Matisse, Musée de l’Orangerie review — pictures from a pivotal decade

For most of his life, Matisse, the modern embodiment of French values in painting — structure and harmony, sensuality and grace — was misunderstood at home and substantially supported by foreign collectors. Before the Russian Revolution, Sergei Shchukin took the lead; afterwards, the enlightened commitment of Sarah and Michael Stein from San Francisco, Etta and Claribel Cone from Baltimore and Philadelphia’s Albert Barnes was crucial.

Barnes was especially significant because his commission for the mural “The Dance” in 1930 ended the creative slump in which Matisse, then 60, found himself after years painting elegant women in small-scale interiors in Nice. His subsequent revitalisation and period of enthralling exploration is the subject of an erudite, beautiful show at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. An abbreviated version of Philadelphia Museum’s Matisse in the 1930s, it continues in the summer at Nice’s Musée Matisse, which contributes the many preparatory oil works for “The Dance”. At the heart of the show, these demonstrate the evolution of Matisse’s efforts to intensify expression by simplifying forms, flattening space and concentrating pure colour in large monochrome areas.

The exhibition fascinates as the first ever to focus on Matisse in this decade, for its optimistic account of renewal by an artist in his sixties and for European audiences as a rare chance to encounter tremendous paintings acquired by Americans.

Among several pieces here from the Cone sisters’ collection is “Large Reclining Nude” (1935), an angular, geometric figure in the reduced pink/blue tonality of the Barnes’s “Dance”, set within a rigid tiled checkerboard. Matisse’s companion Lydia Delectorskaya posed for the nude, cut the painted gouache shapes with which he developed the composition and sent the Cones a score of photographs unravelling the picture’s progress from realism to stylisation. Mesmerised, they bought it.

From Philadelphia comes “Yellow Odalisque” (1937), an experiment in fusing the model in purple and yellow dress with a lavishly patterned ground in the same colours. The following year, “The Song”, the stunning mantelpiece decor featuring women as overlapping cut-out forms, was commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller. Each marks a turn in Matisse’s ideas about decorative possibilities and the equilibrium between voluptuousness and rigour. Usually read as transitional works, pointing to the radical 1940s-50s cut-outs, here they shine in their own right.

So do less definitive, unfamiliar pieces, amplifying our sense of the innovative, improvisatory flavour of this epoch. In “Black Dress and Purple Dress” (1938, from San Francisco), the double sketchy figures of Lydia are held between a relatively naturalistic succulent plant in the foreground and a background frieze of leaves abbreviated and enlarged into giant leaping green hearts.

“Nymph and Red Faun” (1939, sold last year from Jacqueline Matisse’s collection) is a dance of desire enacted by near-abstract arcing forms in saturated colour. In stylised manner, graphic energy and use of monochrome, it anticipates the famous collaged “Blue Nude” of 1952. The classical subject of satyr and nymph, however, is one Matisse painted and Shchukin bought in 1908.

The Orangerie is also displaying the huge lush painting “Nymph in the Forest” (1935-42/43), in which trees beam down like shafts of light; intended as the cartoon for a tapestry decoration, it was never finished. The lack of resolution implies Matisse’s struggle to balance decorative ornamentation within greater abstraction. It could not be shown in better context than at the Orangerie, home to Monet’s luxuriant “Nymphéas”, the supreme example of a French decorative cycle from the 1920s.

Matisse travelled the world, crossing the Atlantic, sailing the Pacific — a memory from his hotel window, the weightless “Papeete — Tahiti” (1935), with crystalline ship and curtain, clouds and treetops swaying to a single rhythm, is another highlight — but his framework was always French painting.

Thus Philadelphia’s disconcerting “Woman in Blue” (1937) is inspired by the monumentality of his work for Barnes, but looks closely at the classical artifice of Ingres’ “Madame Moitessier” — Matisse repeats Ingres’ detail of one arm raised, with a finger pointing to the temple, and the other heavy with bracelets. Lydia is again Matisse’s model; she sewed at his instruction the voluminous taffeta puffs and organza ruffles of the extraordinary outfit that encases her, placed upright — neither sitting nor standing, rather a hieratic icon — on a gold-scarlet throne, its curves echoing the skirt’s bell shape. Haloed by a mimosa crown, Lydia is no more a real woman than the drawings of her hanging on the wall, repeating her image. Does she decorate the space or does it adorn her?

By 1940 the question is no longer asked: in the Cones’ “Striped Robe, Fruit and Anemones” and Cleveland’s “Interior with an Etruscan Vase”, the model in striped gown is subsumed within whirling arabesques of foliage, still-life elements, even an undulating table; the sense of a portrait is left far behind.

Then in the show’s last major painting, “Odalisque in a Black Armchair” (1942), modelled by Nézy Hamidé-Chawkat, a Turkish princess he met on the street in Nice and who reminded him of a figure in Ingres’ “Turkish Bath”, Matisse returns to the orientalist motif that had so staled in the 1920s. But now he transforms it into a glorious assembly of pattern, colour, texture: Nézy’s silk scarves, the designs on a Moorish screen, the arms of the chair and the curling legs of a table are all synthesised in continuous mellifluous lines.

John Elderfield, curator of MoMA’s 1992 Matisse retrospective, suggested of the pictures of this period that “the decorativeness and the very construction of a costume and of a painting are offered as analogous. What developed were groups of paintings showing his model in similar or different poses, costumes and settings: a sequence of themes and variations that gained in mystery and intensity as it unfolded.”

It was essential for Matisse that this decorative unity, wrought from tension — all Matisse’s models commented on the anxious mood in the studio — appeared easy. “I have always tried to hide my own efforts and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of springtime,” he said. He achieved this throughout his career, but that he did so during the dark 1930s and wartime, and after his wife left him in 1939, is one of the miracles of 20th-century art.

It’s marvellously unpacked here and, unsurprisingly, a very popular, crowded show. For anyone travelling specially, it is worth considering the iteration in Nice’s airy galleries, close to where the pictures were made and sharing the Mediterranean light that suffuses them.

Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, to May 29, musee-orangerie.fr
Musée Matisse, Nice, June 23-September 24, musee-matisse-nice.org