ON MATISSE AND LIKENESS

Prologue

There are several objections to focussing on Matisse's portraits. Numerically, they were not an important part of his output. They are easily outnumbered by still lives, interiors, figures that are not portraits; and of course they are overshadowed in grandeur by the large decorative compositions.

And there is a general objection, an external objection that stems from the orthodoxy of modernism. For most of this century it has been held that portraiture is impossible within the terms of modern art - both for obvious social reasons, and for stylistic reasons. Quantities such as likeness, psychology in the dramatic sense, characterisation, responsiveness to the sitter and so forth simply have no part to play in the modernist painter's adventure - and anyway, the camera can take care of all that so much better. The few artists of the 20th century who have persisted in making portraits - Kokoshka, Otto Dix, Balthus, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud - have tended to be seen as marginal cases, somewhere off the main line. It is to the point that in his great hymn of praise to modern art and 'pure painting', it was a portrait that Andre Malraux (the Voices of Silence) took as the cardinal example of what he was talking about. It was Manet's painting of Clemenceau and Malraux dismissed it as a portrait: "From now on the subject was nothing, the artist was everything..."

In J-P. Sartre's novel Le Nausee' the central character Roquetin finds himself one Sunday afternoon in the museum in the provincial city he is living in. He wanders by rows of portraits of the local dignitaries of his grandfather's generation, mayors, industrialists, and stopping in front of one of these he reflects: "When one is confronted with a face sparkling with righteousness, after a moment this sparkle dies away and only an ashy residue remains... Parrottin put up a good fight. But suddenly his look burned out, the picture grew dim. What was left? Blind eyes, the thin mouth of a dead snake..."

I was struck when I first read this because it seemed to describe exactly an experience I had had, not just in front of third-rate paintings. Portraits do burn out. Its as though one's recognition of the individual human presence has a limited life. It runs out. The picture dies, leaving one with an empty effigy with a grimace frozen on its face. One could argue that these qualities of life-likeness are inimical to whatever else it is we go to pictures for. But why should we circumscribe what we ask of a picture, particularly since there are such strong counter-examples, portraits where the longer you look the more strikingly alive the sitter becomes - all of El Greco's portraits, most of Rembrandt's, Goya's, David's - and, to an extent that I find continually astonishing - those of Matisse.

Consider the famous drawing of Sarah Stein, made in the winter of l9l5/l6 when Matisse was going through a period of extreme reduction. It is one of the most austere images he ever made. You can see traces of a lot of searching. His conclusion is a bare structure of about seventeen lines - and yet, what are we to make of its power as a representation? The drawing smolders with life. It seems to be more than a likeness, but rather to be itself alive, generating irresistibly a living, individual human presence, alert, sensate, responsive, with her own inner life. And this feeling does not go away. Look at this drawing for as long as you like. You cannot catch it resting.

I am enthralled by this mystery. What follows is a pursuit of this mystery, but in no sense an explanation of it.

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