ON MATISSE AND LIKENESS

Representations

I turn first to Matisse's representations of himself. Self-portraits belong to the painter in a special way. Every other genre points outwards, finding attachments in the world outside the studio. But the mirror closes out such attachments; it closes the gap between observer and observed: the eye that is being described is the same eye that is directing the description. It looks at its look out there - and here on the canvas. The mirror equals the field of the picture. What it contains is the picture.

Inevitably, self-portraits are pictures about painting. They draw us in to the painter's introspection and his unstable questions -unstable because "What do I look like?" glides ineluctably into another question, "What am I doing?" Not that Matisse plays parts in front of the mirror - he is no Rembrandt in oriental drag, no Courbet swaggering with his thumbs stuck in his belt. It's rather that he turns to the mirror to face his anxiety, the anxiety that was famous among his friends, the anxiety that was the painful tariff that he paid for the driving force of his art, the tension between his deep conservatism and his longing for the new, between his reserve and his sensuality, between his extreme self-consciousness and his wordless intuitions.

He paints himself as a painter and his self-portraits are reflections on painting as well as reflections of himself. In the great nude called Carmelina in Boston, the painter makes his appearance crouched in the corner of the mirror behind her, a tiny oblique presence compared to the model's commanding frontality. But there is more to it: her symmetry is due to the fact that she is facing us straight on. We assume the painter's place in front of her, face to face. We look, and we are aware of ourselves looking. The picture brings this about.

Ever since Velasquez, this situation, this entree into the studio has been a possible subject. It reappears again and again in the 19th century, in Manet, in Degas, in Seurat. Matisse evokes it playfully in many of the Nice interiors, and at a more profound level in the very fabric of the picture itself in his brush-marks, his erasures and corrections that involve the onlooker not only in the act of painting, or drawing, as a series of tactile and motor experiences but as a mental process, of search, of trial, of the unfolding of possibility, of recognition, of judgement.

That Matisse recognised this and valued it in spite of the contrary impulse to conceal the hard work, to turn effort into effortlessness - is clear from his later impulse to record the stages of work and to show in the clearest possible way how changes had been made as he went along. Consider, for example, the first drawing he made after his return home from hospital where he had nearly died, significantly, a page filled with a sequence of self-portraits.

Among Matisse's first paintings there are two intimiste interiors in which self-portraits feature as pictures. They are like secret messages. The Woman Reading is turned away from us, calm and silent in the subdued light, but she is facing the self-portrait drawing which hangs on the left wall. Between the two of them there is a clutter of still-life objects, a plaster cast, a propped up portfolio, all emblems of the life he is embarking on, the life of the studio. Over the woman's head, taking the light so that we can't make out what it is 'of', a picture, a luminous rectangle of pure possibility. This faces us squarely. It is the only form that does so.

In the Top Hat still life the self-portrait drawing faces us and between us and it is the desk with its jumble of papers and objects that don't look as if they had been arranged but rather of having accumulated there as other more important things happened in the room. Standing out from all this is the top hat, emblem of the respectable legal career that Matisse had recently walked away from. The desk is surrounded with canvases, pictures, frames. The self-portrait drawing is crossed by an empty frame. Notice a curious point: although the self-portrait in its frame is drawn in perspective as its place on the wall demands,, the empty frame faces us squarely. Either it must have been carefully adjusted on the wall to do this, or its orientation deliberately distorted.

Richard Wollheim in his Painting as an Art has drawn attention to the importance of a fact about painters at work that is so obvious that one doesn't think about it. Whatever changes that have come about in the history of painting - in materials, subject matter, scale, convention, social use, he says, "there has been one noteworthy constancy, and that has been the posture, the bodily stance that the painter adopts in the act of painting..." i.e. addressing the canvas, eyes open and fixed upon it. She or he faces it.

It's a commonplace of film technique that we experience the spaces of the world from four distinct aspects: behind us we can only see in mirrors; upwards, where we look for glory and heroes; downwards, where we look in dejection, or to find things, or not to step in something disgusting; and levelly, straight ahead. It is levelly that we talk to people, recognize faces. The crucial characteristic of a face, its symmetry, the feature that makes it different from a head, is only seen at eye level. This is where recognition begins.

It's also at eye level that we approach pictures - literally when we see them in a gallery or museum, ideally when we consider them in our mind's eye or think about their meaning. Like faces, they too are all front.

I am arguing that there is some sort of general affinity between pictures and faces, it's clear that this can be put to use as a metaphor. Picture as face would be one among several - picture as window is another, that Matisse worked with all his life. Others might be picture as wall, picture as body and so on, each offering a trope that might yield ways of saying things about pictures that could not otherwise be said, throwing workable if fragile bridges between words and the silence of painting. But in accepting this possibility, I would not want to surrender my earlier and perhaps more primitive affinity. We look at pictures face to face. Both face and picture are expressive. Both are representations.

In the two early pictures we were looking at, the canvases and empty frames have a clear autobiographic importance. They stand for Matisse's tentative view of himself as a painter. There is nothing tentative about the four great decorative interiors of 1911 - the Pink Studio, The Painter's Family, Interior with Aubergines and the Red Studio. There is something triumphant about these pictures in which he declares where he stands and what he has done. In the two studios, pictures play an important and complex role. But what I want to draw your attention to is the way the centre of each of these canvases is held by a rectangular form - not a picture - which faces us, square on and which dominates the action throughout the painting. In the Pink Studio it is a folding screen draped with patterned fabrics. In the Painter's Family it is the fire-place and mantelpiece. I have no doubt that these paintings are truly self-portraits, nor that these squarish, picture-like forms on which they are centred stand in for himself.

Finally, I show you the portrait of Pellerin, where the symmetrical pose confronts us with intimidating severity. The dome of his bald head occludes the frame of the picture behind him. The two, sitter and picture, are bound together by an apparently arbitrary arc of paint. The two stare back at us. Pellerin was a rich industrialist. He was also the owner of the largest collection in France of Matisse's ultimate master, Cezanne.

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