Woman with Hat
Portraits
Matisse's portraits are almost always of family, or of friends - people in his circle, painters, painters wives, musicians, actresses, collectors who had become friends. There are very few commissioned portraits. And as to his models, it is only occasionally that he made portraits of them.
The family, Mme Matisse and Marguerite in particular, are like hard-driven laboratory assistants. During the crucial years 1905/6 his wife is the model for the paintings in which he summarized the Fauve style, The Hat and the Green Line. And it is she again who sits through endless sittings for the great portrait that is his major response to cubism. These paintings mark radical turning points. She had supported him through thick and thin. These sittings which stretched her nerves to breaking point, and the results of which brought down storms of ridicule from conservative critics and the ardent support of critics like Appolinaire, were strenuous tests of her support and understanding.
Matisse's last published words were in the introduction to a folio that was published in 1954, the year he died, called Portraits. It is one of his more beautiful texts. All through it he stresses the search for likeness:
"True portraits, that is to say, those in which the feelings as well as the features seem to come from the model, are rather rare..." He goes on "The driving force which leads me throughout... depends on the initial shock of contemplating a face."
The painter must empty his mind of all preoccupations, Matisse says, thinking only of the face in front of him:
"The art of portraiture... demands especial gifts of the artist, and the possibility of an almost total identification of the painter with his model."
Likeness, he associated with 'asymmetry', by which he means the way an individual face deviates from a type.
"I believe, however, that the essential expression of a work depends almost entirely on the projection of the feeling of the artist in relation to his model rather than in organic accuracy...."
But wait a minute! He is saying two things here: the expression must come from the model; the expression must come from the painter. Which does he mean? I leave the question hanging for a while.
An extreme instance of the painter's 'projection of feeling' would be the Yvonne Landsberg portrait, with its baffling outburst of scratched lines that leap out from the motionless sitter. There have been many attempts at interpreting them. Matisse refused to explain them. Yvonne Landsberg was an extremely shy girl in her teens. Matisse was touched by her shyness. When she and her brother arrived at his studio for the first sitting, they found Matisse drawing the buds of magnolias, which, he told them, reminded him of her. The painting took many sittings and was entirely re-painted at each one. Her brother was to comment that with each sitting it seemed to resemble her less - but, in a quite different sense, became more and more like her. The scratched lines were whipped in at the last minute and, according to Landsberg, Matisse was as astonished by them as everyone else.
In describing his search for likeness, Matisse stresses the interaction between himself and his model as though it comes about on a level over which he has no control, far removed from ordinary social intercourse. He stresses the almost commonplace conventionality of the sittings. There is no Kokoshkarish nonsense about X-ray eyes 'penetrating the sitter to her innermost being.' At first it is a matter of learning her appearance. At the end of the first session, he tells us, he will have a "more or less precise image"...
"This image is revealed to me as though each stroke of charcoal (had) erased from the glass (between us) some of the mist which until then had prevented me from seeing it."
After this first session, he wants to leave it for a day or two. "During this interval there occurs a kind of unconscious mental fermentation..." When he takes s second look at the drawings he made on the first day they are likely to look weak: "But beyond the haze of this uncertain I can sense a structure of solid lines. This structure touches his imagination which, as time goes on is fired equally by the structures revealed in the first sitting and by the renewed presence of the model. "The sittings continue in the same spirit, probably without these two people becoming... much more informed about each other than on the first day."
But "something has come into being... an interaction of feeling...."
"After prolonged work in charcoal, made up of studies which more or less interrelate, flashes of insight arise, which while appearing more or less rough, are the expression of the intimate exchange between the artist and his model."
In contrast to the cool and somewhat detached tone of his description here, there is a mass of evidence to indicate that he approached his portrait sitters in a state of heightened emotion, as though the success or failure of the work was in their hands, as though everything hung by a thread over which they had control. This comes over even in letters he wrote to a colleague when he was working on portrait drawings of the Baltimore collectors, Claribel and Etta Cohn, working from photographs: and one of them was dead! He approached his sitters wide open to the "Shock" of contemplating their faces, with awe and wonder. Sometimes he speaks of them like a man in love.
In 1913, the year of the great cubist portrait of his wife, he was introduced to an American woman, Mrs. Warren, who sat for him. It seems that Matisse was unusually pleased by the final drawing, which had evidently been hard-won.
"For some time" he told Matthew Prichard, who had introduced Mrs. Warren, "I thought it too difficult and that I should have to abandon the attempt. There was a constant movement of her will forwards and backwards, giving and withdrawing, opening and closing; my first drawing was nothing, but when, after hesitating, her being agreed to lend itself, I was able to work. There was no change in the features unless in the light of her eyes, but there was a constant vibration (here Matisse fluttered his hand back and forth) - it was like a rippling lake, like sunshine on water, there was nothing whatever to seize and there was no point where it seemed possible for me to begin."
He was so proud of the final drawing, Prichard tells us. He thought it had a vitality that no photograph could match. Something had happened, something had been released in him - or, something had come over to him from the sitter:
"It was a miracle" he told Prichard later, "She is a flowing stream. She is just a flame, she hangs by a thread, no point is indicated where you can grasp her. In spite of that, the drawing is a complete realisation of my vision."
"Beyond the haze of this uncertain image I can sense a structure solid lines..." In all Matisse's work there is a sense of momentum, a forward pressing movement in which the painting is opened up again and again, change is courted, the standing of the whole painting is put at risk when moves and alterations are made. His blunt, uningratiating corrections are made without any regard for closure. When the still-open picture has looked back at him and its look has matured - not into timelessness, but into a steady, enduring regard - when this has come about, he is ready to walk away from it.
The momentum of his work always involves a certain stripping away, the shedding of irrelevance. In the modernist drawings like the studies for the portrait of Eva Prozor which are among the most aggressively reductive of all, one infers a whole history of search and discovery among the ghosts of lines that hover behind the final ones. This last minimal structure does not feel like something imposed - although it is clearly invented, having no literal correspondence with things seen. These few lines feel less like summaries of past observations than like new statements in an entirely new language - a language in which the terms are not abstracted from the head in front of him and transcribed onto a neutral surface, but rather that the head is made over again, invented, given new life from the unique terms of this particular page and its history.
Later Matisse was to find a different rhythm for this forward-moving process, a process that we can compare to the cycles of compression and release, of indrawn tension and outward flow that are inseparable from our physical and mental awareness. The anxiety that produces the first drawings, with all their trials and corrections, is discharged now in a torrent of line drawings in which the terms that have been laboriously assembled into a tight-knit whole are spent prodigally in a kind of play that looks as if it feels as if it could go on for ever.
Drawings along these lines were exhibited in the late '30s under the title Themes and Variations. But notice that with these heads, the variations that he plays out are not exactly formal variations in which the theme can be exactly specified or to which the variations can be exactly returned. The theme is flexible, a continuity of intangibles, as mobile as running water. The point is that Matisse's reductions must not be mistaken for some latter-day version of that Renaissance tradition that recommended the artist to strip away the particular and the contingent in order to reveal the Idea, the timeless essentials that lie beyond the particular case. Matisse is not working towards an ideal generalization: he is living something out in real time, the presence of his sitter - this person - and the presence of his drawing - this drawing. And it is the unfolding of understanding that took place in real time, that is final1y summarized.
His reductions bring the issue of likeness to the fore, as a problem. The question of likeness fascinated him and puzzled him. He wrote about it in connection with a sheet of self-portrait drawings that were in a major exhibition in Philadelphia in 1947. How can it be, he asks, that these drawings, none of which matches another, are all so obviously of the same person? He lists their differences; then he points out that there is some consistency in the way the parts are articulated: "The way the nose is rooted in the face - the ear screwed into the skull - the lower jaw hung." What preserves the sense of identity, Matisse writes, is the "organic make-up" of the four heads.
Likeness is preserved through all these transformations:
"It is quite clear" he says, letting his self-portrait spill into words, "that all four drawings describe the same man, as to his character and personality, his way of looking at things and his reaction to life, as to the reserve with which he faces it and which keeps him from an uncontrolled surrender to it."
This was the face he presented to the world - dry, clear-eyed, logical, controlled. It was one side - the day-lit side - of an argument that had raged inside him all his life. The other, the dark side, spoke for intuition, the unpremeditated impulse, the surrender of will. It wasn't his argument alone. French painting had defined itself in parallel terms for a hundred years and more, hence the mythic power of the rivalry between Ingres and Delacroix, the persuasiveness of Baudelaire's opposition of le naif et le poncif. The terms change - line versus colour, Florence versus Venice, Poussin versus Rubens, studio versus plein air - and of course, Post-Impressionism, Cezanne above all, had permanently transformed the terms of the argument. But the tension remains, finding new positions in the mind of any artist struggling to understand where they are and what they must do. For this argument is nothing less than painting's specialized way of talking about issues that are as old and as universal as human consciousness itself.
Green Stripe
Madame Matisse
Yvonne Landsberg
Madame Matisse
Greta Pozor