Visual feast
Andrew Lambirth
Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams Royal Academy, until 30 May Sponsored by Farrow & Ball Agood many years ago I wrote a short article about the recent work of an artist (who shall remain nameless), and characterised it — in a very positive way as ‘decorative’. This did not go down at all well, and I was asked to change what I had written and remove this offending word. I refused, and the piece was not published. Such was, and still is, the stigma attached to ‘decorative’. Though it can be intended as praise, it is more often construed as damning criticism. The one great painter whose work has always defied such narrow categorisation is Henri Matisse (1869–1954). A new and utterly delightful show in the Academy’s Sackler Galleries addresses for the first time the heart of his preoccupation with la décoration, by showing some of the fabrics he collected. These have been stored away for the half-century since Matisse’s death, an unseen treasure awaiting this moment and the revelations they offer about their owner’s approach to making art.
The exhibition is the brainchild of Hilary Spurling, the distinguished biographer of Matisse, whose second and final volume on the master has just been published by Hamish Hamilton (see review on page 53). Her research made it clear how crucial the role of fabrics was in Matisse’s life, right from the start. He bought textiles even when he had very little money, always travelled with a selection of them and described his collection as his ‘working library’. As Spurling writes: ‘Matisse’s ancestors had been weavers for generations. Textiles were in his blood. He could not live without them.’ And he made sure he didn’t have to: searching junk stalls and flea markets for old and frayed stuffs (‘noble rags’, he called them) which spoke to him of their possibilities for his art, buying sashes and turbans and harem pants, carpets and couture dresses, Romanian embroidered blouses and African fabrics, in an orgy of sumptuous and decoratively varied acquisition. He hunted pattern as other artists sought out models.
The idea governing the show is to hang a succulent tranche of Matisse’s paintings, drawings and prints with a representative selection of his fabric collection. The spectator is not then encouraged to play ‘snap’ with the images, eagerly matching source to painted version. This would be to diminish the significance of both art and fabric and, with its suggestion of a game completed, bring an end to looking. Of course it’s fascinating to notice how a favourite length of ‘toile de Jouy’ is interpreted and re-interpreted through a series of paintings over a period of years, but the relationship is deeper than that. Rather, it is a dialogue. Spurling calls his collection ‘an experimental laboratory’, and there is a very real sense in which the radical painter was inspired to further innovations of shape and flattened form by the example of his textiles. Matisse himself said that expression and decoration were one and the same thing — a more difficult notion to grasp in the abstract, but visually explained by the group of superb paintings in this show borrowed from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
The exhibition begins quietly enough with some early still-lifes and a painting of a Breton weaver. Silk sample books gleam from display cases. These come from Bohain-en-Vermandois in Picardy, where Matisse grew up, which is famous for the bright colours and experimental designs of its silks which fed the Paris fashion trade. The muted early works soon give way to an explosion of pattern and colour, from the rich but oddly amorphous ‘Still-life with Blue Tablecloth’ of 1905–6, to the ‘Dishes and Fruit on a Red-and-Black Rug’ (1906) and ‘Still-life with Blue Tablecloth’ (1909). This group, all borrowed from the Hermitage, culminates in the magnificent ‘Seville Still-life’ (1910–11). Space has been increasingly flattened, the fabrics which would have been relegated to the background have been foregrounded and presented on the picture plane itself, and all is intense colour and energetic pattern.
The familiar piece of blue toile de Jouy, which was a backcloth in ‘The Guitarist’ (1903), and then assumed more importance in the 1905–6 tablecloth still-life, has taken over by 1909 and dominates the composition almost entirely, apart from a wedge of more traditional space inserted on the extreme right to bring some degree of naturalism to the picture. Its wild blue arabesques and flower baskets reappear in other paintings, but never with quite the same all-encompassing assertiveness. In ‘Pansies’ of 1918–19, however, the fabric threatens to overwhelm and crush the flowers in this daring composition, so selfdetermining had the toile become. It seems to make its own peremptory demands, and Matisse is happy to grant it a starring role, or, at the very least, best supporting actor.
Matisse opened up the whole debate by stating: ‘It’s a bad mistake to give a pejorative sense to the word “decorative”. A work of art should be decorative above all.’ In the second room of the exhibition three North African hangings (or haiti), which imitate the wooden fretwork screens so common in the Islamic world, are displayed on lightboxes. At right angles to them are ‘Seated Odalisque’ (1926) and ‘The Moorish Screen’ (1921). This room is dedicated to odalisques (literally, an Eastern female slave or concubine), the likes of whom Matisse had seen in Morocco. And so, as he said, he was ‘able to put them in my pictures back in France without playing make-believe’. His style of depicting them seems intended to demonstrate further their reality: the increased naturalism and modelling of form despite the continued input of decorative fabrics. These paintings are less obviously radical and seem curiously lacking in sap, perhaps because Matisse never laid a finger on his harem and remained touchingly faithful to his wife.
If his harem was real in the sense of consisting of living models, its true existence may have been in the artist’s mind. Painting for Matisse, a late starter, was a kind of paradise, a paradise he decorated with every kind of pattern like a bowerbird. His Arcadia was a resort of the mind and spirit, but existed in the actual world through the vision communicated by his paintings. His last great flowering, the remarkable paper cut-outs, was inspired by the geometric patterns of Polynesian bark cloth and Kuba undyed raffia fabrics from the Congo. These are hung together at the end of the last room in a climactic sequence of fierce joy. Here are the late collages — the foliate shapes like seaweed, negative and positive space interweaving, in singing colours: luscious pinks, blues, greens, with black like a formal backbone. A tremendous finale.
The exhibition first opened at the Matisse Museum in his home town of Le Cateau-Cambresis (a name familiar to readers because of the treaty of 1559 named after it), and will travel on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York in June. Although crowded in the Sackler wing (the idea being to recreate the feel of Matisse’s own rooms), it is a visual feast, layered with colour and texture. The nature of many of the exhibits means that they can easily withstand a little cramming or double-banking, and the paintings are hung with more circumspection. There will be those visitors for whom the paintings are of primary interest, and those who favour the textiles. Both groups will relish this show. And the art amateur (in the sense of lover, of course) will be in seventh heaven. It’s a brilliant idea, extremely wellexecuted.
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