Matisse and the pleasure principle

Is there anyone alive on the face of the earth who doesn’t like Matisse? But then what’s not to like? Of all the modern masters, Matisse was the one least embarrassed by the pleasure principle. Time after time he delivers great bolts of eye-popping colour that are not just at the service of form but construct it. Liberated from the planes and objects they ostensibly represent, Matisse’s colour fields gorge on the headlong energy of visual appetite. Vibrating reds, luxuriant purples and depthless blues meet his bounding, sinuous line and off they go to the races.

A stunningly eccentric painting from 1915 at MoMA’s thought-provoking show in New York – ostensibly a view through a window, a patterned red curtain at its edge – translates details into thinly painted passages of flat colour, in startling anticipation of the poetic essentialism of the artist’s late cut-outs.

Between blue and green is a dominant irregular panel of yellow gold that Matisse later explained registered “the vibration and pleasure which he derived from the contrast of trees and sky”. This intuitive, voluptuary innocence is why – with Van Gogh – Matisse is such a sure-fire box office draw. By comparison Picasso seems hard work. On Picasso’s vaunting difficulty, you bark your shins. Matisse greets the eye with a “come on in and take a load off”.

But it’s this very ease of entry into Matisse’s art that sets off teeth-grinding among the curatorial class. Heaven forbid he should be seen as a “bourgeois decorator” in the voiced anxiety of John Elderfield, who was until 2009 the senior curator of painting at MoMA and who, together with Stephanie d’Alessandro of the Art Institute of Chicago, has organised this show of Matisse’s work between 1913 and 1917.

Grandly subtitled “Radical Invention” – as if, before and after, Matisse was some sort of conceptual slouch – the idea is to showcase a period of what Alfred Barr, the first director of MoMA, called “almost forbidding asceticism”. This is a heavyweight Matisse meant to wipe the smile off our faces.

But did the smoke of Verdun really hang over Matisse’s studio? To be sure, blacks and greys make a striking appearance at this time, mostly as the formal armature of the paintings, and there is plenty of evidence of the struggle between painterly and sculptural urges (there is a good deal of sculpture in the show, not much of it exciting). But visitors might be forgiven for wondering, as they walk through galleries where fierce colour continues to flow juicily from the walls, whether all this really represents a decisive turn towards gravity.

Matisse: ‘Bathers by a River’

The one great work Matisse laboured from 1909 to 1917 to turn into a modernist monument, “Bathers by a River”, with its four statuesque faceless figures, each confined to columnar bands of the enormous canvas, unquestionably makes d’Alessandro’s and Elderfield’s case.

The very first item in this show is not a Matisse at all but a small Cézanne, “Bathers”, which the younger artist for a while owned and which seems to have tortured him daily with a challenge to produce something that might comparably fuse the burgeoning of the natural world with the timeless solemnity beyond it.

At the back of his mind – and sometimes at the front of it – was of course the gauntlet thrown down by an even more violent deconstruction of classical aesthetics: Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”.

The current Chicago-MoMA show began as an effort to track the toilsome journey before Matisse finally resolved everything into the frieze-like composition of “Bathers by a River”, which concludes the show. It is no anticlimax. All the agonies of revision resulted in a work that does marry the painterly and the sculptural: a processional pan, left to right, from deep forest through earth to water and sky, the caryatid-like figures carrying on their faceless frames the poignancy of broken mythology.

So perhaps a smaller, more concentrated exhibition contenting itself with the process that formed the masterpiece would have had the cohesiveness the curators had in mind. But their premise of a first world war march away from the decorative and towards what they call “architectonic” austerity falls apart as soon as they stock the galleries.

Dark grounds are misrepresented as some sort of gesture towards sobriety, when, as in “The Rose Marble Table” of 1916, they actually serve to make the brilliance of the subject more, not less, radiant. Yes, it’s the year of the Battle of the Somme and Matisse’s friends Derain and Apollinaire were at the front, but the charcoal-outlined table could as easily be read as a resistance to darkness as the opposite. Or, more likely, neither.

And when Matisse has a brush with cubism, you always feel he is just going through the motions. While his “Flowers and Ceramic Plate” of 1913 dutifully represents the latter seen from above as an outlined disc, the pantheist Matisse breaks through by setting below it, at an entirely naturalist angle of vision, a bowl of pansies rioting with jubilant brightness, the whole piece nailed to a ground that is mind-piercingly cerulean.

To bolster their case, d’Alessandro and Elderfield fetishise an innocuous remark made by Matisse in 1951 in an interview given to the Greco-French critic Tériade when he referred to “modern methods of construction”. The MoMA show wants to say that Matisse’s habit of retaining the marks of trial and error, the turn towards incising, scoring and rubbing the surface, was the demonstration of those “modern methods”.

But a closer look at what Matisse actually meant by the phrase reveals it to be the very un-radical interlocking of painterly elements – form, colour, light, space, their interdependent parts forming a whole so precisely calibrated that the dislocation of any of them would make the composition fall part. Seventeenth-century Dutch theorists called this houding, and Matisse, whose congested variation on David de Heem’s still life is included in the show, knew all about it from his Old Master studies.

Does this mean that Elderfield and d’Alessandro have over-egged their claims for “radical invention” in this period? Not altogether. At the heart of the show is a series of works that are, indeed, unlike anything Matisse ever did before or after. Confronted with some of them, the temptation is to mutter “just as well”, since there are some real stinkers in the jewel box. If Matisse ever painted anything more dire than “Head, White and Rose” (1914-1915), an embarrassingly amateurish re-enactment of cubist portraiture, I have yet to see it.

What is truly striking about a time when Matisse was stylistically thrashing around was that a botched effort would be redeemed by work so perfectly knit together that the clunky rehearsals seem worth it. So, for instance, one clumsy version of a “Bowl of Apples on a Table”, yet another formulaic homage to Cézanne’s play with upturned planes, magically turns, in a different version when the ground is bisected into yellow and black, into a spinning disc of mesmerising beauty. “The Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg”, scraped in cubist monochrome and featuring a hand-me-down version of Picasso masking, bears signs of desperation as Matisse scores it in whiplash strokes that rhyme with the outlines of his subject’s body.

But the “Portrait of Sarah Stein”, though much worked over, seems free of laboriousness, the big expressive face perched on an impossibly long neck-stalk craning out of the picture plane into our space.

And there are plenty of glorious paintings in this stern show that simply embody moments when Matisse synthesised strenuous experiment with the calling of his own painterly instincts. In MoMA’s own “Piano Lesson” (1916), inside and outside dissolve as they usually do in Matisse’s sabotage of the definition of planes; in this instance, the scrambling of space reinforces the imprisonment of Matisse’s son, his face reduced to a summary disc sliced by a blade of exasperation as he hammers out his practice pieces. Tone, colour, space, sound and light, time and space, all hang together as they do in “The Moroccans”, painted in 1916 from memories of two stays in Tangier four years earlier.

There is, indeed, a black ground here, but it serves as a foil for a composition that reclaims the passion for the dazzling patterning Matisse adored in Islamic art, textiles and architecture, not to mention the brilliant local colouring on which he is supposed to have turned his back. But there it all is: mounds of fleshily indented melons, a turbaned squatting figure, an elegant architectural ensemble of roofline and cupola at the background, all bathed in hot Maghrebi light. You look at this and you breathe a sigh of relief, for here is Henri Matisse at last freed from the obligation of response and returned, most happily, to his true nature and his sublime gift.

‘Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, until October 11. www.moma.org

Simon Schama is an FT contributing editor