The Sultan and the Scissors

By ROBERT HUGHES

A dazzling show of Matisse cut-outs

Young prodigies in art are as common as seagulls; the rarities are old. A special aura clings to the late works of old men who can sum up a lifetime's deposit of knowledge in a final burst of invention. One thinks of Rembrandt's late self-portraits, of Titian at 90 or Bernini at 75; or, in our century, of Henri Matisse, who died in 1954 at the age of 85. The last two decades of his life were increasingly spent on making works in paper. Ensconced in the south of France, first at Nice and later in the town of Vence, the aged sultan of the Mediterranean had his assistants cover sheets of paper with flat, brilliantly hued gouache. He then cut out shapes with scissors, and had these bright silhouettes pasted on a flat paper support. These he called his decoupages--"cutouts." "Cutting into color," Matisse memorably observed in 1947, "reminds me of the direct carving of the sculptor."

Vast in scale (though not always in size), lush and rigorous in color, his cutouts are among the most admired and influential works of Matisse's entire career. They belong with the grandest affirmations of the elan vital in Western art. Dr. Johnson once remarked that the prospect of being hanged wonderfully concentrates the mind. In 1941, when he was 71, Matisse nearly died of an intestinal blockage and was bedridden for much of his remaining time. But he felt reborn, and the cut-outs would serve as most eloquent witnesses to an old man's new life.

Last week a show of this late Matisse work opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Later it will travel to Detroit and St. Louis. Organized by four art historians--Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade and John Hallmark Neff--it is a brilliant start to the art season. This is not the definitive exhibition of Matisse's cutouts; it includes 58 works, about a quarter of the known total. But if it does not exhaust Matisse's achievement as decoupeur, it offers an unstinted sense of buoyancy. Matisse liked to talk about the "beneficent radiation" of his color, of its power to heal, and he would prop up his paintings, like sun lamps, around the bed of a sick friend. In the National Gallery, in the sublime, undulating leaf patterns in green, blue and yellow that Matisse designed for the stained-glass windows of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, this radiation is almost enough to give the viewer a tan.

Nearly a quarter of a century has passed since Matisse's death, but the audacity of his color remains astonishing. What other artist could handle those deep, resonant cobalt blues, those fuchsias and oranges, those velvety blacks and soprano yellows, without producing an effect akin to colored gumballs? In Matisse's world, color was equated with feeling. It belonged to the realm of Dionysus. But Matisse's goal was, in his own words, to establish "a sort of hierarchy of all my sensations," to possess and minutely articulate the nuances of feeling. There was nothing more decisive than the actual process of cutting, the shears slicing through the painted paper, dividing the final form from its surplus without ambiguity.

Forty years earlier in his career, Matisse had demonstrated, with his big canvases of dancing figures, that he was a master of energetic motion. There is a clear difference, though, between the degree of energy that a pencil or brush can express and the kind of incisive force that the bite of his scissors gave to Matisse's later image of a figure in ecstatic movement, La Danseuse, 1949. The directness of such a cut-out could not be repeated in paint. No drawn profile could approach the strictness of a cut edge, and the paper has its own density as palpable substance--which accounts for the peculiarly sculptural look of some of Matisse's blue cut-outs of nudes, such as the Woman with Amphora and Pomegranates, 1953.

"One must study an object a long tune," Matisse remarked in 1951, "to know what its sign is." The signs he developed in the cut-outs are a testament to his gift for preserving the ebullience of nature in a medium that naturally moved toward decorative formality.

The cut-outs are Matisse's last resolution of two visions of nature that were woven into his birthright as a painter: the European heritage of symbols. One was the artificial paradise garden, whose chief example (for Matisse) was the Alhambra in Granada--nature tamed, formalized and patterned to the highest degree of artifice and comfort. A work like the Large Decoration with Masks, 1953, with its repeated gridwork of leaves and cloves, alludes directly to Arabic tilework. But the other prototype was the vision of the natural paradise, exemplified since the 18th century by Tahiti. Matisse had gone to Tahiti in 1930, finding it "both superb and boring . . . There the weather is beautiful at sunrise and it does not change until night. Such immutable happiness is tiring." He dived off the reefs and never forgot the colors of the madrepores and the absinthe-green water; these appear in cut-outs like Polynesia, 1946, or The Bird and the Shark, 1947, as images of a spectacular and, on the whole, beneficent nature.

To say that Matisse was obsessed with dialogue between nature and culture is, perhaps, to say no more than that he was a painter. But the intensity of that conversation between perceived and stylized form in the cut-outs renders them heroic. They are the climax of the symbolist tradition in France, and may be the greatest works of visual art in that tradition.

Their context is a remark by Stephane Mallarme: "The intellectual core of a poem conceals itself, is present--is active--in the blank space which separates the stanzas and in the white of the paper: a pregnant silence, no less wonderful to compose than the lines themselves."

The fields on which Matisse strewed his cut-out nouns of shape--ivy leaf, diver, parakeet, dancer--work in the same way. They are not backgrounds; they are an enveloping fluid, a space that seems as active as its contents but, being "unpainted," is wholly different. Every painter since 1950 has had to reckon with the peculiar void Matisse invented with his cutouts. Not one has equaled their suppleness as decor, or their episodic grandeur as painting.

--Robert Hughes

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