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Matisse: Revolutionary Conservative
| Article
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10474 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
1,662 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
By now, it seems, everything that can be said about the Museum of Modern Art's magnificent Matisse retrospective has been said.
We know, for example, just what went into organizing such an enormous undertaking and how certain loans were secured. We know that Fate lent a hand in the proceedings by introducing an additional element of excitement just weeks before the exhibition opened in September a major work long thought to have been lost, namely Matisse's study for his original version of the extraordinary mural he painted for the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia in 1931. (Having finished it, Matisse found his measurements just slightly off. Instead of fudging things, as many an artist would have been tempted to do, he started all over again.)
And from the uniformly adulatory critical response we know that the exhibition has not only been a success, but has sparked a rare unanimity of another kind among the art critics charged with the task of summarizing the artist's varied and remarkable achievement. Almost everyone (including myself, elsewhere) spoke about Matisse's revolutionary approach to color, the joie de vivre his paintings strive so successfully to elicit, and his radical innovations that constantly pushed the art of painting beyond what was thought possible and in the process invented modern art.
But I wonder whether in all of this discussion, particularly about Matisse's radicalism, something equally important hasn't been overlooked: the extent of Matisse's conservatism. For Matisse's art puts the lie to the romantic notion, so much a fixture of our art discourse today, of the modern artist as someone who feels it is his first duty to effect a complete break with the past, turning his back on all the art produced before him and self consciously overturning every inherited pictorial convention in order to start afresh and unencumbered.
Perhaps it is the way that the history of modern art is taught, or maybe it comes from reading all the polemics and broadsides written by modern artists (Filippo Marinetti's "Futurist Manifesto" being a case in point). Perhaps it is some combination of both. At any rate, this conception of the modern artist as some sort of Samson run amok, pulling down the art temples of the past, is so much a part of current orthodoxy (and has been for some time) as to constitute something of fetish. It is an attitude firmly and reflexively embraced by contemporary artists, and it is one projected onto the past, imputed to artists no longer living, like Matisse.
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