist, living from hand to mouth in Paris. He liked Corsica so much that he stayed on a few months longer, until July, and did about fifty paintings there, including Landscape, the Pink Wall. The atmosphere of Corsica inspired him so deeply that he began to assert his own style, especially with regard to his choice of colours, which paved the way for Fauvism a few years later. Landscape, the pink wall (1898)

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019 3 It was in Corsica that Matisse, in his own words, “learned to know” the Mediterranean. “It was in Ajaccio that I first experienced my great amazement at the South.” In the years that followed, he continued extensively to explore this “South” that so entranced him. Together with his friend and fellow artist André Derain, Matisse painted many pictures in Collioure and the surrounding area, pushing the exploration of light and colour to new limits. These pure, violent colours painted flat on canvases, which he showed at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, were what led to Fauvism, of which Matisse is the great master. Among the earlier painters whose influence he acknowledged was Van Gogh, but predominantly Gauguin – the Gauguin of Polynesia, naturally. His paintings deeply impressed Matisse. On board the ship to Tahiti in March 1930, Matisse must surely Open window, Collioure (1905) have been thinking of his great predecessor, who had died nearly twenty-five years earlier. Matisse thinks back on the dazzling success of Fauvism in 1905 and the journeys he made thereafter. He travelled regularly – almost every winter from 1906 to 1913 – to Andalusia, Algeria and especially Morocco, twice, in 1912 and 1913. “These trips to Morocco helped me reconnect with nature more completely than I could by practising a living but rather limited theory, such as Fauvism”. In fact, in these years just before World War One, when Matisse was 43-44, he went through a profound midlife crisis. For one thing, he had just lost his father and was haunted by grief. For another, Sergei Shchukin had just rejected Dance and Music, two panels Matisse had painted for the Russian art collector’s Moscow home. An artistic crisis, therefore, on top of a family one, was exacerbated by the fact that the wildfire of Fauvism had died down a few years before. It was time for Matisse to move on to something else, to find a new creative impetus. Zohra in yellow (1912) It was in Tangiers that he first experienced what he called “the ineffable sweetness when it comes of its own accord” and foresaw the potential of his creative work that lay ahead, through his contact with Islamic art. As he wrote at the time, “This type of art suggests a wider space, a truly plastic space.” In his studio/bedroom overlooking the Bay of Tangiers, he painted incessantly: still lives, landscapes and figures, of women, most notably Zohra, but also of men, such as the “Riffian”. In a way, he was still trying to reconcile his leading inspirations – Cézanne and Gauguin – with the grand traditions of Eastern art, but over time he moved on from there. He would stroll in the medina or immerse himself in the peace and quiet of the Moroccan gardens, beguiled by their lush vegetation.

The Window, Tangiers (1912)

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019

4 It is no coincidence that the search for the arabesque, or the wavy shape in general, is a distinctive feature of Matisse’s art. Nor is it by coincidence that another feature of his painting is the simplification of shapes and colours: often pure and flat and rimmed by a dark line, and later, just solid colours. All of this is the result of his travels and the indirect influence of Eastern art, ranging from the figure of the odalisque to his famous series of blue nudes.

Odalisque with a Turkish Chair (1928) / Blue nude IV (1952)

But at the same time, Matisse did not travel east in order to experiment with Orientalist painting, let alone to walk in the footsteps of Delacroix. He has always been a painter who goes his own way, and this is what he is about to do in Polynesia. He has no intention of following in Gaugin’s footsteps. Since his trip to Morocco, one thing has been crystal clear to him: what really matters is the search for himself in his art. When Matisse decided to settle in Nice in 1917, it was to be able to live permanently on the Mediterranean shore. To illustrate how much his first discovery of the light, not only in the south of France but on both sides of the Mediterranean, was a major milestone in Matisse’s life, we see various key paintings from this period juxtaposed with contemporary scenes of the French Riviera, Corsica, and Morocco, illustrating the scope of his Mediterranean work and the contribution that his many “southward travels” made to his oeuvre. Seated Woman, Back Turned to the Open Window (1922) Nonetheless, in early 1930, we find Matisse seeking to renew himself and go even farther, both literally and metaphorically. It’s a long journey – first across the Atlantic, then coast-to-coast across the United States by train from New York to San Francisco. He had already travelled frequently to the USA since the mid-1920s because most of his biggest collectors were there. The New York skyscrapers fascinate him now, as always: the vastness of the cities and the special kind of light that falls between the buildings. This journey across America forms an unexpected prologue to his journey: the immensity of the Wild West makes a sharp break with the Old World behind him. After spending a few days in San Francisco, he boards ship again. The pristine waters of the Bay open into the ocean. And there it is, finally – the Pacific.

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019 5 Setting sail for the South Seas is still a great adventure in 1930. During the voyage, Matisse reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s travelogue In the South Seas and enjoys retracing part of his journey around Polynesia. At other times, he simply leans on the rail and gazes out at the limitless ocean that is “blue, so blue that the sky no longer exists.” For Matisse, who nurtured an obsession with blue throughout his life, the experience is deep and lasting. After ten days at sea, Tahiti finally comes into view. At the harbour, alerted by the local radio, a lively, colourful crowd is there to see the ship come in. Back in those days, a ship’s arrival was a big event. Waiting in the throng on the quayside are Pauline and Etienne Schylle, a mixed-race (half-Polynesian, half-European) couple. Mutual friends have recommended them to Matisse to be his guides for the first part of his stay. They soon become firm friends. Matisse takes dozens of photos of the couple. Pauline’s creole beauty fascinates him. For Matisse, Tahiti brings interesting meetings with many Tahitians, both native and adoptive. He is impressed by their solid, serious beauty. He likens them to ancient statues

Murnau and Matisse / Sketching in Polynesia / View from Matisse’s room in Tahiti (1930) © Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung, Wiesbaden

As well as these local inhabitants, Matisse also meets the German filmmaker, F. W. Murnau. Like Matisse, Murnau has come here to confront a different reality. He is currently finishing what will be his last movie, Taboo. He invites Matisse to the shoot. The two artists observe and get to know each other and spend time together. Matisse enjoys meeting Murnau and discussing what each of them, as an artist, sees in the beauty of Tahiti. This being Matisse’s first taste of Polynesia, he is hit by an incredible wave of sensations, not only of sight but also of touch and smell. Nature here is so much more powerful, overwhelming, head-spinning – a stupendous riot of foliage and fruit surpassing anything that even Matisse, the great painter of plant motifs, could have dreamed of. Matisse can’t get enough of it. After Tahiti, he pushes the culture shock even further by secluding himself on the remote coral atolls of the Tuamotu archipelago, where the sky and sea blend into each other, the horizon disappears, and wavy shapes are everywhere. Matisse’s search for the wavy line is a natural outgrowth of his fascination with the arabesque during his travels to Algeria, and especially Morocco, and his explorations of Eastern art. The Apataki atoll makes a special impression on him because this, more than any other place, is where he feels most clearly the manifestations of the flow of life in everything – a flow that he tries, thenceforth, to transcribe into all his work in the form of a wavy

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019 6 line that has shed every organic component of itself except its dynamism, a shape so simplified that it becomes almost abstract. In a way, it is Matisse’s own personal arabesque. During his three months travelling among the islands of Polynesia, Matisse takes a temporary break from painting. He assuages his overwhelming emotions by making quick sketches and taking photographs, but does not paint. He exposes himself to the sea, the wind, the sun and the blue of the sky and lets them permeate his body. Matisse divides his next three years between Nice and the United States. In 1931, the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) honours him with a retrospective. On this occasion, Albert Barnes, one of the greatest collectors of the time, commissions him to paint a monumental mural for his foundation in Philadelphia.

In May 1933, Matisse goes to the Barnes Foundation to install this monumental work, entitled La Danse de Mérion (or “The Dance”). It would be his last trip to the United States. It was during the preparatory work for this mural that Matisse, to cope with the scale of the project, developed what would evolve into his “gouache-painted cut-outs”, such a distinctive technique that it is probably now the most easily recognizable feature of his work.

Window in Tahiti (1936) / Vegetal Elements (1947)

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Back in Nice, Matisse delivered, directly or indirectly, his very personal pictorial vision of Polynesia and, in the process, renewed the artist’s way of seeing the Pacific. But as a side-effect, his own way of seeing the South of France was also altered and renewed. His works are often seen as being specifically Mediterranean, not to say Provençal, but the decoration of the Rosary Chapel in Vence, the apotheosis of his career, contains Polynesian and Moroccan influences. These new lights, colours, lines and shapes pervade his painting more and more as time goes on. Swept along by an unfurling of plant life as well as an aquatic waviness from the antipodes, Matisse’s work embarked on a final creative cycle so fertile that it triggered a full-scale upheaval of modern art. This absolute quest for pure colour and splendid light brought Matisse to the threshold of contemporary art, to such an extent that he became a major source of influence for Pollock, Rothko, Klein and other great contemporary painters who were starting out on their careers. Even today, we can find the same influence at work in the Spot Paintings of Damien Hirst.

Memory of Oceania / The Snail (1953)

To conclude, this film shines a spotlight on the importance that travel had in Matisse’s life and especially his creative work. Moreover, it profoundly influenced not only his work, but the history of art in general. At the very end of his life, Matisse still cherished his love of travel, declaring “If I were young again, I would travel around the world by aeroplane. I think it’s an amazing invention. Just imagine, in a few hours you can be in India, China, or South Africa. It’s miraculous!” Despite being physically disabled after a major surgical procedure in 1941, Matisse remained a traveller in his heart to the end of his days.

The Parakeet and the Mermaid (1953)

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In retracing Matisse’s last great journey, to Polynesia in 1930, we will conjure up, through a series of narrative flashbacks, all his previous major journeys – to Corsica, Algeria, Morocco, etc. Then we will flash forward to consider how, during his later years, this Polynesian voyage slowly blended with the influences of all his other journeys. In short, the idea is to embark in excellent company – Matisse’s – on a journey that is both geographical and aesthetic. Geographically, we will travel from the shores of the French Riviera to the atolls of the south Pacific and back to the South of France, while opening windows here and there into Matisse’s previous travels. These are all journeys of immersion into natural environments that are always new to Matisse, in which he repowers himself with new impressions and observations. As he so eloquently said of his last great journey, to Polynesia, “I longed to discover the light on the other side of the equator, to make contact with the trees, to penetrate the things there. [...] How to give life to a brushstroke, draw a line, bring a shape into being, these challenges are not solved in conventional schools but outside, in nature, by deeply observing the things around us.” Aesthetically, our journey will guide us through the artistic portrayals of Polynesia and the Pacific, inasmuch as Matisse, by setting out to reinvent his own way of seeing the world, incidentally reinvented the world’s view of Polynesia and the Pacific. Furthermore, it is a journey through the artistic portrayals of both shores of the Mediterranean, so deeply did these coastlines underpin Matisse’s work (Fauvism would not have existed were it not for his experiences of painting in Ajaccio and Collioure). This multi-faceted artistic journey will also give us the chance to revisit what might be called a series of great moments in modern art, with the aim of showing how the “Corsican Matisse” and the “Southern Matisse”, followed by the “Moroccan Matisse” and finally the “Polynesian Matisse” ushered in new eras of colour and shape and, at the same time, invented a wavy line that erased the distinction between figurative and abstract art in a totally novel fashion and paved the way for Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting, both born in the aftermath of World War Two and climaxing in the 1950s, perhaps not coincidentally around the time of Matisse’s death in 1954.

The voice of Matisse It is Matisse’s voice that will open the narrative and subsequently provide the thread of continuity by quoting from the letters he wrote on all his journeys, sometimes on a daily basis, especially to his wife, Amélie, but also to a select handful of other people (artist friends, collectors, etc.) with whom he corresponded regularly. These sources will be supplemented by excerpts from Matisse’s Writings on Art, published in French in 1972, and also excerpts from Matisse, the Lost 1941 Interview, published only in 2013 by the Getty Research Institute and even more recently in France as Bavardages : les entretiens égarés (2017). As far as we know, neither book has been quoted before in a documentary film. This approach has the advantage of letting the artist speak for himself, in language that is exceptionally clear and easy for everyone to understand. We are hoping to have his words voiced by Olivier Gourmet, to whom we can reach out through our Belgian co-producer, Marion Hänsel, who has cast him in several of her fiction films. The main commentary Intermingled with these excerpts will be a more general narrative commentary, filling in the background to Matisse’s journey when his own quotes are insufficient and drawing connections with art history as

Chasing Light, The Voyages of Matisse © CC&C – Man’s Films Productions – Nocturnes Productions - 2019 9 a whole. This commentary, which we intend to be voiced by a woman, will be supplemented now and again by quotes from famous people who wrote to Matisse or about him, such as Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Apollinaire and Louis Aragon.

Matisse’s paintings, sketches and photographies A large place will be made to the works, drawings and photographs taken by Matisse himself. We want to put in place a graphic device to show the creative gesture of Matisse and allow us to link the forms and colors of his works with the filmed places of his travels. This process, which remains to be defined, would also allow to establish a certain proximity with the artist and to make us live these moments of artistic revelation and creative frenzy.

Matisse and his assistants in the studio, Nice (ca. 1953)

Additional material from photo and film archives will supplement the main picture sources by showing what the various places Matisse visited looked like at the time, e.g. Corsica and the French Riviera in the 1900s, 10s and 20s; Algeria and Morocco in the 1910s (a great period for newsreels and early colonial film footage, both professional and amateur); Polynesia in the late 1920s and early 30s; and New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and San Francisco in the same period.

Modern-day footage of the South of France, Corsica, Morocco and Polynesia will show us the places Matisse saw, and make us feel what he felt, in a more immediate, tangible way than the archive material. Locations under consideration for filming include Nice (Place Charles-Félix, the end of Cours Saleya, the Promenade des Anglais, the Matisse Museum, and the view of the Mediterranean looking down from Nice Castle Park), Vence, (the Rosary Chapel, a.k.a. the Matisse Chapel), Ajaccio, Tangiers, Tahiti (Mataiea and Papeete), the Taiaparu Peninsula (Tautira, Hihitara Bay, Motu Fenua Ino), the Tuamotu Archipelago (Fakarava and Apakati atolls).

To make these images of different types and times fit together and chime with each other and to weave aesthetic and thematic correspondences between them, we will shuffle them together in a very fluid edit that makes abundant use of superimpositions. I have already used this creative process successfully in my previous films and would like to take it one step further here.

By superimposing images from the past and present, we conjure up “strata” of time and memory that allow us to “think in pictures” and consider issues that are linked, not only to the passage of time but also, more importantly, to the successive waves of the history of art, or indeed to the meeting and blending together of different landscapes (Polynesia, the Mediterranean) in the artist’s mind and work.

Born in 1970, Raphaël Millet earned degrees from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and Sorbonne-Nouvelle University (Film Studies). He worked at the French National Centre for Cinema (1998-1999), France Télévisions (1999-2000), the Ministry of Overseas France (2000-2002), and then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an audio- visual attaché (2002-2008). Since 2008, he has produced documentary films, including Code Name Melville (2008), Jean-Luc Godard, Disorder Exposed, (2012) and Edgar Morin, Chronicle of a Gaze (2014), and two short fiction films: Midway (2011) and Dramonasc (2018). He has also directed documentaries: Pierre Schoendoerffer, the Sentinel of Memory (2011), The Cinematographic Voyage of Gaston Méliès to Tahiti (2014), Gaston Méliès and his Wandering Star Film Company (2015), Chaplin in Bali (2017) and The Saint-Nazaire Pocket, Such a Long Occupation (2019). Raphaël Millet has travelled several times to Corsica and Morocco and also to Polynesia, where he has already shot two films. It was during these travels that he met the distant shadow of Matisse “the Corsican”, “the Moroccan” and “the Polynesian”.

CC&C is a film production company which specializes in high-end History documentaries, meant to decipher and recount History to the larger public. Our credits include the world-renowned Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke’s collection Apocalypse (ongoing since 2009) and History of Aviation (original version in 1977, remastered in 2019); as well as Frederic Lumiere’s The 100 days of Normandy (20'x9 screens for Arromanches 360 theater in Normandy) in 2013; and blue-chip feature documentaries such as Olivier Julien’s Tokyo Phoenix, the Rise of Modern Japan (Arte, NHK, Japan Foundation, Smithsonian, TV5 Québec, Al Arabiya, Planete+) in 2017 and Stéphane Bégoin and Thomas Marlier’s America's Great War 1917-1918 (France 5, Inrap, National Geographic Channel, Toute l’Histoire, RTBF) in 2017. www.cccprod.com

Belgian director and producer Marion Hänsel created the Brussels-based company Man's Films Productions in 1977. She won her first success in 1987 with Les noces barbares and more recently with La tendresse and En amont du fleuve, in which Olivier Gourmet plays. Man's Films is one of Belgium's leading independent production companies, producing both fiction and documentary. Man's Films Productions has a long experience of coproduction with other European countries, especially with France, as in the case of No Man's Land co-produced with Noé Productions in 2002, Les chemins de la mémoire co-produced with Alokatu in 2009, or Raphael Millet's Chaplin à Bali, co-produced with Nocturnes Productions in 2017. http://marionhansel.com/

Since 2007, Nocturnes Productions has been producing mainly documentaries, which deal with the history of cinema and art history, with: - portraits of great filmmakers marked by war: Sous le nom de Melville, 2008, Pierre Schoendoerffer, la sentinelle de la mémoire, 2011 - the links between cinema and the other arts (especially modern art), as André S. Labarthe s’expose, du chat au chapeau (2011) and Jean-Luc Godard, le désordre exposé (2012) - the relationship between a filmmaker and an actor, as in Melville-Delon: d’honneur et de nuit (2011) - the relationship between a thinker and the cinema, as in Edgar Morin, chronique d’un regard (2014) - Exploring the history of cinema with Le Voyage cinématographique de Gaston Méliès à Tahiti in 2014, Le Voyage cinématographique de Gaston Méliès dans les mers du Sud et en Extrême-Orient in 2015, Chaplin à Bali in 2017. Nocturnes Productions produit also fiction shorts such as Arnaud Bénoliel's À Mi-chemin (2011) and Olivier Bohler and Céline Gailleurd’s Dramonasc (2018). https://nocturnesproductions.net/