"Matisse and the Truth' in New York

Henri Matisse came of age at a moment when the fine arts were in a ferment perhaps unprecedented in modern history. Wagner had shaken traditional tonality in music, and Proust would soon do the same with fictional narrative. Even more radical experiments in prose and verse had been undertaken by the Count de Lautréamont and Arthur Rimbaud.

Cézanne, Monet and their successors were doing the same with pictorial form. For artists who, like Henri Matisse, came of age in the 1890s, the only rule was that there was no rule, or at least no generally accepted one.

Matisse (1869-1954) was a great artist for whom little came easily. Unlike Picasso, whose prodigious gifts were manifest from the very beginning and who created his own styles rather than working his way through those of others, Matisse labored well into his 30s before finding his own path, and that path, as the show currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art makes clear, was not a smooth one.

Art has never been merely mimetic— that is, concerned with the accurate representation of the physical world as people commonly experience it. Its expressive and symbolic values have always been more important, and mimesis has never been an end in itself, but rather the table on which the great feast of art was laid.

Effect of photography

Elements of abstraction and distortion have always been present in art, and few art works have ever been as "Expressionist" as, for example, the clay or stone figurines that served as fertility totems in prehistoric art.

The rise of art academies and the formalist, neoclassical style they favored put a premium on representational fidelity, culminating in the trompe l'oeil painting of the latter 19th Century, whose goal was to deceive the eye into perceiving an "actual" object. The development of photography, however, presented a crisis for academic art and mimesis in general.

Photographs had a verisimilitude that even the most skilled painters couldn't match. This led art in new expressive directions. The wicker chair that Van Gogh painted in Arles was present to the senses in a way that no photograph could be, or indeed any ordinary perception of the object itself.

Why paint apples?

One could go only so far in such a direction, however. As Matisse pointed out Ó propos the apples he painted in homage to Cézanne, there was no point in trying to accurately depict an object that nature supplied in such abundance. It was a matter of using such an object to create clusters of form and combinations of color.

These could be varied endlessly, as Cézanne had done. But this fact also meant that there was no reason to paint apples at all —or, by extension, anything else— unless one could say something new with them.

The object had ceased to be anything but a jumping-off point; and if it wasn't necessary to paint it as it appeared in "real" life, there was no point to situating it in traditional space, either. Complete abstraction was the next logical step— but, like everything else in this new, aleatory world, there was no compulsion to take it. Neither Matisse nor Picasso did, although at times they came close.

50 years of simplifying

Painters who continued to orient themselves by the object world had more choices too. A given object could be painted in an infinite multiplicity of ways and relations to other objects; in theory, one could limit oneself to a single object or cluster for an entire lifetime, as Giorgio Morandi did (apart from a few forays into landscape).

This meant that, in place of a single, definitive statement (the "masterpiece"), painting took the form of variations on a theme. Only when a given series exhausted its expressive possibilities for the painter was there any incentive to move on.

The Met show examines Matisse from this perspective, giving us multiple takes on various subjects over a 50-year period, and showing how he tended to simplify and clarify his forms (but also, at times, to enrich and complicate them).

Blaming the mailman

Matisse reached a critical juncture with the two versions of The Young Sailor that he painted in 1906. Matisse had gone far beyond conventional portraiture in the first one, but the second was significantly streamlined and abstracted, with blocks of color substituted for detail work.

He called this second version a "deformation" of the first, and at first tried— jokingly, one presumes— to pass it off as the work of his mailman. It's masterful, of course, but did Matisse himself have misgivings about his radical simplifications?

If so, he had resolved them by the time of his Le Luxe series—here, two canvases and a large charcoal drawing— which featured a large nude against a nautical background. Again, a simplification of color and outline is evident from the first to the second of the painted versions, with the drawing more detailed than either one.

(A similar progression is evident in his great sculptural series, Nu de dos, on which he had begun to work at the same time.)

Cubism seeps in

Matisse was evidently working toward a new language, and he was certainly aware of the one being forged at the same time by Picasso and Braque. Cubism works itself into the large domestic interiors Matisse did during World War I, and it remained a resource for him, although a more natural curvilinear style soon reasserted itself.

Nonetheless, his practice of painting subjects in series did not mean that the earlier works were mere preparatory sketches for the later ones. Each painting was a valid approach to its subject in its own terms; it took a multiplicity of approaches to encompass each one, and there was no final or summative point of view.

Picasso adopted a similar approach after working out Cubism, although he tended to revert to certain themes— as for example in his bathers series of the late 1920s and early '30s— rather than working variations of a specific prototype.

Up against abstraction

All of this of course went back to the dancers of Degas and Cézanne's still lifes and landscapes, and in Cézanne we see deliberate stylistic experimentation too. But in Matisse the objective was to push the language forward from painting to painting, until the invisible barrier was reached. That barrier was abstraction.

For me, the greatest Matisses are those painted between his first visit to Morocco in 1912 and the end of World War I (including the wonderful "Goldfish" series included here), but that's a personal preference. It's true that contemporary critics, having recognized the importance of Matisse's achievement, believed that what appeared his more decorative style of the 1920s and "'30s was a falling-off from his earlier work. It seems to me, however, that he was still pursuing a pictorial form that would capture the inherent ambiguity and instability of objects, which is to say the mutability of perception itself.

To lose the object in abstraction would be to abandon perception in favor of imagination; but imagination itself was grounded in perception. The hard work of describing the world— a description necessarily grounded not only in perception but emotion— was still, for him, the task of art.

Postwar renewal

The Nazi occupation of France in 1940, and a serious health crisis, temporarily diminished Matisse's output. But, with the end of the war, he enjoyed an extraordinary revitalization in which he put all he'd learned in a lifetime of craft into a joyous new synthesis of form and color.

This was signaled by a major exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1945, photographs of which show how Matisse saw his progression from painting to painting and series to series. These and later key works take up the last galleries of the Met exhibit, displaying an artist who, like his beloved Cézanne, was still in the process of discovering the world even as he left it.

A good exhibition should follow two basic rules, especially when dealing with an established master: it should make a point and, while covering the necessary ground, make it succinctly. Its sententious title aside, "Matisse and the Search for True Painting" succeeds on both points. It puts both Matisse's working method and his long quest for expressive form in context, and shows how each clarified the other.

You'll see great paintings here of course. But what's equally of value, you'll see the unfolding process of a great artist's progressive enlargement of his world, and ours.