Vlaminck: Barges on the Seine, 1906	Vlaminck: The Restaurant at Marley-le-Roi, 1906
Matisse: Landscape at Collioure, 1905	Derain: Turning Road, L'Estaque, 1906

Impressionism had contributed to the creation of conventions which emphasized atmospheric effects, but by the 1900s, those atmospheric effects had become associated with symbolism and were no longer thought of as naturalistic.  The Fauves eliminated suggestions of ethereal  and atmospheric effects from their paintings.  Because their style centralized the appearance of a hasty, simple, and visceral response to nature, their paintings were thought by many observers to be a natural rendering of nature, without the intervention of artifice.  It is this perception of naturalism which contributed to another response to Fauvist paintings: a tendency to see them as depicting true social commentary and to promote an association between the Fauves and various political positions (especially anarchy) which may not have been true of the artists themselves.

[on the difference bewteen "naturism" and  naturalism:
naturalism: a "natural" rendering of the effects of nature  (in reality, what is thought to be "natural" consists of conventions that are widely shared and for the most part, no longer noticed by viewers); naturism: a cult of nature, celebrating the experience of physical sensations, spontaneity, and joie de vivre]

Whether Matisse and the other Fauves were actually naturists or anarchists is not really known; their paintings do, however, appear to be embracing naturist beliefs.  They are predominantly landscape paintings, and when human figures are present, they are engaged in dancing and sexual activities.  In other words, these are paintings about a sensual, exuberant, and primitive life style, with primitive, in this case, implying a life that is unencumbered by the rules of urban life.
 

Derain: Bathers, 1906	Derain: Trees, L'Estaque, 1906

Matisse: Luxe, Calme et Volupté (Luxury, Peace, and Sensuality), 1904	Matisse: The Joy of Life (Bonheur de Vivre), 1905-6

In Luxe, Calme et Volupté, Matisse unites the influence of neo-impressionism with that of Cézanne.  He varies his predominantly neo-impressionist brush-stroke, uses more hues and mixes primaries.  The colors create envelopes of space in a manner which reminds us of Cézanne, and the awkward bodies of the bathers do as well.  Likewise, the subject itself can be seen to reflect the dual influence of neo-impressionism and Cézanne, along with the utopian or arcadian landscape tradition seen in earlier French paintings (those of Puvis de Chavanne and Poussin, for example).  Finally, his title comes from a poem by Baudelaire -- this painting is the first he does from his imagination rather than from life and the first with an explicit literary reference.  But the relationship to Cézanne’s bathers cannot be ignored, partly because it tells us of the importance of these paintings for later generations of modernists, and partly because it emphasizes the pervasive use of the theme of bathers and dancers in art of the early 20th century.

The Joy of Life also shows an Arcadian scene, more clearly a bacchanalia.  It is similar to Luxe, Calme et Volupté but it is more clearly a rejection of contemporary and urban life because the contemporary setting of the former painting (the landscape at Collioure) has been replaced here by a completely imagined and idyllic setting.  The composition of this painting is based on near repetitions of linear elements and triangular clusters of figures, with a central triangle rising to the gothic arch of the trees in the center, finally creating a canopy for the dancing figures.  We can, however, also look at the dancing figures as a circular composition which is echoed in the arabesques of the trees and the other figures.  The mixture of styles in this painting, something which Matisse will continue to do in a deliberate manner, begins to carry meaning--in other words, pre-existing styles become signs of the real world, if the real world refers to the world of art and style.

If we consider all the Fauvist paintings as a rejection of the impressionism landscape of the late 19th century and the heroic landscape of the baroque period, we have what appears to be a new type of landscape painting: one which is decorative and exotic at the same time. In the political interpretation of these paintings, the landscape, the style and the women are clues to a political message. Taken together, the suggestion of an exotic landscape, made through the intense colors which evoked Gauguin's style, and through Gauguin, the primitive world, combined with the crude finish of these paintings, which continued to evoke the untutored or untrained eye, and in part the presence of the dancing women as a symbol of exotic femininity all acted to further an association between these paintings as a national message of French absorption, and therefore containment and control, of its north African territories.  But this message, if it was intended, was probably ambiguous, for Matisse had violated the French principles of design: his lines are not clear and spatial ambiguities abound.  The idyllic golden age is not completely isolated from the intrusions of the modern period, an isolation which French nationalists were seeking in the early 20th century.  But if the paintings of Matisse and Derain were not paintings of a golden age of the past, and they were not anarchist paintings of a utopian future to emerge in the Mediterranean south of France, what were they?  In the end, what they may be saying is that the golden age of the classical past and the utopian age of the future co-exist in the same space (the present), but anyone who looks for it will be looking in vain. Reality is always contingent; utopia is not.

Matisse, the Dance, and Music:

Music (1909-10) (painted for Sergei Shchukin)	Dance (1909-10)  (painted for Sergei Shchukin)

The use of color to liberate the image:

Interior with Young Girl, 1905-6	Woman with a Hat, 1905

Use of sculpture to explore painterly issues:

Back I, 1908-9	Back 4, 1930-1

Breaking down the boundary between figure and ground, between painted reality and imagined reality, in painting:
 

Interior with Eggplants, 1911	Harmony in Red, 1908-9

The Red Studio, 1911

Open windows and planes of reality as metaphors of the creative process:
 

Open Window at Collioure, 1905	The Blue Window, 1913	The French Window at Collioure, 1914

In the Open Window at Collioure, each level of space is characterized by a different type of brush-stroke which in this painting becomes a metaphor for the quality of time associated with the type of space.  Flat areas of paint are used for the interior and architectonic spaces which have static time; curved short strokes for the plants around the window, and horizontal and vertical dashed lines for the ships at sea.  The composition is a series of framed views within views, further surrounded by rectangular framed spaces, which in the end becomes a metaphor for the act and art of painting.  Despite what appears to be relatively neutral subject matter, the painting was deeply disturbing to Matisse’s colleagues.  In 1905, it is one of the most complete challenges to the Renaissance conception of space, and it poses this challenge with a painting of a window.  The Renaissance notion of the painting as a window onto the world is here turned almost inside out as the other world and the window unite with no sense of depth or perspective in the painting.

Thematic summary:

• the elision of different planes of reality: open windows, pictures within pictures, breaking down the difference between figure and ground
• dissolving the figure and composing with the figure
• the artistic process, understood as a means of picturing reality, as the subject of art

The Decorative Nude

The Blue Nude, 1907	Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background, 1925

The Blue Nude was a turning point for Matisse.  In this painting he painted the figure entirely from his imagination, rather than from a model.  The composition uses echoing curves and arcs which appear to be derived from the body of the nude and which relate the body to the landscape, engaging the human body and the land in an exchange of energy.  We also see the figure from more than one viewing point simultaneously, a technique which creates a sense of flux in the painting, and a sense of sculptural reality.  The association of this figure with African sculpture, an association made by Matisse in his own sculptural rendering of the same figure, lent a sense of the exotic to this figure.  But the omniscient viewpoint of the spectator reinforces the control of the artist and the viewer over the object in the painting: an exotic female.
 

Odalisque with Magnolias, 1924

Flowing Hair, 1952	Blue Nude, 1952

Matisse’s Women

To Carol Duncan, a recent feminist critic, the female figures lose their seductive properties because of Matisse’s assertion of control.  In her criticism, male control becomes the same as artistic control, or vice versa.  The nudes lose their aesthetic interest and become objects of social or political interest in this interpretation.  Given what Matisse himself has said, and given what strikes me as the voluptuous use of color and form in his paintings, the feminist in me unfortunately has to reject Duncan's interpretation and say that Greenberg comes much closer to explaining these paintings than she does.

In 1913, when Matisse’s first Blue Nude (1907) was seen in Chicago, it was burned in effigy by students who thought he had used art to violate the female body, by which they meant he had denied the viewer the pleasure associated with the feminine.  Matisse, as we know, did not believe that he was reproducing a woman on the canvas so much as creating an image of art. Throughout his writings he speaks of the process of making art as a process of representing a state of mind, and in this sense, the image of the female body is equally an image of himself.  He actually says this: “After a certain moment it [the drawing of a model] is a kind of revelation, it is no longer me.  At these moments there is a veritable doubling of myself: I don’t know what I am doing, I am identified with my model.” ¹

Consistently, although using varying means, Matisse does deny the viewer the right to gaze with pleasure on the female model – in the Blue Nude, by distorting the body; in his odalisque paintings, by creating dazzling backgrounds which almost seem to anticipate op art in their optical confusion and movement.  It is not so much that the figure dissolves into the ground as that the ground prevents the eye from settling on the figure.  Some of the figures have been described as phallic in form or at the very least androgenous; likewise these are strategies which deny erotic sexuality.  The questions which have been raised by these paintings include the following: are these paintings reflective of a psychological fear of women, such that the artist, even as he paints a female model, does not want to look at her and will not let the spectator look at her either?  Or is that question a red herring, because in fact, Matisse rarely lets the viewer’s eyes rest on anything in his paintings?  If this is true, they why does Matisse paint from life?  But he doesn’t -- let him speak for himself:
“To copy the objects in a still-life is nothing....One must render the emotion they awaken in him.” ²  For Matisse, the painting as a whole composition must convey significance and emotion; from this it follows that the background and the foreground do not exist in a hierarchical relationship with one demanding more attention than the other. Two points follow from this.  The first is that the female body as a foreground subject inherently threatens equality of foreground and background; it is possible that Matisse does engage in distortion of the figure in order to prevent the female from dominating the vision of the viewer.  This is not entirely a plausible hypothesis, though, because the distortions do call attention to themselves, which leaves us in the position of asserting that Matisse is using a female body as part of his equalized composition and then treats the female aggressively because she prevents him from achieving his goal.  His strategy in the odalisque paintings is more successful because it is less aggressive: here he prevents the gaze from destroying the equality of the composition.

With Matisse, and increasingly throughout the 20th century, alternative readings of artworks coexist so that we can almost go back and forth from one reading to another.  This tendency to see more than one interpretation, more than one reaction to gender, and the use of more than one medium to explore the same issue, can become a metaphor for the loss of boundaries between figure and ground.  In this case, if we consider the "background" as the entire painting and the "figure" as the interpretation, we have more than one interpretation imposing itself against the same background.  The interpretations then become part of the background for new ones.

Citations:
1. John Elderfield, Pleasuring Painting.  Matisse’s Feminine Representations  (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 13.
2.  Elderfield, p. 22.