Prologue | Representation | Expression | Portraits | Conclusion
There is a drawing that is published by Lydia Delectorskaya - Matisse's model and companion for the last two decades of his life - and on the back of it Matisse has scribbled that day's version of the argument. There are two lists, under the titles Reason and Inspiration. Reason has Method, Colour (crossed out), Drawing (the translator has Sketch, but as far as I can see the word is Dessin), then Colour is written in again, and finally Valeur. This is translated as Meaning; which is, of course, one of the word's primary meanings. But in studio jargon, valeur means the weight and temperature of a tone - and elsewhere Matisse will tell us that the particular emotion that his model evokes is expressed by the distribution of valeurs - values - across the whole canvas "forming their orchestration, their architecture." So in the ambiguity of this word we are brought back to his original formulation - Expression is indistinguishable from Means.
The other list, under the heading Inspiration, starts with the word Rapture. Then: The devil - or a double substituting for a rational man.
Then: Comparison to a woman being courted - who is another's.
It is an enigmatic list. What thoughts were going through his head when he wrote colour on the Reason side, then crossed it out, then wrote it in again? And who is it who is compared to a woman being courted and belongs to another? The model? The picture? Or the painter himself?
Some years later, the year he died, he wrote in the Portraits essay the now famous account of the "revelation in the post office". Here he tells us that he first became interested in portraits at a precise moment in his youth. He was waiting in a post office for a phone call. He was thinking about his mother - the implication is that it was her call that he was expecting.
"To pass the time I picked up a telegraph form.... and using the post office pen, began to draw on it... I drew without thinking what I was doing, my pen going by itself, and I was surprised to see my mother's face, with all its subtleties...." He goes on: "I was struck by the revelations of my pen, and saw that the mind which is composing should keep a sort of virginity... and reject what is offered by reasoning."
Perhaps one reason why Matisse so valued the particular relation that the portrait required, the painter, the sitter, the canvas somewhere between them -- was that it brought into the foreground the very nature of painting itself. It gave reasonable circumstances for the release of fantasy, and in turn, fantasy, desire, delirium spun an atmosphere in which reason could focus its sharp point. The canvas, the paper, faced him. It was face-like. It returned his look. In moving across it, in marking it, he was forming its features, finding its expression. The presence of the sitter - whom he never placed more than two metres away, usually closer - the presence of his sitter opened channels of feeling that flowed as if from outside, from the sitter, from the mysterious portals of that face whose expression was her own, autonomous, Other - and yet, as it flowed through him, was his.
"At a certain moment" he told one writer "There is a sort of revelation, I am no longer in control. At such times there is a real split in me. I no longer know what I am doing. I identify with my model."
An ancient myth
of inspiration is being enacted here, only now the Muse, who
alone understands the mysteries of inside and outside, of here
and there - and knows all about the terms of modern painting -
relinquishes her muse position at the artist's elbow and crosses
the room and sits for him, expressionless, not more than two
metres away - face to face.
AF
| International School of Painting, Drawing
and Sculpture |