Matisse on Art
Expression
How can this affinity between picture and face be brought to bear on the matter that I started with - the sense of living likeness that haunts Matisse's portraits? I turn first to his own words. Painter's statements usually need to be taken with a grain of salt, but Matisse's Notes of a Painter of 1908 are different. He was 39 when he wrote them. He was confident of the ground he had covered in the last ten years. He had just opened a school. He really wanted to explain, to make himself clear. These are carefully formulated statements, written with integrity.
"What I am after above all is expression..... The thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means.... I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it."
He asserts the identity, the inextricable link between ends and means. This is where he dissociates himself once and for all from the academic tradition. Now he goes on to specify how this identity can be brought about.
"Expression, for me, does not reside in the passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions.... In a picture every part will be visible and will play its appointed role.... Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety."
You will notice how he presents the two key ideas - Expression and Wholeness - as though they are linked, or rather, different ways of looking at the same thing, the recto and verso of the same coin.
Expression is a strange word. It means first to press or squeeze out, only later to represent, to state, to convey.. In this sense it seems to Point both ways, inwards and outwards, to hover somewhere in that shadowy zone between subject and object. We sweat over how to express ourselves; we sweat over how to interpret another's expression.
When Matisse begins to draw his model, her expression is, if you like, what her features mean; how she represents herself. Understanding the constellation of her features is to understand her expression; but his search for that constellation consists exactly of his search for expression - his, Matisse's expression. I think no artist has ever understood this reciprocity as clearly as he did. The sitter's face was a mirror, not in the vulgar sense that could be applied to all those portrait painters who always end up painting the same face. With him, the particular, the idiosyncratic and elusive was the sharpest stimulus to his own expression.
Expression, he tells us, is indistinguishable from his means. What does this signify? It does not mean that he has some sort of held idea about what he wants the drawing or painting to express - and then shapes and judges the painting as the vehicle for that idea. He looks to the painting to guide his expression, to make himself clear to himself. His moment-to-moment response to how the canvas looks back at him constitutes the unfolding of his expression. Now he describes the painting process (he's talking in general here, not about portraits):
I must precisely define the character of the object or of the body that I wish to paint. To do so, I study my method closely. If I put a black dot on a sheet of white paper, the dot will be visible no matter how far away I hold it: it is a clear notation. But beside this dot I place another one, and ten a third, and already there is confusion. In order for the first dot to maintain its value I must enlarge it as I put other marks on the paper."
His marks must hold their own, must stand on their own terms..The relations between them, their organization, must have their own coherence and in the achievement of that coherence, he discovers his expression.
What is assumed here, it goes without saying, is the vitality of the canvas or the sheet in front of him. It looks back, and the fantasy that absorbs him is that as he marks it he is modulating its expression.
Look, for example, at one of the few portrait drawings done in the Fauvist years, the portrait of Jeanne Manguin of 1906. The drawing develops symmetrically. The linked hands, the fold of her shawl, the centred brooch, the collar, all join in a series of upward-spreading triangles that support her head. This structure spreads out from a vertical axis, the axis that supports her features and is closed only by the swoop of the brim of her hat that literally caps it off. The whole drawing looks back at us. The marks that denote her eyes, nose, mouth are in lively accord with the marks that denote her shawl, the veil, lacey cuffs.
The canvas or the sheet of paper has its own specifics of size, proportion and area: it's not just a piece of something neutral. It is a whole thing. He devotes a paragraph to this point in the Notes of a Painter:
"If I take a sheet of paper of a given size, my drawing will have a necessary relationship to its format. I would not repeat this drawing on another sheet of different proportions, for example, rectangular instead of square. Nor should I be satisfied with a mere enlargement had I to transfer the drawing to a sheet the same shape, but ten times larger."
At the height of his most severely modernist period (1915) Matisse made some drawings of the violinist Eva Mudocci. One of these is on a tall narrow sheet - I think it is a Japanese paer that he used for prints. The image is worked out to the edge. You can see from the erased marks how he has progressively assimilated the image to the page, bringing the collar and the long upraised hand into a parallel relation to the edges, re-drawing the features so that they lock into the shape of the paper, the paper that he pushes back on either side of the head with charcoal rubbing that is not so much like shading as like a kind of cutting or carving as though the paper were a plank, something solid.
In the famous drawing of the same sitter (in MOMA) we can see the same process working in an opposite direction. The drawing started at about two thirds its present size. The head was further to the right and much more naturalistic in its rendering. The additions appear to be sequential - first the strip on the left, making the whole wider than it is tall, allowing him to develop the great buttress of her supporting arm; then the two strips on the bottom which restore the proportions of the original sheet but change the subject, introducing the arm of the chair and the movement of the other arm across her lap. I can't think of another work that brings the experience of time more poignantly into play. There is a forward momentum, a drive in which one view of the whole is supplanted by another and another; at each stage, the parts root themselves in the different rectangles, giving a distinct quality to her presence, a different balance to her splendid pose. We take in this forward momentum by reading it backward, working back to the original drawing as though working through layers of memory. We find her present head locked in to the top of the page, the contour of the hair left open on both sides so that the background shapes flow in, as if to an armature, to enclose and delicately support the head. Earlier markings have left their traces. Through them we can feel her gradual shift to the left, drawing herself together, drawing herself up with greater and greater authority, and pulling away from, although not leaving the ravishingly beautiful face that once was and is now erased, that hangs there, a memory. But it was in that veiled, dreaming face that the drawing began. Somewhere within those first moves were the seeds of the impulses that drove the drawing forward to its present state.
In drawings like this we can feel how sometimes the paper becomes so real in its dimensions that he is able to work on it as concretely as a sculptor working on a piece of stone. It is given, and the image is carved out of what is there as best it may be. His erasures are like a stripping down. There are several reported remarks where Matisse says things like "Drawing is nearer to sculpture than to painting." Elderfield quotes him as saying "A drawing is a sculpture," and of course, at the end, with the cut-outs, when he felt that he had at last got somewhere in his life-long battle to have drawing and colour speaking as one, he says it again, in triumph: "Cutting directly into colour reminds me of a sculptor's carving into stone."
There is a little self-portrait drawing where we have no choice but to see the sheet itself as the artist's head. The boundaries of the head are left open. The drawing is all features, but they don't float around. I am reminded of a solid object that has had a face inscribed on it and becomes a head. And also of that astonishing object, the fifth version of the head of Jeanine in which the features, the massive nose, the craggy eyes, have become the head, finding their own version of the skull, a more compelling presence by far than the earlier versions where the head was realised in a more normative form.
In the painting of Sarah Stein, which is associated with the drawing that I first showed you, the head emerges from a grey wedge that is both background to her head and pushes forward to become her shoulders and chest in one continuous plane. The head and long neck seem to grow out of that grey plane, to be both part of it and an exotic flowering above its surface. The picture as rectangle, the picture as fabric, the picture as face: the haunting affinity between the face and the fabric that supports it evokes that legendary picture, the True Image, the Vera Ikon, the Veronica, the veil onto which Christ's features were miraculously imprinted on the road to Calvary. I have no idea how much Matisse had thought about this legend before he made the Stations of the Cross designs for the Chapel at Vence, but there the Veronica is, dominating the whole wall, facing us more openly even than the figure on the cross and with greater force than anything else - because it is a picture.
Greta Moll
Marguerite
Eva Mudocci
Jeannette V
St. Veronica