Matisse made this artwork towards the end of his life, in 1953. It is a cut-out, made out of twenty pieces of paper, glued on like a collage of colors. Suffering from arthritis and other physical ailments, Matisse had put down the brush in favor of scissors. If not for its enormous size, spanning over nine feet in width and height, its simplicity and bright colors are more akin to some preschool project, like an exercise in cutting and pasting.
Many great artists, composers, and writers underwent radical stylistic changes towards the end of their lives. Beethoven and his late quartets; Goya and his Black Paintings; Turner and his increasingly abstract and expressionistic landscapes; there are countless more examples, but for the most part the common thread is an obsession with darkness, mortality—the futility of man, the powerlessness of humanity against fate and nature. Matisse’s late work seems, then, an anomaly in some sense. The Snail hardly seems a reflection on anything related to death; its vibrant colors and solid geometry appear youthful, unassuming, and confident. It’s playful, daring the audience ask about its medium, its intentions. The composition is beautiful: the colors are balanced, the formal structure both dynamic and in equilibrium.
Yet in its brightness, I think there’s some nostalgia and melancholy in The Snail. Perhaps I am too eager to read into historical context and search for hidden darkness. Maybe the work is no more than the individual pieces of paper dancing upon the canvas, its humility containing no grander meaning. However, I can’t help but thinking that it speaks of a mind full of vigor that lacks finesse, like an energetic youth who hasn’t learned to harness his talents to its full extent. But Matisse isn’t pretending to be young. He simply can’t paint anymore. His body is frail, and he is confined to a medium that’s infantile in appearance. Perhaps that is its meaning, to convey the eloquence of childhood that he has now refound. Instead of lamenting the imminence of death, he expresses the poetic symmetry of life, the odd and beautiful ways in which we return to the pangs of infant helplessness in old age.
The Snail is by someone who not only makes art, but lives it. Imagine Matisse in his studio, alone, scissors in hand, slowly cutting pieces of paper and gluing each one tactfully and delicately onto the canvas. He doesn’t do it out of boredom, but because that’s what he has done all his life. He thinks about the war years, those tense months and years under the Vichy regime, when his art was but a silent testament to his anxieties and fears. He thinks back to the first two decades of the twentieth century, spent in smoky Parisian cafes, with long conversations with bohemian artists and late-night drinks and the great anticipations of artistic liberation and a grand future. Matisse is 83 now. His hands shake. He walks with difficulty. His art is that of a man whose body has betrayed him, whose style has been outdated, whose memory is hazier with nostalgia every day, but whose genius and restless creativity refuses to cease. It comes naturally. The colors continue to give him happiness, a sense of quiet purpose. Death is close, but he chooses not to think about it too much. He’s in no rush, in no sense of desperate urgency. He’s simply living art, so that his art can keep him alive today.
No comments:
Post a Comment