1995

Matisse Exhibition

National Gallery of Victoria

Melbourne

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is around half past nine and there are people pouring out of Flinders Street station, some heading across the Swanston Street intersection, others, like me, heading into town for a salubrious bite to eat. There we all are- ordering our number one breakfasts, McBottomless coffee and bacon McMuffin.  Several armies are about to march on their stomachs. The Magpies fans, in their black and white Nikes and scarves, outflash and outnumber the more muted tones of the Bombers but everyone is quietly standing their ground. The exigencies of the McDonalds experience makes some contact unavoidable although most prefer to  queue according to colours. The mood is bouyant, some are hunched over the morning sports pages, others make considered adjustments to their plumage.

Collingwood are playing Essendon at the MCG. The papers are full of it . Back in Round Four – on Anzac Day no less- the Bombers drew 111-all against the Magpies before a crowd of 94,825. The Munchausens of Melbourne sports writing forsee today’s clash as a sky’s the limit situation.

Replenished and light of foot we weave through the crowds off to make statistical impact of our own. Over the bridge and past the conspicuous cultural consumption of Southgate and the Arts Centre we are heading to join another big mob of celebration. Ten years in the planning, the Matisse exhibition, initiated by the Queensland Gallery, facilitated by Arts Exhibitions Australia and hosted by galleries in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne, has, like the Van Gogh, Renoir, Golden Summers and Guggenheim exhibitions before it, been attracting  crowds of MCG proportions.

Now in its final week in Melbourne, this collection of Matisse paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and decoupage has attracted the Australian citizenry in large numbers. More than 79,000 filed respectfully past in Brisbane, 99,000 in Canberra apparently abandoned the bike tracks and Parliament House galleries for an eyeful of Odalisque and, with some ballot boxes still to be counted, Melbourne also has the equivalent of an Essendon-Collingwood clash on its hands.

It is not surprising that the versatile fluency of Henri Matisse should prove so attractive to us. Less driven than Vincent, more distinct than Monet, Matisse’s work is a continuous field of pleasure.  His discovery of Mediterranean blue could have been made at Bondi or Coogee. Instead of Tahiti he could have had a painterly damascus in Townsville. The intense blues and erotic lineaments of Whiteley’s work are an homage to Henri, as is the hive of industry which is the House of Done. When the doubters suggest that Matisse was a classy magazine designer, who slipped rather easily into production mode, an Australian reaction might be- why should we worry?  Matisse may have looked rather a stern-boots  but if he’d lived in Sydney he’d probably have found time time to do some t-shirts for Mambo.

It is impossible not to impressed by the sheer flair of his work. And this exhibition has depth in so many areas. The sculptures are curvy and earthy. His Serpentine from 1909, a standing figure in parody of a Rodin thinker, has the coquettry of a beach girl. The Jeannette series show an increasing degree of abstraction in head shape and expression. The Venus in the Shell has the unabashed carnality of the African carving which at the turn of the century amazed all of Paris but few could articulate what they saw like Matisse.

The prints and drawings alone make this showing a major event. A hundred and seventy eight in total they chart the progress of some of the paintings and murals as well as providing delight in themselves. His oft-quoted remark that exactitude is not truth, reminds us that Matisse was a careful craftsman who devoted himself to painstaking technical accuracy in order to work with such apparent abandon. A series of studies of odalisques from the mid 1920s are detailed pencil works produced alongside sketches of audacious simplicity of line, a facility he never lost as the late work, Nude with Oranges (1953) so splendidly demonstrates.

Matisse, the master of black, was never more startling than in his lithographs, many for book illustrations. The economy and energy of line is superbly indicated in the Dive, in the Pasiphae illustrations, even in something as apparently prosaic as a vase of begonias.

Then, turning to his paintings -of which fifty seven are on display-  we find a narrative of development from Impressionism and Cezanne, to works identifying him as one of the wild beasty Fauvists, through to paintings which epitomise  Matisse at his most singular.  So many are  delights- Madame Matisse in japonaise camouflage in Woman Beside the water, or striking a powerfully  angular pose as Algerian Woman. Landscapes from Morocco such as Acanthus (1912) are so densely blue and luxuriant you want to climb into them, while his still lifes- mundane  baskets of oranges, tulips and oysters, nasturtiums, magnolias, goldfish, parakeets  and pink shrimp redefine the pleasures of the interior life. With their elusive perspectives, creamy brushwork and detonations of colour they render the most familiar tableaux as miracles of luxury.

Matisse liked dress-ups. Many of the paintings are elaborately staged, whether scrumptious depictions of his scrumptious sculptures or putative harem attendants, lounging about on low divans like it was somebody else’s turn to cook tea. Sometimes they really are flappers, posed at a window or draped about in what look like rooms in a Turkish carpet emporium. Elsewhere they are rather Parisian seeming odalisques, basking in their culottes amidst black edged drapery in crimsons, yellows and deep indigo.

At the end of the painting display is Michaela (1943)  a seated figure in a yellow dress whose red chair merges mysteriously into a hemaglobin wall decorated with grey zig-zags. She is almost pushed out of frame by a cabbagy coloured pot plant and her face is an unreadable mask. It is so apparently artless but has an arresting curiosity matched only by The Abduction of Europa, jewel from the National Gallery collection. In this painting Europa reclines with her arms raised like many a languorous Matisse nude while Zeus, in the form of a bull, rests beside her like Ferdinand, with a bashful sated look that doesn’t quite bear thinking about.

The final section of the exhibition is devoted to Matisse’s decoupage, brightly coloured cut-outs which form the remarkable Jazz series. Like one-dimensional origami, like Warner Brothers cartoons, like accidents of genius, they are ravishing in their hard edge colours, the blacks, the blues, and yellows like the sun. The energy and assurance of Icarus, the sword swallower, the nodding mane of a circus horse, belie the ailing octogenarian artist’s immobility. That Henri Matisse could have retained such an unerring eye, such wit and originality in a creative life of more than sixty years is breathtaking. That he could so delight in the business of being alive is an open invitation.

The Adelaide Review, No.143, September, 1995, pp.28-9.