Henri-Emile-Benoît Matisse
Although he regularly took drawing classes as a young man, Henri Matisse came to painting late. When he was 20, Matisse found himself convalescing in a hospital. This was long before managed care’s attempts to get patients out of the hospital in record time. No, back in the 19th century, once admitted, stays were often extended. During his recuperation, Matisse shared his room with a man who painted from bed. Matisse was intrigued and his mother, brought him a box of oils. Eventually, Matisse would study under the greatest literary Symbolist painter, Gustave Moreau (Goo-stav More-row). Moreau’s canvases are extraordinary bejeweled creations of lush color and form. They express a dark sensuality not only in their mythic subjects, but also in their intense color, darkness, and form.

Henri Matisse’s early masterpiece, The Dinner Table, was finished just after the death of his teacher. Yet it can be seen as a sort of thesis project. It is Matisse’s declaration that he has outgrown the style of his student days–a darkly colored style derived from the Dutch art of the late 19th century and that he had come to fully understand the newly established art of his time, Impressionism (very much like the change that took place in Van Gogh’s art when he came to Paris). However, this is not to suggest that Moreau’s art is not felt here. The table before us is in some ways as opulent and sensual in its color and form as many canvases by Moreau, even if the subject is far more tame.

We see a young servant arranging flowers above the richly set table. She bends forward towards the table’s centerpiece and in so doing, places her face beside the flowers. This bouquet is itself framed and softly illuminated by the window behind it. In this way Matisse uses the flowers as a bridge between nature and the woman, a relationship to which Matisse refers throughout his long career. By the way, the model was then Matisse’s lover and the chairs at the far end of the room that edge towards each other re thought by some art historians to refer to their intimacy. But this is little more than an aside, the main issue of the painting is the extraordinary range of reflective surfaces. The linen tablecloth emits a warm soft glow quite different from the sharp light thrown from the porcelain of the plates. The ivory of the flatware is different again as are each of the five carafes that reflect light according to the opacity and color of the wine inside. Finally, look at the stemware of the setting closest to us. These elusive glasses are constructed only of reflection itself.


Matisse as Fauve


The Green Stripe (Mme. Matisse), 1905

What has happened! Only eight years have passed since Matise painted The Dinner Table and yet Matisse has rendered his wife with a coarse green stripe running down her face. What happened to the subtle color, the delicate line, the prismatic light?! In a 1907 interview conducted by the avant-garde poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, Matisse stated:

I made an effort to develop this personality by counting above all on my intuition and by returning again and again to fundamentals. When difficulties stopped me in my work I said to myself: ‘I have colors, a canvas, and I must express myself with purity, even though I do it in the briefest manner by putting down, for instance, four of five spots of color or drawing four or five lines which have plastic expression.’ (from: Jack Flam, Matisse on Art. New York: Dutton, 1978, page 32).

So, in the simplest terms, Matisse has rejected his former concern for an objective rendering of the referent (in this case, his wife) and has become preoccupied instead with subjective expression. He has shifted from a dialogue between the model and the canvas to a dialogue between the artist and his canvas. The referent or model is only a point of departure. It no longer dictates a standard against which the image is measured. Indeed, the painting seems more concerned with issues of painting then it does with issues of representation. Note, for example, that color is functioning as a replacement for chiaroscuro (modeling with light and shade). The yellow is no darker than the pinkish side of the face yet that side is in shadow. Likewise, the green stripe is not meant to represent darkness but an expression, in pure color, of an optical effect–the transitory point between light and dark.

Further, Matisse has created artificial color that has more to do with theory than nature. For instance, the yellow is opposed to the violet as the pink is to the green, each are complimentary. In fact the entire canvas becomes a color wheel of sorts. Wild color and flagrant disregard for nature, these are the hallmarks of Les Fauves (lay faux-v) or the Wild Beasts as the artists with whom Matisse worked were called by a critic.