Matisse @MoMA @Charlie Rose
On the Charlie Rose show the curators involved in a recent show of Matisse’s work focused on little known work. Curators work from the outside in — with rare exceptions, such as the late Kirk Varnedoe, who seemed to ingest the work he discussed. But most often you get lots of detailed information about the physical work and historical context, but don’t quite understand how the mainstream art bureaucracy values the work, or why. Contemporary art, like contemporary science, often needs a well-wrought bridge to the public.
Art is one area where “this means that” just doesn’t work — even though that simple symbolism is what is taught in universities by indirection; or the artist’s relations to the power structure. Curatorial discussion can often sound as shallowly partisan and mechanically tendentious as docent lectures. But these curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, had some nuance; their discussion shed light on the context of the work both historically and on Matisse’s thinking, and thus expressed by indirection their love for the Matisse’s work.
From an artist’s perspective the work under review reveals its true nature without technocratic or historical intrusion: it is clearly transitional work, aware of itself as such, but choosing to present itself in the main tent. Rather than an artist working out the many issues involved in creating an image in his/her studio, away from the public, Matisse chose to let it all hang out. The subject of his work was the ambivalence of the expressive act, particularly evident in these very complex works shown on Rose’s show.
Matisse’s work, deceptively brilliant in its daring, not only in its historically significant transition to the graphical — a crude surface indicator — but in the way he used the graphical (a building of planes rather than of forms); graphical work had before been seen as purely decorative but Matisse used the flat areas of his paintings to express ambiguity. He incorporated decorative defaults as a subtle disjunction. Faces were sometimes depicted flat, without features, or with generic features, and this might seem not much, but they are a daring and dramatic assertion for an audience expecting realism.
A courageous decision and a trusting approach to the audience rather than smug winking at shared assumptions between artist and viewer, often seen in contemporary work. In contemporary art there is much that seems clubby, obscure for its own sake, derivative of idea, referential if it is to have any meaning, or ingratiating in its pop cultural references (not trusting the viewer’s serious side). Matisse was principally an aesthetic artist, even though his gnomic written pronouncements often were impressively insightful. Matisse was a bright man. The paradigmatic quality of Matisse’s work is his intelligence; in Picasso’s work it is the very force of the creative — a seeming force of nature inhabiting Picasso’s work.
