COURTESY OF THE MOURLOT ARCHIVE
Henri Matisse’s “Sleeping Woman” is part of the “Beyond Color” exhibition at The Morris Museum in Morris Township.
When we think of Henri Matisse, we visualize colors. Not random colors, but a paintbox of particular shades: Mediterranean blue, the green of a spring leaf, the red of a blushing cheek. The palette of the beloved modernist feels like an expression of the attitude and temperament of his native French Riviera; a seaside town, bright and still on a sunny day.
But not all days are sunny, and not all times in an artist’s life are colorful. By the outbreak of World War II, Matisse’s verdant garden had wilted. The artist, who was born in 1869, was sick, reviled by the Nazi occupiers, and isolated after his wife of 40 years abandoned him to his fate. Housebound after an operation, Matisse kept working. But he purged complexity from an art style that was already more straightforward than it had been when he was young.
COURTESY OF THE MOURLOT ARCHIVE
Henri Matisse’s “Flower.”
Most fans of Matisse’s work associate paper-cutting and shape collage with this troubled final period of his life. As “Beyond Color” — a smart and surprising show at The Morris Museum — demonstrates, there was more to it than that. Matisse also fitted scores of black and white illustrations and line drawings to beautifully made books of poetry. The drawings in “Beyond Color” are, by necessity, much simpler than the world-famous paintings he created during the early decades of the 20th Century. They could not, however, have been made by anybody else. They are Matisse at a glance. Those who have been intrigued by his work in the past may find in “Beyond Color” a rare thing to encounter in a museum of any size: the trace emanations of a great star fading out.
As afterimages go, it is a vivid one. Much that is associated with Matisse recurs in these drawings: fruits, pine cones, foliage and flower petals, and the enigmatic faces of women. The elderly Matisse avoided hard, straight lines just as the young Matisse did. From the chin of a girl to the fronds of a fern, most everything is languorously curved.
Matisse’s marks always seem to have the relaxed quality of tresses let down after a long pin-up. The young Matisse often loaded his brush with paint only to deliver to the canvas a thick, short stroke. The elder Matisse is up to something similar in his lithographs, filling the pupils of the eyes of his subjects with squat, black loops. Both gestures suggest abundance — of paint, of printing material, of alacrity. The gentleness, the roundness, the lush and pregnant fullness of Matisse’s shapes never left him.
Yet more has drained away from these late works than color. Some of these marks are left curiously incomplete, as if the artist is straining to remember something he has lost. In “Head of a Woman,” half of his character’s lips and parts of her hair and eyebrows are omitted. Though no source of light is depicted in the drawing, Matisse’s choice makes it look like the subject is emerging from a shadow, or slipping into one. Her left eye has migrated to the fringes of her forehead. It makes her seem hyperaware, and also slightly disapproving. The master has drawn a person who sees us better than we can see her. She is on a higher level than we are; we can try to touch her, but even as we do, she is coming undone.
COURTESY OF THE MOURLOT ARCHIVE
Henri Matisse’s “Head of a Nun in Profile.”
Like “Head of a Woman,” “Head of a Nun in Profile” demonstrates how much personality Matisse can squeeze from a few clever strokes. A museum-goer could almost count the number of lines in the piece on two hands. Somehow, though, we know this person: her discontent, her hard-won wisdom, her tight-lipped parsimony with expression, her elusiveness. Her face peers out from her heavy habit with the caution of a box turtle. She is also beautiful, and probably desirable, but she isn’t looking our way, and she may be through with us. The artist seems to crave her acknowledgement, but she is out of reach.
Other drawn characters feel just as individual, and just as inaccessible. The “Head of a Girl,” committed to paper in 1948, gives us a haughty beauty with ringlets of hair and an expression in her eyes that is subtly harsh. “Head of a Girl in Profile,” drawn that same year, brings us a woman, heavy-lidded, high-collared and unmistakably high-class; she will be polite, but don’t expect any engagement beyond that. Even the “Female Nude, Half-Length,” with her bare breast popping out from beneath her bent elbow, hugs herself ferociously as she shows off to the viewer. She doesn’t need any attention: she is wrapped up in her own strong arms. Her nose is upturned, her eyes are closed, her hair is down, and her lips contain a small but noticeable smile.
What are we to make of a septuagenarian summoning these young girls to his sickbed? What are we to think of his desire to place these women on pages of poetry and bind them into books? Certainly the ease with which he breathes life into these drawings is characteristic of a master who, no matter what else ill fortune has stolen from him, remains in command of his magic powers and has plenty left to give.
There is also something sad about the project. Nothing here suggests the playful, sexually confident tone of early lithographs like the great “Yellow Dress With Black Ribbon,” made in 1922, in which artist and subject exist in a two-way conspiracy against the rest of the world. Even though he has created them, the women in “Beyond Color” seem to have had their fill of Matisse.
COURTESY OF THE MOURLOT ARCHIVE
A page proof for André Rouveyre’s “Apollinaire,” with an illustration by Henri Matisse.
The relationship between this coterie of women (and a few delicate men) and the printed poetry that their pictures grace isn’t easy to ascertain. Though the creators of “Beyond Color” provide text on the wall that testifies to Matisse’s search for a link between image and verse, we are mostly asked to take the museum’s word for it. It would have helped if a few more of the art books that Matisse made with the lithographer and archivist Fernand Mourlot were put on view. Those books on view are tucked away inside vitrines.
The Matisse-Mourlot version of Antoine Nau’s “Poesies,” for instance, arrives in a yolk-yellow hardcover and features stately print and winsome illustrations on thick, fluffy paper. It begs to be thumbed through. We aren’t given that satisfaction. We are shown two pages only, which is kind of like getting a pair of potato chips for supper.
The correspondence on display doesn’t help much, either. Almost all of the many letters in “Beyond Color” are in French, and the brief English-language synopses provided by the museum don’t do much to connect the drawings to the texts. Since I’m not a Francophone, it’s possible that I missed the passages that explain why the Mourlot books of poetry inspired the artist to generate so many pretty faces of inaccessible women. Maybe the link was an unconscious one, and maybe Matisse was simply recording, without too much regard for the verse, what was on his mind before it slipped away.
COURTESY OF THE MOURLOT ARCHIVE
Henri Matisse “Head of a Girl in Profile.”
To fight the onrush of oblivion, human beings — even visionaries — tend to strip things down to their essential components. In these black-and-white lithographs, Matisse chipped away everything, including color, that was extraneous to the meaning he wanted to preserve.
For instance, he had drawn and painted bodies entwined many times, but in “Two Lovers” from 1948, the figures are a noodle-mass of limbs, twisting, wrapping and bowing around each other. What should be downright bizarre is, in the hands of an artist who always knows where to place the lines, strangely erotic.
Then there is “Five Dancers,” a deliberate echo of two of Matisse’s most kinetic paintings: “Dance (I),” from 1909, and “Dance,” from 1910. The ring of naked bodies has been drained of pigment and shrunk to the size of a large postcard. The ground is gone, the sky is gone, facial features are reduced to squiggles, and defined musculature has been replaced by malleable body-like shapes. Identity has flown apart in the centrifuge.
Matisse is pulling apart his old characters and old ideas until only ghosts remain. Form may be exhausted by time. Cohesion may be crushed. Yet the choreography at the core of the image continues — and the dance whirls on.
The Morris Museum in Morris Township will present “Henri Matisse: Beyond Color” through Aug. 9. Visit morrismuseum.org.
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