A WINDOW ON MATISSE

HENRI MATISSE, INTERIOR WITH EGYPTIAN CURTAIN, 1948

(Phillips Collection, Washington)

Many of Matisse’s greatest paintings (and far too many of his worst) depict rooms filled with symbols. The Museum of Modern Art’s Red Studio (1911) is, of course, the best-known of these, but the contemporaneous Interior with Aubergines (Musée de Grenoble) is an even better example and a superior work overall, its dark color harmonies and beautifully patterned flatness anticipating the later Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Braque. The earlier, and justly famous, Harmony in Red–a symbolic woman arranging symbolic fruit in an eponymously colored room–certainly belongs in any list of Matisse’s symbol-filled interiors. And what is Conversation but a radically flattened blue room in which a masculine symbol faces a feminine symbol across the vast psychological distance between them? After these great early paintings, in the years between the wars, Matisse’s symbolic interiors hardened into formula and his work became tiresomely repetitious: too many sunlit French windows, too many half-dressed or overdressed models posing in far too many brightly colored rooms. It was a time when Matisse’s art aspired to the condition of luxury wallpaper–and usually achieved it. Only much later, in the series of interiors painted after World War Two, did Matisse regain some of the power of his pre-WWI works. These late symbolic rooms are the last great paintings of the artist’s long life, and the greatest among them is the Phillips Collection’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain.

Blackness drew me to the Egyptian Curtain. Although Matisse’s typically bright colors tend to blind people to the darker side of his palette, it is with black, dark blue and purple that he achieves some of his most sublime effects. I think of the 1914 French Window at Collioure, a nighttime companion to his sun- and color-drenched, Fauvist version of the same motif painted nine years earlier. The 1914 painting is a work of stunning simplicity: three vertical patches of neutral grayish color frame an opening onto deep black night. At least fifty years ahead of its time, it is the first–and perhaps the only–truly great Minimalist painting. The Egyptian Curtain is not so spartan, but it is a beautiful vision in black. Here black is used as an overall flattening color, like red in the Red Studio or blue in Conversation. Blackness melds the foreground curtain into the back wall and counteracts the illusion of depth created by the receding tabletop. However naturalistic some passages of this canvas might appear, the flattening black signals that we are in an imaginary, symbolic space. Of course, bright colors also play out with greater force against a black background, an effect especially noticeable on the curtain itself where the red leaves of the stylized vine, enlarging as they curve downward, seem to dance out toward the viewer with a funky, jazzy rhythm. The circular shape around which the vine dances is a highly-stylized cross-section of a pomegranate, the same fruit gathered on the tabletop below. This pomegranate in a place of darkness evokes the myth of Persephone, abducted and raped by Pluto, god of the underworld, and forced to spend half of every year underground as queen of Hades because she ate of the pomegranates that grow in the gardens of Death. The deathly associations of the fruit are complicated, however, by the proximity of that vine, its red and green colors symbolizing the blood and leaves that are the vital forces of all plant and animal life. But lest we overstate the symbolic case we should note that four black leaves are also visible along the vine, suggesting a death force intertwined with the lively ones, a few dark steps in the vine’s bright dance. This vine, like the entire curtain–and the story of Persephone itself–is a complex, mysterious fusion of life and death.

Against the curtain’s pure black, the heavy white lines that delineate the chambers of the pomegranate stand out with startling force (an effect impossible to capture in reproduction but obvious when the painting is seen in person). While all the other whites in this work are unpainted canvas ground, these lines are thickly painted in pure white, and the leftmost line appears to have been laid on or smoothed over with a palette knife. This emphatic, aggressive technique, as well as the angularity of these shapes amidst all the curtain’s curves, catches our eye and forces us to reflect upon these lines, to think about the meaning of white. Although the opposite of black, white is not, surprisingly, a color we immediately associate with life. White connotes purity, virginity, coldness, frigidity; it is the color of snowy winter days and frozen mountain heights. In the context of the pomegranate, white could represent the virginity of Persephone, violated by Pluto–a reading that accounts for the phallic spear at the bottom of the curtain that seems about to pierce a blood-red hymeneal barrier. But I think whiteness also has a more general meaning in the painting. The complementary opposite of a black associated with the darkness of death, the white of the Egyptian Curtain might represent the blankness before birth. White is the tabula rasa, the unpainted canvas, the field of freedom where we define ourselves by our actions (yes, this is a painting from the heyday of French Existentialism). White is where we begin. And living, painting, playing, making marks–all of that happens between the two eternities of white and black.

Patches of unpainted white punctuate the loosely painted table and bowl, dispelling with glimpses of flat canvas any illusion of space created by the table’s slight recession. A single touch of red on the tabletop just left of the bowl must be a red pomegranate seed like those eaten by Persephone. This table is a kind of altar, and the seed is an invitation to deathly communion, an invitation to eat. And here we should consider that the pomegranate is a food associated with death, a living fruit bursting with fertility that grows in the gardens of Hades. While the pomegranate on the curtain evokes the death side of the fruit’s associations, these sunnier yellow fruits more strongly suggest the idea of afterlife, of an existence after death in which these will be the nourishing foods. The relative sunniness of this still life is undermined, however, by the pure black shadow on the tabletop. An anomaly in the shadowless world of Matisse’s late works, this matte black surface is like a puddle of crude oil spreading across the table, and we might see it as an old man’s late riposte to two opposing tendencies in the artistic world of his youth: the Impressionist insistence that shadows are complexly colored and that nature knows no black, and the academic doctrine of subtle tonal gradations leading from darkness to light. More than anything else, though, the shadow looks like a hole in the table through which we glimpse the black wall behind (a very similar effect is found in some of Braque’s later works), and as such it is yet another image of death: the hole of Plutonic darkness into which we fall. The shadow is a black hole, a void from which there is no light and no return.

Above this somber bass note, the colors of the window sing out riotously. These spreading palm fronds that seem smashed against the window panes are loose constructions of short, visible brushstrokes with a huge amount of white ground showing through. The whole thing is like a fireworks explosion, a burst of energy that stylistically recalls Matisse’s 1905 Fauve works. Once our initial excitement has passed, though, we begin to notice the black in the window. For black, along with yellow, blue and green, is one of the four colors of this chromatic burst. Strokes of pure black peppered through the palm fronds are the dark notes against which the other colors sound out more brightly. Deathly black further enlivens this vision of life. "Death is the mother of beauty,"¹ Wallace Stevens says. All forms of natural beauty play out against a background of death–within a frame of death, we might say, like the black frame of Matisse’s window. We grasp at the beautiful in nature because we know it will die–or, more likely, because we know we will die.

There is also in this window, despite the energy, a sense of nature as something removed from us, estranged. It is trapped behind a black wall, partitioned by a black crossbar. Unlike the open French windows frequently seen in Matisse’s earlier works, this opening permits no easy passage to the exterior. Here nature neither invites nor encroaches; it is sealed off from us. We have its fruits–literally, here on the tabletop–but we cannot grasp the reality from which they came. We can see nature but not touch it. It is in a frame behind glass. Like a painting. That’s the ultimate reality here. We step up, peer through the glass, and see flat brushstrokes on flat canvas.

Is this it? Is this where Matisse leaves us: trapped, hermetically sealed in a room full of symbols, a place made out of paint? Not exactly. Unable to completely grasp nature–or any reality–the artist still sees it, perceives it, and has the power to transform those perceptions into art. This is perhaps the greatest significance of the Egyptian curtain, for the curtain is a work of art that symbolically transforms the other two-thirds of the painting. The tripartite structure of this work (curtain, table, window) tends to conceal an equally important dual structure in which the curtain, as a man-made, constructed thing, is opposed to the palm tree and pomegranates as representations of nature. On the surface of the curtain, the pomegranates are transformed into that large, powerful, chambered symbol, an icon of the fruit, and the curving palm fronds, built out of individual brushstrokes, become that dancing vine with its flat patches of pure color. The curtain thus represents an act of artistic transformation that parallels and comments upon the entire painting. That’s why the curtain is so prominent and why Matisse draws further attention to it by signing his name on its lower half instead of in some less obtrusive part of the canvas. Just as the curtain translates the rest of the painting into a stylized language of symbols, so does Matisse translate a corner of his studio into the symbolic language of paint to create Interior with Egyptian Curtain. Each brushstroke on this canvas has meaning, every mark is a sign, and all possess the potential difficulty of symbolic language: the way the literal, surface meaning both carries and partly obscures the symbolic meaning, like a curtain that both conceals and reveals.

Close to the canvas, looking through the window, we see the individual brushstrokes that are Matisse’s most minimal signs. As we move slowly back, the brushmarks become identifiable forms, like letters coalescing into readable words. Soon we can read the shapes as palm fronds, blue sky, a window frame. Farther back, the entire window comes together in a dynamic vision of nature. Yellow lines sizzle out from the center like arcs of electric current, and the whole thing moves, turning like a wheel– indeed, like that pomegranate section on the curtain that also resembles a spoked wheel. The palm fronds turn around a central axis just as the red and green vine circles the pomegranate. The fruits in the bowl are likewise arranged in a circle with a blank patch at the center. All the principle images of this painting are thus symbols of motion, of a circular motion that evokes the cycles of nature, the changing seasons, death in winter and rebirth in spring. The Persephone myth can be interpreted as an allegory of this cycle, her six months underground corresponding to fall and winter while her above-ground half year is spring and summer, so the mythological reference accords perfectly with the painting’s formal symbolism. The work is all about these natural cycles, the constant change that is nature’s only continuity. And the entire canvas, like the curtain, is a flat surface to which symbols of this cyclical change have been applied.

It is impossible at this point not to see Egyptian Curtain as a prefiguration of Matisse’s next artistic direction: the late cut-outs which consist entirely of symbols arranged on flat surfaces. In fact, this painting, this great poem of natural change and continuity, contains references to several changes in Matisse’s own career. It is a highly-selective three-part retrospective in which the wildness of the window remembers the distant Fauve past, the still life brings to mind the interiors of his middle years, and the curtain predicts his cut-out future. Continuity lies in the fact that in all three disparate phases Matisse is making signs. In the final phase his symbolic expression is simply more direct. Without any trappings of naturalism, he cuts symbolic forms out of painted paper and pastes them onto flat colored surfaces. Even the chapel Matisse designed at Vence is predicted by the Egyptian Curtain, for this chapel can be seen as a crowning three-dimensional realization of the master motif that recurred in his paintings for decades: it is a room full of symbols. Not orthodox Christian symbols, but original, Matissean symbols inspired by Christianity. Nor was the Vence chapel the old man’s final symbolic room. Photographs taken in Matisse’s Nice apartment in the last years of his life show the walls of his working and living areas papered with large cut-outs and drawings. We see MOMA’s huge Swimming Pool cut-out wrapped around the walls of his dining room, while Women with Monkeys (now in Cologne) is used as an overdoor. Something about this great burst of originality at the end of Matisse’s life seems like a means of fending off death. As long as the painter continues to make meaning out of color, the blackness can’t win. And so he fills his rooms with symbols. Like one of the plunging figures in his Swimming Pool, Matisse dives into the Egyptian curtain and makes it his world.

NOTES

1. Stevens, "Sunday Morning," Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 283.

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