Cultural Resistance in Henri Matisse's Poèmes De Charles D
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Cultural Resistance in Henri Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans Dr Rodney Swan This is an accepted manuscript of an article published in Visual Resources, publisher Taylor and Francis, online publication date 17 September 2018. The print publication date is pending. The final version of record is available on line from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01973762.2018.1507475 2 Swan Cultural Resistance in Henri Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans Rodney Swan Henri Matisse (1869–1954) adopted medievalism, a motif of cultural resistance in Occupied France, as a symbol of national unity through his appropriation of the fifteenth century poems of Charles de Valois, duc d'Orléans (1394–1465). Matisse saw parallels between the plight of the medieval poet, held captive in England, and his own circumstances in France during the Second World War. Begun in 1942, while recovering from his near-death illness, aided by his friend, André Rouveyre (1879–1962), encouraged by the fugitive poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Matisse introduced covert symbols and coded messages of hope and rebirth into his book to highlight his nations heritage as he silently participated in the cultural battle that was being fought in France. This paper analyses the aesthetic evolution of his wartime illustrated book Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950), and examines his choice of poems, the handwritten text, his decorative illuminations, the images, d’Orléans portrait and the frontispiece within the context of the disruption to the French nation and his own personal circumstance. Keywords: Henri Matisse (1869–1954); Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465); André Rouveyre (1879- 1962); Livre d’artiste; Cultural Resistance; Tériade (Stratis Eleftheriades, 1897–1983). Strategies and Actions of Cultural Resistance Turbulent political and personal winds battered the elderly Henri Matisse (1869–1954) during the German Occupation of France of 1940–1944. As German troops rapidly advanced towards Paris, Matisse, who had been declared a degenerate artist by Adolph Hitler (1889–1945) in July 1937, fled the capital for the safety of Nice.1 He was dismayed by the defeat of France and horrified by the ongoing atrocities.2 Whilst his assistant Lydia Delectorskaya (1910–1998) was questioned by the Vichy authorities because of her Russian origin, he was aware that his estranged wife Amélie Parayre (1872–1958), daughter Marguerite (1895–1982) and son Jean (1899–1976) worked in the French resistance and held grave fears for their safety.3 In addition, his youngest son Pierre (1900–1989), a successful art dealer in New York, was exhibiting works by the surrealist artists who had fled France, artists also deemed to be degenerate by the Germans. Matisse was devastated when his beloved grandson, Claude Duthuit (1931–2011), was taken to the United States for safety, with the possibility that he may never see the child again. Moreover, Amélie had recently issued him with a legal Deed of Separation demanding half of all his possessions. Overlaying this was his near-death experience after two risky operations just after his flight from Paris, and his consequent frail health left him incapacitated. It was in this difficult period that Matisse commenced his illustrated book Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans, which this article identifies as an act of cultural resistance. Surprisingly, this livre d’artiste has Cultural Resistance in Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans 3 not received the scholarly analysis of Matisse’s other illustrated books and so this paper adds to the evaluation of Matisse’s works, particularly those he created during the Second World War.4 Matisse was not known as an overtly political artist and has been subject of some criticism for not openly condemning the Vichy regime. Art historian Michèle Cone claimed that “there is the possibility that Matisse, unlike his wife and his daughter, both active in the French Resistance, sided with the nationalism of the Vichy Regime.”5 Cone based this assessment, in part, on a 1924 interview to a Danish critic where Matisse is reported to have said that he did not consider it desirable for so many foreign artists to arrive in Paris. Biographer Hilary Spurling (1940) strongly rejects Cone's view stating that it is unsubstantiated, that there is no documentary evidence supporting it and asserts that Cone seems to be responsible for the widespread assumption that Matisse supported Vichy.6 In addition, artist Françoise Gilot (1921) stated that Matisse’s sympathies did not lie with the Vichy regime and that it was only his illness and age that prevented him from taking an active role in opposition.7 In 1972, French poet and intellectual Louis Aragon (1897–1982) had repeatedly asserted Matisse’s anti-Vichy stance, including an insightful commentary on the anti-Occupation symbolism of Matisse’s cut-out (découpage) image, The Fall of Icarus. More recently, art historian Jack Flam published a reading of many of the images in Jazz as anti-War representation. Yet, Cone make no reference to Gilot, Aragon and Flam. Also, at issue was Matisse’s association with the collaborationist Henri Montherlant (1895-1972), author of Pasiphaé, and Martin Fabiani, publisher of two of the artists wartime illustrated books, Dessins: Thèmes et Variations and Pasiphaé: Chant de Minos (Les Crétois). Fabiani, close to the Germans and widely regarded as a collaborator, was able to secure paper, ink and other materials and thus continue to publish. Fabiani attained greater visibility when he continued with some of Ambroise Vollard’s (1866–1939) unfinished illustrated books after Vollard’s untimely death in 1939, just before France declared war on Germany. Fabiani had also during the Occupation, on 26 May 1942, published Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) livre d’artiste Picasso: Eaux-Fortes Originales Pour des Textes de Buffon, a work that Vollard originally commissioned.8 Picasso, however, did not suffer any reputational damage because of this association. In fact, Fabiani was the perfect foil and using his services even offered some degree of protection as the publisher. Matisse also did not seem to be perturbed by Fabiani’s or Montherlant’s political stance. Close personal and working relationships between friends and colleagues with opposing political views was not unusual during the Occupation. Riding refers to the friendship between the fascist editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle (1893–1945), a known collaborator, and anti-fascist campaigner and intellectual André Malraux (1901–1976), citing that in 1943 Drieu La Rochelle even became godfather to one of Malraux’s children. Likewise, the resistance leader and writer Jean Paulhan (1884–1968) remained close friends with the collaborationist writer Marcel Jouhandeau (1888–1979) even though Jouhandeau’s wife denounced Paulhan to the German Wehrmacht’s military police. Another example is Drieu La 4 Swan Rochelle’s intervention with his German friends to seek the release of Paulhan who had been arrested by the German police.9 The Occupation of France included a cultural conflict of ideology and propaganda: the invading Germans attempted to supplant centuries of French cultural and historical practices and traditions, and with this cultural battle came the cultural resistance. Many scholars have tried to explain the dilemma of using the term “resistance” and at the time it was, “a territory without maps and sometimes developed differently from what the first pioneers had expected.”10 For instance, the resistance has been postulated as comprising two different but overlapping components, “active resistance” and “passive resistance”.11 Active resistance relates to primarily to the military aspects of resistance and could include actions such as physical combat, reconnaissance, sabotage, forging documents, hiding hostages, and blowing up bridges and railway lines. In contrast passive resistance is of a non-military nature which could vary from listening to illicit broadcasts on the BBC, wearing black for mourning, wearing the colours of the French flag, drawing the Croix de Lorraine and “V” for victory on walls, or even whistling patriotic music.12 By its nature cultural resistance is a form of passive resistance. The strategies and actions of cultural resistance utilised by the French during the German Occupation fall into a wide spectrum. These included attempts to preserve French culture, to propagate confidence, to memorialise the atrocities taking place and, importantly, the return to a framework of national unity that tolerated diversity of thought.13. The notion of the artist who works alone to create clandestine works of protest and national unity raises the idea of individualism and the cultural resistance. This form of resistance was neither organised nor followed a single or identifiable protocol, rather, because of its individuality, there were different expressions of resistance—each with its own myriad of complexities—and hence there was no single language of individual cultural resistance. Thus, artists deployed a wide variety of actions, ranging from the very basic form of resistance inherent in continuing to live and work in France to the refusal to work or to the use of understood codes of transgression.14 Their weapons included the printed word, the image, dance, music and film, and they used newspapers, books, radio, cinema and mass meetings.15 Some scholars took the notion of cultural resistance even further and argued that it is a state of mind, where if one has the will to resist even though the means is not available, then the mere determination to resist itself constitutes an act of resistance.16 It is therefore necessary to include as resistance literature those works that were produced during the war, remained unseen, but were published after it.17 This is an important issue as it applies to Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans. Consequently, it is argued in this paper that Matisse’s livre d’artiste Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans, created in large part during the Occupation, is a work imbued with cultural patriotism, a work that focuses on propagating French national unity and an instrument of cultural resistance.