For a little more than six months in 1912 and 1913, Henri Matisse twice visited a place that matched outer environment to inner life more completely than at any other time in his long career.
The place was Morocco. And of the many exotic locales Matisse visited, only this one prompted an important series of paintings and drawings.
He exhibited several of the works in 1913 at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. But not since then have they hung together, and only now for the first time can we see nearly all of them, in ”Matisse in Morocco,” the Soviet-American collaboration at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
This glorious exhibition-happily, far from a blockbuster-includes 25 paintings and almost twice as many drawings, half of which are newly discovered and receiving their premier showing. So, in a sense, it is a connoisseur`s exhibition, best appreciated by those who already know that Morocco held the artist in thrall. Yet the physical beauty of the paintings extends beyond the scrutiny of specialists, casting a spell on anyone even casually interested in art of the halcyon years before World War I.
Viewers should be forewarned, however, that none of the work is picturesque. Matisse loathed this aspect of foreign places, criticizing it even in the art of painters who influenced him, such as Eugene Delacroix.
Delacroix visited Morocco 80 years before Matisse and wrote, ”The picturesque is plentiful here. At every step one meets ready-made paintings that would bring 20 generations of painters wealth and glory.” Unfortunately, Matisse was not among them. He hated the idea of a place, any place, having sights so exotic that they required little or no remaking. For him, painting involved a complex transmutation of sights by the artist`s feeling.
He did not, then, go to Morocco to find ”ready-made” paintings; he went for the light. This is the great enduring subject of Matisse`s art, and because he worked from natural appearances, he needed weather-and, hence, light-to be unvariable. His painter friend Albert Marquet said it would be. And in just the wrong way, it was: On the first 15 days and nights of Matisse`s stay in Morocco, rain was continuous.
He wrote, ”Ah, Tangier, Tangier! I wish I had the courage to get the hell out.” But then the rain stopped, leaving streets and buildings enveloped by a light softer than any he had known. This is the delicate yet clear illumination that Matisse specialist Pierre Schneider has said was at once the artist`s light of the sky and light of the spirit.
To render it, Matisse thinned his oils and applied them like watercolors, leaving a lot of the white of the canvases showing. Some of this we see as tremulous auras that surround Matisse`s objects, replacing with negative space firmer outlines. They are especially apparent-and beautiful-in the pictures of indoor still-lifes and outdoor gardens.
But the light that comes from within each painting is even more potent. Matisse`s pigments wash over the primed white surfaces of the canvas, sometimes giving the appearance of only colored filters for the light underneath. Here we feel the softness of Moroccan light as a fine, humid mist. As Schneider has written, ”the colors are not exalted, but rather exhaled.” Several of these pictures are of female figures, and, at first, that gave the artist trouble because of the Islamic law of the veil. Only prostitutes and Jewesses were exempt, and Matisse finally engaged one of the former, but she found modeling difficult, knowing it meant death if she were discovered by her brother.
Matisse created four paintings of the girl named Zorah, each of which was disarmingly simple. One, in oil paint thinned with turpentine, is really just a line drawing; another, a series of closed curved shapes in extremely pale colors.
The remaining two have associations reflecting not only a spiritualizing tendency on the part of Matisse but also art of more orthodox Christian tendencies that he saw on an earlier trip to Russia. ”On the Terrace” is part of a triad that secularizes religious triptychs by according the kneeling girl the central place of the Virgin. And ”Zorah Standing” recalls the splendor and hieratic frontal pose of full-figure Russian icons.
At this time, Matisse`s strongest support came from two Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morosov. Before going to Tangier, the artist spent considerable time with them in Moscow, where he had a healthy following of artists but also some hostile critics.
The critics underlined what Matisse himself had felt in Paris, namely, that he was losing his place at the head of the avant garde to Picasso and other Cubists. No one knows for sure, but the reminders he received in Russia may have given his trips to Morocco added impetus, for Matisse once said they enabled him ”to renew closer contact with nature” and that contact might have been part of a necessary act of self-renewal in the face of Cubist threats to his position.
In any event, Matisse left Paris on his second Moroccan trip a few weeks before the opening of a big Cubist exhibition and the publication of the movement`s first major monograph. The reason, regardless of his timing, was that he had to complete commissions for Morosov and Shchukin.
There he found precisely the opposite of what he had encountered before, the land having been parched by the summer sun. His works reflect it in their sense of heat not only when treating landscapes but also some figures, particularly a male mountain warrior.
All of the Moroccan drawings have this quality, as Matisse consistently worked on each sheet with ink or pencil but not color. He showed little apparent interest in capturing the steamier atmosphere of the first trip, and where one could say atmosphere was not paramount in the drawings even later, there was, at least, the fortuitous coincidence of the blazing white of his sheets and the light of summer.
The second stay was longer and more prolific, Matisse completing 23 paintings to the 12 he had done earlier. Then, too, there was the element of good fellowship, when painter friend Charles Camoin came to work with him midway through the four-month sojourn.
Matisse planned a third trip but never took it, knowing when to stop. Morocco was in him to the degree that he did not need to repeat the outward experience. Exactly how much it was in him is indicated by three smaller exhibitions from the museum`s permanent collection. One of them, including only paintings, holds the last canvas he completed, and even in 1951 it draws on his Moroccan idylls.
The sole disappointment of the show comes from the absence of ”Moroccan Cafe,” Matisse`s greatest painting of the period. Reserved for Morosov, it nonetheless went to Shchukin and, by his account, became his favorite Matisse picture. It will join the present complement only at the institution where it normally hangs, the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad.
In Washington, the open installation is exemplary, recreating Matisse`s pale grey frames and forming several telling groupings. The catalog proves exceptional, as well, with a beautifully reasoned (and written) essay by Schneider preceding solid contributions from four other scholars ($39.95, $22.50 paperback). A pity only the book will come to Chicago.
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”Matisse in Morocco” continues at the National Gallery of Art, 4th Street at Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C., through June 3. Thereafter, it will travel to the Museum of Modern Art, New York (June 24-Sept. 4); the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Sept. 28-Nov. 20); and the State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad (Dec. 15-Feb. 15, 1991).
