Matisse: A Strange, Healing Calm

By ROBERT HUGHES

WHAT I dream is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that might be for every mental worker like an appeasing influence; something like a good armchair . . ."

Thus Henri Matisse. The gentle modesty was characteristic of the man. When Matisse died in 1954 at the age of 84, he left behind him what must seem, in retrospect, the most serene and perfect body of "decorative" painting since Tiepolo. His bronzes --generally small in scale and strictly limited in edition--are not so famous. Yet a feeling has been abroad for some years that Matisse was a master not only of painting but of sculpture too. This month, two events present the evidence. One is a survey of his whole work in bronze, amounting to 69 pieces, which opened last week at New York's Museum of Modern Art. It is accompanied by an illuminating and scholarly study of Matisse's sculpture by Art Historian Albert E. Elsen (Harry Abrams, Inc.). Together, they immeasurably expand our knowledge of Matisse's genius.

Self-Taught. Matisse has so long been hailed as the apostle of pictorial flatness that his bronzes, in all their ridged and bulging solidity, might seem to contradict his paintings. In fact, one form complements the other, and the museum's show beautifully demonstrates that exchange; thus key Matisse paintings like Dance (1909) and Blue Nude (1907) grew out of corresponding and earlier sculptures, while his own bronzes appear in many a later Matisse still life.

As a sculptor, Matisse was largely self-taught--Rodin refused to have him as a student, though he worked with Antoine Bourdelle. Yet his sculpture is a superb demonstration of the way a great artist will find a use and a form for all his sensations. "I took up sculpture," said Matisse, "because what interested me in painting was a clarification of my ideas . . . When I found it in sculpture, it helped me in my painting. I kept working in the hope of finding an ultimate method."

As both a Cartesian and a sensualist, Matisse wasted nothing. Feeling, for him, included a great deal that flat paint could not convey--notably the awareness of thick, monumental volume, of the thrust and jut of shapes by which human frames state their energy. The proper vehicle for this was sculpture, where volume is real and not--as in painting--illusion. The result, despite the small scale that Matisse preferred in works like Reclining Nude III, was the most Michelangelesque collection of sculpture that any 20th century artist has produced.

Arabesques. Nowhere in Matisse's work is this heroic quality more striking than in a set of four bas-reliefs of a woman's back, which he worked on intermittently from 1909 to 1930. They give an extraordinary vision of his working methods in all their tenacity. The back, in its successive versions, turns from a deeply in dented landscape of bulges and arabesques, with gullies of shoulder blade and buttocks radiating from the central valley of the spine, into an image with the vast immobility of a mountain -- abstracted to a point where its human quality is nearly lost, but pervaded by a strange, healing calm.

The debt to Michelangelo is clear.

The pose is an amalgam of Buonarotti's Bound Slave and the Pieta in the Florence cathedral; the sense of the figure emerging like a captive from its shroud of bronze is profoundly Michelangelesque. Above all, there is the sense of intellectual energy, of a powerful mind striking to the core of problems which it alone could formulate. Perhaps Matisse was not as "radical" a sculptor as he was a painter. His sculpture was avowedly traditional; it addressed itself, as his paintings did, to the classic themes of the erect or reclining figure, the portrait and the nude. But only a few early modern sculptors -- Rodin, Bourdelle and Degas in old age -- achieved the same vitality of surface and gesture. One can hardly imagine more joy communicated by the act of squeezing clay, and though Matisse's sculpture has had little effect on later artists, it still remains an exquisite testament to the douceur de vivre that he strove all his life to bring into form.

qedRobert Hughes

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