A Domain of Light and Color

By ROBERT HUGHES

"Matisse in Morocco," which opened Sunday at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (it was at the National Gallery in Washington through the spring, and will go to Moscow and Leningrad in the fall and winter), is what used to be called a connoisseurs' show. It covers a short time in a long life. Henri Matisse visited Morocco just twice, in early 1912 and again in the winter of 1912-13. Hence the exhibition is fairly small, only 24 paintings and a large group of sketchbook drawings. It can be seen without sore feet and framed as a whole in one's mind. It is thorough, scholarly -- Jack Cowart, John Elderfield, Pierre Schneider and others have done a fine job on the catalog -- and, above all, full of exhilaratingly beautiful paintings that have lost none of their sensuous finesse and cerebral sharpness in the nearly 80 years since Matisse made them.

As a bonus, some of the paintings are being seen in the U.S. for the first time. Most of the best work that Morocco evoked from Matisse was bought by those two pioneer collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov and has remained in Leningrad's Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin museums since the Russian revolution. As no reproduction has ever done justice to the peculiar intensity of the thin, washed, yet highly saturated color Matisse developed in Morocco, one is grateful that the components of this phase of his work have at last been reunited. Matisse was a mature painter of 42 when he went to Morocco, but what he learned from the trip struck to the very root of his development as an artist. He was tempted to make a third trip but never did.

Why should he have gone to North Africa, a part of the world that Frenchmen in 1912 were still apt to generalize as "the Orient"? There were two basic reasons: cultural curiosity and the search for light.

Matisse wanted a place where the sun shone reliably, like a lamp, where the conditions of light, constant from day to day, enabled him to pursue his researches into color without distraction. Later he would find this stability by moving permanently to Nice, but it was not available in Paris. Following ) the sun, going south to a domain of purer light and color, had been his obsession since his first trips to Provence in his Fauvist years. In North Africa it produced radiant motifs: the green garden, the white breastlike curves of marabout domes, the angled cuts of shadow in street and alley, the blue haze of light behind ogival arches.

But Matisse's pictorial motives differed from those of all European artists who had visited "the Orient" before. French painters from the 1830s on, starting with Eugene Delacroix, had gone there in search of the picturesque, the exotic, the ready-made subject: mosques and Riffian horsemen, camels and harem slaves. By 1880 Orientalism had become a large fashion among salon painters and their clients. French artists brought their minutely realist style and their mildly prurient interests to Fez and Marrakech, and went back to Paris with both intact. To be influenced as a painter by Islamic art -- architecture, rugs, tiles, cloth, miniatures -- was inconceivable, like "going native." The imperious gaze went only one way; its view of Morocco was colonialism in paint.

But Matisse was intensely interested in Muslim decorative arts, and it was their intrinsic style, not their use as exotic props, that affected him. He had been to Algeria in 1906. In 1910 he was bowled over by an exhibition of the art of Islam in Munich and by a visit to the Moorish monuments of Andalusia. As a result, he recalled, "I felt the passion for color develop in me." This was dramatically confirmed by Morocco, where Matisse's aesthetic of decoration took full hold. Flat pattern, inlaid motifs, sharp conjunctions of highly decorative forms -- as in the wonderful Basket of Oranges, 1912, with the sharp forms of citrus fruit and their leaves competing against the more diffuse pattern of the flowered silk drape on which they rest -- these were the signs of a world crammed with pictorial events, all common yet all august and tending to equivalent value.

It seems that as Matisse's experience of Islamic art deepened, he tried to find equivalents for it, not only in his shapes but also in the substance of his paint. He worked increasingly in vaporous, quick washes thinned to watercolor transparency -- stains of extraordinary beauty that establish a constant field of light against which the passages of denser paint and linear drawing create, by subtle inflection, the illusion of solidity. These are, in part, Matisse's response to the textiles and ceramics he observed, in which - the color was dyed or glazed rather than opaquely painted.

Light, landscape, enclosed gardens and domes were everywhere; regular human models, harder to come by. Matisse's main one was a girl named Zorah, who worked in a brothel in Tangier. She is most unforgettably commemorated in On the Terrace, the central panel of a triptych he painted in 1912-13, on commission for Morosov. Zorah kneels in front of a bowl of goldfish in the suffused aquamarine light of a terrace. Apparently Matisse was worried that Morosov would object to the use of a prostitute, since the central panels of Russian triptychs often contained figures of the Virgin Mary. But one can hardly doubt that the artist enjoyed the switch, and submissive Zorah does become a kind of Moroccan madonna.

Zorah has many descendants in the artist's mature work, and it is evident that in Morocco Matisse's basic idea of the artist-model relationship crystallized. He began to envision the studio as a kind of harem, where the static and endlessly compliant figure submitted again and again to the pasha- like gaze of her observer.

The great summing-up of Matisse's experience in North Africa occurred several years after he had returned to France, in The Moroccans, 1915-16. In that dense, grand and mysterious painting, the intensity of light is evoked, with all the courage of paradox, with a predominant velvety black. The ambiguous forms -- Are the green curved objects in the left foreground melons, as some think, or the backsides of Muslims praying to Mecca? -- combine in a pictorial structure of wonderful explicitness and rigor. One sees in the work painters who would not be born for another 20 or 30 years: Frank Stella, Sean Scully. Clearly, though Matisse left Morocco, Morocco never left him.