The largest-ever exhibition of Henri Matisse's graphic art at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane is exhilarating.
Les lanceurs de couteaux (1947)
For someone who famously suggested, “A painter should cut out his tongue”, Henri Matisse had a surprising amount to say about his work. Colour, he maintained, was his chief concern and his most crucial means of expression. “Good colour sings,” he remarked. “It is melodious, aroma-like, never overbaked.” But Matisse also spoke of the importance of drawing in underpinning his art, and it is this aspect of his work that is the focus of a major exhibition at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art.
Matisse: Drawing Life is an exhilarating immersion in the creative process of one of the great modern artists. It allows us to see his restless, searching intelligence at work, his experiments and revisions, successes and failures. “An artist must never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success,” he declared. “One must always guard one’s freshness.” Matisse’s ability to renew his art, to seek new challenges, is one of the lasting impressions of this exhibition.
Disciplined and hardworking, Matisse was devoted to his art to the point of obsession. As a young man, he warned his fiancée, “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more.” As an art student in the 1890s, he received an academic training in drawing, based on the rote copying of plaster casts and antique sculpture. Later, he condemned the limitations of such training; his teachers were “pompous ignoramuses”; the drudgery of copying was “deadly”. The problem was not with drawing, however, but the way it was taught, and Matisse impressed on his own students the importance of a sound training in draftsmanship.
To Matisse, the act of seeing in itself was a creative discipline. He advised his students to look at everything “as though for the first time”: “Exaggerate the truth,” he urged them, “and study at length the importance of voids.” Hours of contemplation and drawing lay behind his finished work. He described drawing a lace collar in preparation for the Plumed Hat series, returning to it over and over, rendering it first in minute detail – “each mesh, yes, almost each thread” – until he knew it by heart and could “translate it with a few quickly drawn lines into an ornament, an arabesque …”
The arabesque is a feature of Matisse’s art – a sensuous, spiralling line derived from Islamic art, endlessly varied and expressive. One of the pleasures of his swift line drawings – such as Bust of a young woman – is the way we instinctively follow the sure, rhythmic movement of his hand. The act of “reading” such drawings becomes an intimate act; it is as if we can hear the artist thinking aloud. The economy and audacity of Matisse’s line drawings can be breathtaking and he regarded them as one of his greatest achievements – “the purest and most direct translation of my emotion”.
But Matisse was not always so confident or so decisive. “People think I work with facility,” he observed. “That’s a mistake.” It’s one of the merits of this generous exhibition that it makes us aware of the sheer physical effort behind the serenity and beauty of Matisse’s art. Many works show evidence of erasures and alterations; some show a surprisingly off-key artist, capable of curiously mismatched eyes, for example. Yet even the most awkward or worked-over drawing is full of character and interest, rewarding close scrutiny.
Chronological in structure, the exhibition reveals the remarkable distance Matisse travelled over five decades, from the prosaic student work of the 1890s to the exuberant paper cutouts of the 1940s. We see him responding to the major art movements of the early 20th century, yet always retaining his individuality. (“Of course cubism interested me,” he noted many years later, “but it did not speak directly to my deeply sensuous nature.”) In studies for major works such as The Dance, we watch the way an image is distilled over several stages, from preliminary drawing to finished design, becoming progressively more sinuous and abstract.
The final room is devoted to Matisse’s paper cutouts, in which he developed a radically new method of “drawing with scissors”. These works were inspired by the memory of his travels in Tahiti in 1930. “With my eyes wide open,” he recalled, “I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid.” The highly stylised imagery of works like The knife-thrower suggests Matisse owed a debt to tifaifai Tahitian appliqué quilts. The connection is not noted in the substantial catalogue, but the tifaifai on display upstairs in the gallery in an exhibition of contemporary Pacific textiles make the point clearly enough.
Primavera (Spring) (1938)
Presented in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Matisse: Drawing Life includes more than 300 works – drawings, prints, illustrated books and paintings – making it the largest exhibition of the artist’s graphic art to be held anywhere in the world. It follows a retrospective of Matisse’s paintings at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1995, and its seed was planted then by the artist’s late grandson Claude Duthuit. The Matisse family has supported the exhibition with more than 70 loans, making it, with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, one of the key lenders.
Interviewing the curators, I suggested it was unusual for a major museum to organise such a large exhibition of drawings. Céline Chicha-Castex, from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, agreed: “Shows like this are now very rare in Europe. There’s such pressure to attract audiences – museums shy away from the intimacy of drawings. The emphasis is on large works, the end result, rather than the creative process.” For the Gallery of Modern Art, now celebrating its fifth birthday, this ambitious project is not without risk, as managing curator of international art Miranda Wallace admitted. “We know people love Matisse’s paintings, but will they come to a show of graphic work?”
The curators are also well aware, however, that drawing is much more accessible than painting, an activity in which we all have some fleeting experience. To reinforce that connection, visitors leaving the exhibition enter an inviting and generously appointed “drawing room” with live models, still-life arrangements, art materials and iPads. It’s an astute move on the part of the gallery. For what better way to appreciate the magical quality of Matisse’s art than to spend an hour or two considering the demands and satisfactions of drawing?
MATISSE: DRAWING LIFE, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until March 4.