The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process. In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles. By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives. Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.
In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism. And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table. In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things. In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain. In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint. Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window. It makes a poetry of the concrete.
Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.