People will no doubt disagree with me but I think this is one of Matisse's more grand and compelling pictures. Granted in his large oeuvre there is a lot to choose from, but this one speaks to his poetic and daring faith in a picture's thirst for a spontaneous but unified surface. I like everything about it, from the colour harmonies to the organisation, to how each part appears to interlock with another like in a lego project.
Somehow, I imagine this picture would enrage feminists everywhere. A nude woman opens up her legs to a male voyeur who doesn't even acknowledge her identity! No visage! Sacré Bleu! Because context is everything for so many viewers of Art (and politics) these days, I think poor Henri would not come out very well, especially in America.
Being a painter, I don't place context high up on my list of criteria for appreciating a painting. I'm a lover of the subtle and unified grace in a picture with almost no attention to any context concerning it.
I marvel at how each of these colours come together as objects. Each one takes its appropriate place within each object it assumes. I love the two pinks that monopolise the entire surface. The warm pink for the woman's body, and the cool, not only for the nightgown, but also for the walls of the room. Is the floor red? Or is it a rug? Or is that a golden rug? Is that a green door or green window? Is that a small blue cupboard in the distance? Do any of these 'things' in a picture even have to do, or be anything at all? What if a painting just surprises us but its mystery?
My real beef with the Non-Figurative, or Abstract genre of Painting, in this era of ours, is that I almost never see any paintings that possess a sufficient cohesion of relationships as to make an image even remotely believable.
So much painting usually appears mushy with poor light sources, and is scattered about randomly. To call it Light isn't even possible because it's usually Lighting, like used in a photo shoot. Without a natural light source how can form exist? And without that, how can colours then exist?
I love Matisse for so many reasons, too long to list and expound upon here, but it's primarily because, over his lifetime, he was an unabashed explorer into the wild jungles of the Plastic Arts. When he hit it, for he did a lot, it was solely because he painted so prolifically and by that account the odds were in his favour. He was a constant gardner producing every sort of edible in each season.
He worked tirelessly and faced a continual uphill battle against a mercurial and mistrustful public. And, like almost every painter he made some truly awful pictures at times but I love him for all his experimentations that encompass an exceptionally wide set of styles and materials. He was up for for everything it seems. Even towards his end, when ill in bed, he made cut-outs with coloured paper shapes using a pair of scissors.
But in this painting, I think the most important element is the small necklace made of just three dark coloured beads. Are they deep blue/grey or black? For me, they are the keys around which everything else revolves. The strong accents represented by these small three 'beads', perhaps without which the entire surface of the picture might suffer, are pivotal. Somehow they seem to act like tiny batteries that keep the entire picture moving around itself in a slow docile movement.
In Chiaroscuro terms, they present the strongest accents in the painting which they permit him to use all those surrounding pale, bleached pinks everywhere.
The great display of foliage placed behind the model in the form of an indoor house plant is a brilliant and anodyne solution for creating a passageway over to the deep green door (?) on the right, or is it a window (?) hallway (?) whatever it is, no problem because it there to set off the red (tile?) floor.
This is a painting that delights its viewers but does so without making a big fuss about it. In it, everything reposes.
As an afterthought, and because I like upsetting people, I include a de Kooning just for fun. It's from a later period in his long life, and certainly not one of his better pictures for which I apologise to his fans, but I picked it out on Dr Google because it's a model painted in a somewhat similar situational place like the Matisse, and as a oil painting I find it dreadful.
While Matisse opened himself up to a visual window of the world, de Kooning, by contrast, appeared to close himself off from it. It's as though he only seemed to pretend to look at the model, because for me, the result explains that he didn't even see her in the first place.
I will be crucified for criticising a god like de Kooning, but honestly, who cares? I think that as critical space has expanded between today and the world of yesterday, it's clear that the Expressionist movement, barely some eighty odd years old, is actually another weak link in the long history of Art. It certainly did not add much to the rich history of Painting, nor was it a lighthouse for the next generation. In many ways it was an myopic diversion away from everything that many have loved and cherished in Painting for centuries.
Specifically, when comparing it to the Matisse, look at the random ad-hoc and irrelevant way he used colour and placed his model in the picture. The colour is all wrong, was it meant as a joke? There is no light in it all, it's a horror show, and no contextual gibberish can prop it upright with ArtSpeak.
To be fair, it looks like it may have been painted at night because of the garish overuse of yellow paint. This comes from working from artificial light. It has lighting but no luminosity. Honestly, the more I look at it the more ridiculous it really appears. Yes, he made some interesting pictures in his life but no. I don't think many of them stand up to time.
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