Inventing a Sensory Utopia

By ROBERT HUGHES

"The grand object of travelling," said Samuel Johnson, "is to see the shores of the Mediterranean." The maxim had a special force among artists from the early 1900s to the eve of World War II. It applied to one particular shore: the Cote d'Azur, that strip of Provence that runs from Nice to Hyeres. If ever a littoral was changed from a place to an idea by the efforts of painters, this one was it. Paul Cezanne, a Provencal rooted in the limestone and red clay of his native Aix, had made backcountry Provence around Mont Ste.-Victoire one of the sacred loci of the modernist imagination. Among them, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard would do the same for the coast.

The image of the paradisiacal Mediterranean that still haunts our imagination -- despite its present-day reality of myriad gridlocked campers frying in the sun at the tepid edge of a half-dead sea -- was created by these painters and their followers. Their relations with this place, or more properly their invention of it, gave modernism its one practical utopia of the senses, a bourgeois Eden whose roots wound back through a coastal peasant culture (still unhurt by tourism in the 1920s) to the Greco-Roman past. Instead of the pie in the sky offered by constructivism, they contemplated the langoustes on the table, bringing their sensuous embodiment to an extraordinary pitch of imaginative precision in which mere fantasy had no role.

The maestro of this process was Matisse. He was a mature painter of 48 when he started his first working sojourn in Nice after 1916. Just as Gauguin had carried his style preformed with him to Tahiti, so Matisse took his to the Cote d'Azur. One would logically expect that given the tremendous efforts of ! abstraction and integration that had gone into his work from his fauve paintings of 1905-06 to The Moroccans of 1916, nothing he did thereafter would seem trivial to art historians. Yet such was not the case. Most accounts of Matisse's life treat his first 15 years on the Mediterranean (however much the public liked their results) as a slackening of his talent, almost a betrayal of its essence; he would not entirely recover, this version insists, until he began a new phase of abstraction in the early 1930s, one which would culminate 15 years later with the pure color silhouettes of his paper cutouts. Museums, up to now, have not shown us much of Matisse the Nicois. Of the gaps in our experience of any great 20th century artist, this was surely one of the biggest.

Now the National Gallery of Art in Washington has filled it, persuasively, radiantly and definitively, with a show of 171 paintings done by Matisse in his early Nice years, assembled by Art Historians Jack Cowart and Dominique Fourcade. It should dispel any lingering suspicion that between 1916 and 1930, even average Matisses got as complacent as most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris-New York abstraction. If you assume that art history culminates in abstract art, then you may feel betrayed if your hero's work goes from flatness to depth, from a space built from blocks of color to one evoked by the illusion of light, from schematic drawing to fuller modeling.

Matisse, though, made no such assumptions. He was not an abstract artist but a magisterial painter of bodies and spaces. The specific did not just "interest" him; it was close to an obsession, for all the apparent generalizations of his style. Even in paintings of calm and predictable subjects, like the girl seated by a vase of flowers in The Black Table, 1919, one sees his hand evoking the most difficult conjunctions of sight and imagination -- in the way the transparent Turkish blouse is rendered by a few luscious strokes of white over the flesh, for instance, or in the sliding knot of green and black shapes that defines the leg of the armchair. When Matisse saw the glitter of light on a band of water, he wanted to get it right, along with the curlicues of wrought iron between his eye and the Baie des Anges, and the peculiar Moorish dome of a pier pavilion, and the curl of a dressing- mirror frame, and the flat black cover of a notebook on the vanity, and the way a scrim curtain hung and stirred in the faint breeze -- and all the rest.

Scanning Matisse's rooms is like reading a distinguished, reticent autobiography, written before the days when authors were expected to spill all the beans. The calm they radiate is best understood not as an expression of complacency but as a ploy against anxiety. Nice enabled Matisse to stabilize things, to remain in the same frame of mind for days on end. "After a half century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there," he wrote to a friend. "Nature -- or rather, my nature -- remains mysterious. Meanwhile I believe I have put a little order in my chaos . . . I am not intelligent." Of course, Matisse painted his share of perfunctory images in Nice. But the overwhelming impression is of struggle and synthesis, of a mature artist who, having achieved a monumental diction before 1916, set out to reinvest it with immediate impressions before it congealed.

His instrument for this was color, betokening light. Nice gave him a different light from Paris -- a high, constant effulgence with little gray in it, flooding broadly across sea, city and hills, producing luminous shadows and clear tonal structures. It encouraged Matisse to think of space (in particular, the space of the hotel rooms where he worked overlooking the Promenade des Anglais) as a light-filled box, full of reflections, transparencies and openings. Shutters filter the light, and their bars are echoed in the stripes of awnings or rugs; light is doubled by mirrors that break open the space of the room, and discreetly splintered in the gleam from silk, pewter or furniture.

All this is some way from the flat pre-1916 Matisses, and one of its governing impulses was the artist's desire to measure himself not only against the visual stimuli of the Cote d'Azur but against the heritage of the 19th century, whose former citizen he was. Its masters speak both to and from his Nicois canvases. The hushed green density of Large Landscape, Mont Alban, 1918, is an amalgam of Courbet and Corot, though the slow, wristy drawing that drives the eye round the curve of the road and follows the slant of the windblown pines is entirely Matisse's own. The modulation of silvery grays (jug of water, belly of sole) with a few touches of red within the ambient - darkness of Still Life, Fish and Lemons, 1921, accentuates a lesson Matisse had learned from Manet: that black, far from signifying the absence of color, can read as a suave and powerful hue. Matisse's work, seen in this concentration, proves once more that in painting, innovation means nothing without a vital sense of the past. "I have simply wished to assert," he used to tell his students, echoing Courbet, "the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition."

Because of, never despite, such affinities, Matisse's originality is always clear. It lay in his unique gift of pure color. He possessed to the nth degree the power of making a flat disk of yellow or a slice of viridian turn into a lemon or a leaf, bathed in sunlit air. Sixty years have done little to blunt the impact of the flat-out chromatic intensity of some Matisses from the 1920s, like Anemones in an Earthenware Vase, 1924. The structure of the painting is as lucid as a theorem, with its pattern of rectangular hangings, panels and tabletop and the surging diagonal of the flowers in the vase, but the color -- pinks, carmines, chromes, lilacs and an orange that glows like a red-hot cannonball laid casually on the table -- would be disorienting if the strict harmony Matisse somehow imposed on it did not persuade you that it is real.

The strain between the all-over pattern and the real motifs gives his Nice paintings their special vitality. But the strain was real, and in extreme cases, like Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, 1925-26, it induces an almost palpable discomfort. The sheer congestion of pattern -- rococo mirror, painted wallpaper, overlapping rugs, Ming blue planter -- dismays the eye while seducing it, and the architectonic forms of the nude halt the whirling of color like a massive log brusquely jammed in the gears of a machine. This is the creation not of a complacent man but of an artist at the height of his powers and willing to gamble deeply. By putting such paintings alongside others that are less well known, the National Gallery has given us, if not an entirely new Matisse, then at least a radically refreshed one -- no mean feat, considering the amount of writing and scholarship devoted to his career in the three decades since he died.