!"#$%#&'()$*+$,#-.

/$0&(/11#
2'("*.3145$6&7/8$9&../#.
:*'.;#5$<*'.-&=$*+$2#1("#(/;$>8';&(/*-?$@*=A$BC?$D*A$E$3:'FF#.?$EGGH4?$IIA$CGJCK
L'M=/1"#8$M)5$University of Illinois Press
:(&M=#$NOP5$http://www.jstor.org/stable/3527318
2;;#11#85$QERQEREGQG$GC5GH

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of
Aesthetic Education.

http://www.jstor.org
The Beauty of Henri Matisse

DAVID CARRIER

Because beauty has for a long time now been politically incorrect (at least
among certain influential critics and academic historians) the art of Henri
Matisse has recently suffered from a kind of benign neglect. His goals were
luxury, calm, and voluptuousness, not social critique. He painted female
nudes, and was preoccupied with artistic tradition. Celebrated in his own
lifetime, he died a rich man. Matisse's famous identification of the work of
art with a good armchair is another provocation. His paintings, after all, are
very expensive armchairs. Liberated from any vital connection with every-
day life, they often seem merely escapist. In her recent book, On Beauty and
Being Just, Elaine Scarry remarks, "Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he
repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that
when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside."' That
some of Matisse's paintings succeed in being serenely beautiful seems self-
evident to Scarry, to me, and to a great many other art lovers. What is per-
haps worth exploring at greater length, however, is precisely how Matisse's
paintings succeed in achieving their unfashionable goal. What is it that
makes the work of Matisse so serenely beautiful?
To start, consider The Painter and His Model (1918-1921), made just after
his move from Paris to Nice. Like other works from this period of his career,
this picture raises special problems, even for many commentators who ad-
mire his earlier experimentation. At the left, we see the painter working on
a canvas of a nude. "Expression, for me," Matisse wrote, "does not reside in
passions glowing in a human face."2 Like most of his models, this one ap-
pears expressionless. She poses at the center of the picture, beneath a win-
dow that admits the light filling the room. A flowering palm, a symbol of
fertility, is the only object visible from the world outside the studio.
Leaving behind his family and the luxury of his Paris home, Matisse
lived and worked in a small room like this one. The entire picture is filled

David Carrier is Champney Family Professor at Case Western University and

Cleveland Institute of Art. His recent books include Rosalind Krauss and American
PhilosophicalArt Criticism and Writing About Visual Art.

Journalof Aesthetic Education,Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 2004

02004 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
 Beauty of Matisse 81

with patterns- a red tablecloth on the left, orange wallpaper on the right,
blue stripes on the painter's shirt, a red grid on the floor. A dark painting
hangs above flowers on the table. The Painter and His Model shows the artist
hard at work, but the composition appears effortlessly spontaneous. Matisse,
who lived only to paint during his time in Nice, concealed the endless effort
required to make his beautiful pictures. A man from North France, he dis-
covered the power of light. There is nothing special about this room, but
under the spell of his model Matisse makes it appear ravishing. Intense
Mediterranean sunlight transforms ordinary patterns into a world of visual
luxury.
We know that ThePainter and His Model is beautiful because we get great
pleasure seeing the model in the golden room. Her skin is close in tone to,
or in harmony with the colors of the walls; her curves harmonize with the
two vases, and play against the spreading linear grids. As we move our eyes
easily from the model to the entire picture, we experience a kind of subli-
mated erotic pleasure. In "Notes of a Painter,"Matisse gave an apt description
of his approach in ThePainter and His Model.

Suppose I want to paint a woman's body: first of all I imbue it with

grace and charm, but I know that I must give something more. I will
condense the meaning of this body by seeking its essential lines. The
charm will be less apparent at first glance, but it must eventually
emerge from the new image which will have a broader meaning, one
more fully human (MA, 36).

He does not use the word "beauty," but speaks instead about expression
and harmony. When he published this manifesto, Matisse was painting
very different sorts of pictures - portraits, scenes of nudes in utopian set-
tings, and still lives. Written in 1908, "Notes of a Painter" was a prophecy.
Not until he arrived in Nice did he consistently work in this way.
Including himself in the painting allows us to see the creative process in
progress. Refusing to paint in a servile way that merely transcribes the ap-
parent, Matisse is inspired by the model. Because she is beautiful, he can
make a beautiful painting presenting her in this otherwise ordinary room.
Composing to express his feelings, Matisse makes every detail essential.
Nature is often chaotic and ugly, but Matisse's paintings are organic wholes
- one way in which they are beautiful.
Working in the wake of cubism, Matisse was a strange revolutionary.
The gist of his method was discussed in the 1850s by Charles Baudelaire,
who described how Eugene Delacroix used the visual world as a dictionary,
transforming it according to his temperament.3 Like Matisse, Delacroix re-
sponds to his subjects according to his sensibility, depicting them in his
style. He is not a realist, for realists show things as they are. But neither
does he purely invent, for he starts with what he sees. He shows the real
world not as it is, but as seen aesthetically. Neither Matisse nor Delacroix
82 David Carrier

had any interest in presenting contemporary life. By his death in 1859,

Delacroix was a figure of the past, more similar to the old masters than the
rising young artists. Baudelaire also developed another, quite distinct aes-
thetic theory. Modern art, he argued, can make the novel subjects of con-
temporary urban life beautiful. This account anticipated the art of another
friend, Edouard Manet, the painter of modern life. Manet depicted civil
war, prostitution, and public spaces, and so historians are much concerned
with the political significance of his subjects.
Matisse's working method, by contrast, depended upon choosing inher-
ently harmonious subjects, like the female nude. Rejecting the Impression-
ists' interest in appearances, he wanted unchanging light. Matisse does not
claim to be able to make any subject beautiful. His mature art never shows
industrial landscapes, working class life or street scenes. Vincent Van Gogh
and Georges Seurat beautifully paint unattractive modern subjects. Matisse
does not. Avoiding ugly subjects or scenes of emotional conflict, he depicts
idyllic landscapes, harmonious still lives, and beautiful women. He dreamt
of "an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing
subject matter" (MA, 38).
The need to avoid conflict led Matisse to turn away from his early stylis-
tic experimentation to the voluptuous Nice pictures. Two years before The
Painter and His Model, Matisse's The Painter in His Studio (1916) shows the
artist, the same model, and her image on his canvas in the studio. This paint-
ing was finished in winter. At the far right, the gray Paris cityscape seen
through the window reminds us that the Great War was in progress. (Matisse
volunteered for the army in 1914, but was rejected because he was forty-
four.) The black center of the studio flattens the entire room. A mirror reflects
nothing. Both figures are simplified, the model represented in the painting
even more so than the woman posing.
Baudelaire compared a colorist like Delacroix to God, who created the
colors of nature. Matisse treats his models with a similarly sovereign free-
dom. He once explained, "I put down my tones without a preconceived
plan....The expressive aspect of colors imposes itself on me in a purely in-
stinctive way (MA, 38). Often Matisse gives the model on display the larger
place in his pictures, but he also shows himself working, a reminder that of
course he is in charge, telling the model how to pose. Pleasure in looking, it
has been repeatedly said, separates the controlling male from the passive
female, whose sole role is to be on display. The visual pleasure we get from
pictures like The Painter in His Studio thus is the male viewer's pleasure in
looking at a pretty woman.
Matisse's slightly later The Studio, quai Saint-Michel (1916-1917) shows a
studio with model and various pictures, but no painter. As in other pictures
of this decade, Matisse fills the room with his own art. He thus controls the
studio even when he is not present. The active male, projecting his fantasy
 Beauty of Matisse 83

onto the model whose only reason for being is to look beautiful, aims for
visual and erotic impact. Matisse preferred to paint human figures rather
than still lives or landscapes, because they best allowed him to express an
"almost religious awe towards life" (MA, 38). Matisse needed his pretty fe-
male models, and for his later paintings, especially, he liked that they be
nude. In 1939, modifying the account of "Notes of a Painter," Matisse wrote
that the emotional interest aroused in him by his models "is perhaps subli-
mated sensual pleasure, which may not yet be perceived by everyone"
(MA, 82). He came to recognize what we all easily see - he needed the
erotic power of his models.
The stimulus for Matisse's Nice art is the sensuality of the model, and so
the beauty of his images is the objective correlate of his pleasure in the
model's beauty. Nowadays everyone sees this effect, but describing it is not
easy. The difference between Matisse's subjects and their appearance trans-
figured in his art is like the difference between everyday perception and
how the world looks to an aroused man. Following Baudelaire, we might
compare looking at Matisse's images to being high on drugs. We see famil-
iar things transfixed. However we describe it, we need to contrast banal ev-
eryday experience with the pleasure given viewing the world shown in
Matisse's pictures.
Studio photographs show Matisse's models before paintings depicting
them. A black and white photograph by Brassai, for example, shows the
model Wilma Javor assuming her pose from Matisse's Readeron a BlackBack-
ground (1939), visible to her right. In the photograph, an attractive woman
poses in a studio surrounded by furniture. Readeron a BlackBackgroundsim-
plifies and exaggerates Javor's features, emphasizing the contrast between
the pink of the table on which she leans, her orangish skin, and the black
background which picks up the black of her skirt. In a mirror her arm and
head are reflected further simplified. As in The Painter in His Studio, the
background is black, but here the light pink table and reflected area picks
up the orange of Javor's skin.
The entire room glows in Matisse's aesthetically pleasing pictures be-
cause the model seems to radiate healthy light. A mere photograph does
not have this effect. Readeron a Black Backgroundis not just a picture of a
beautiful woman, but an extremely beautiful painting. The photographs of
Matisse's studio in 1930s black and white now show their period style, but
his paintings of that era give a miraculous illusion, presenting the model
here-and-now.
Matisse disliked photographs because he found them too literal. In
"Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child" (1953), he writes:

Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by

acquired habits, and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours
84 David Carrier
when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a
flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what the prejudices
are to the mind (MA, 148).

He was intimidated by the ruthless criticism of children because he thought

that only they see rightly. For him, like Baudelaire, children have no habits
to unlearn. As this comparison hints, there is something regressive, even
narcissistic about aesthetic experience and the associated erotic pleasure, as
Matisse understood both. Like a child, Matisse wants that the world never
refuse him immediate satisfaction.
Matisse's most erotic images are his relatively small 1930s drawings. The
drawings feel private. The drawing Large Nude (1935) shows the model
sprawling before the artist, and at the lower right hand corner his hand de-
picted in the process of drawing her. Matisse wants to demonstrate how her
body inspired his picture; he is not merely showing her body. Pornogra-
phers often employ mirrors, permitting us to view both sides of the model,
allowing us to visually possess her. Matisse uses mirrors to show himself at
work drawing the model. In LargeNude, for example, we see both the nude
and, at bottom right, the paper on which Matisse is drawing her. The Painter
and His Model shows an earlier painting of the model. LargeNude shows her
image seeming to emerge as we look. The pornographer is interested in
erotic display. Seeking aesthetic detachment, Matisse strives for balance,
purity, and serenity. Matisse uses his sexy model to create a pleasure that is
aesthetic rather than straightforwardly sexy.
Some years ago, Lawrence Gowing argued that because Matisse's
women never were wholly real, the emotional depth of his art is limited.4 In
Vermeer's paintings, by contrast, women are deliberately set apart, often
with physical barriers between them and the male painter. Vermeer was not
a feminist, but Gowing's speculative account helps us see Matisse's nudes.
Matisse comes very close to his models; Vermeer sets them at a distance,
protecting them. But the infinite regress of the picture-within-the-picture of
The Painter and His Model and Matisse's drawings of himself drawing the
model like LargeNude is another way of distancing the model, showing her
only as a mere representation. Intimately revealing his creative process,
Matisse keeps models at a distance even when they are physically close to
himself and the viewer. In a number of photographs staged toward the end
of his life, the portly Matisse in suit and tie works from his models. The ef-
fect is slightly comical because he looks so serious, like a hard working doc-
tor, while his youthful model only holds her pose. Often Matisse dominates
these photographs, but when he makes paintings or drawings, he usually
puts himself at the margin.
Matisse's later art is thought to reject radical innovation in favor of a more
traditional aesthetic often associated with a conservative view of women.
 Beauty of Matisse 85

When we understand why that view is incorrect, then we will better see
these works of art. Matisse does not always present women purely aestheti-
-
cally Gowing's account does not apply to the paintings showing Matisse's
family, made between 1908 and 1918.
For example, Conversation (1908-1912) documents a troubled marriage.
Matisse, a notorious insomniac, stands at the left in his pajamas, with his
wife Amelie seated on the far side of the window between them. When he
could not sleep, she stayed up all night reading to him. Because Conversa-
tion is violently original, commentators compare it with such diverse works
of art as a Fra Angelico annunciation; the icons Matisse saw on his visit to
his Russian collectors; and an ancient stele in the Louvre. Matisse was eru-
dite, but such comparisons take us away from the painting at hand, which
shows a confrontation of two strong people.
Viewing Conversationis like coming into a room where two people are so
engaged in discussion that they pay no attention to the intrusion. Not know-
ing what is happening, we feel left outside their conversation. The sweep-
ing blue background, which picks up the colors of the light blue garment of
Matisse and the very dark robe of Amelie Matisse, gives unity to this pic-
ture of a couple who later, after a long marriage, divorced. The Painter and
His Model and Large Nude show paid models. But here that split between
active male and passive female is abolished in favor of confrontation. Matisse
does not show his wife aesthetically, like his models. Neither face reveals
emotion - this is his first picture in which two people face each other.
When he depicts models, Matisse, controlling the image, at most shows
himself at the picture's margins. Putting himself and Amelie in the picture,
Matisse leaves us uncertain of where we stand. Usually he was very dis-
crete, and he and his wife kept their personal lives very private. How amaz-
ing that he sold Conversationto his great Russian collector, Sergei Shchukin.
At first glance, Tea in the Garden (1919), a relatively neglected Matisse,
does not seem like an emotionally charged scene. Matisse's daughter Mar-
guerite, sitting in the foreground, takes tea in his suburban garden with her
companion, Antoinette, a model for some of his 1919 drawings of odalisques.
The family bitch Lily scratches her ear in the foreground. Physically far apart,
separated by the table, Marguerite and Antoinette both turn toward the
painter. The women and dog sit in shadow, in a dull naturalistic landscape,
like a Bonnard without his golden light.
The odd planes of Marguerite's face and the tabletop, which is in sun-
light, recall Matisse's flirtations with cubism. Marguerite, born of a pre-
marital relationship, was his favorite child. In Tea in the Garden, Matisse's
famous anxiety momentarily suppressed, we are given a quite banal set-
ting, without that extraordinary light which fills The Painter and His Model
and the later Nice paintings. Almost seven feet wide, this large painting is
oddly modest. Matisse is momentarily back in Northern light - his image
86 David Carrier

lacks the erotic power of the Nice art. In 1919 Matisse was making the tran-
sition between his family pictures, which often include Marguerite, and the
Nice odalisques, but there is no tension in this composition, which presents
the women without relating them. With her delicately patterned violet
dress, Marguerite, who often modeled for her father, outshines Antoinette
whose face is nearly blank. Marguerite adored her father, describing herself
as being like his wife. What sexy black shoes Matisse has given his loving
daughter to dangle!
Only very recently have John Elderfield's research, Hilary Spurling's bi-
ography, and publication of letters to his son Jean, the art dealer, revealed
Matisse's personal life.5 Now we know that it is impossible to understand
his artistic development without knowing his life. To understand Conversa-
tion and Tea in the Garden,we need to grasp their place in his career. Until
we recognize how he came to depict his Nice models, we cannot see these
pictures properly. His art is all on the surface, but to properly perceive
those surfaces we need to know how and why they were produced.
Matisse was a slow beginner. Had he died in 1905, he would be known
only as a minor fauvre painter. His artistic breakthrough came with Luxe,
calmeet volupte (1904-1905) and Le Bonheurde vivre (1905-1906), groupings of
nudes in Arcadian, deliberately unreal settings. Matisse became great only
when he turned away from depicting real scenes to creating utopias. In his
mid-thirties he was still making oddly gawky compositions. Like Conversa-
tion, these much analyzed, almost too richly inventive pictures have many
sources. Luxe, calme et volupte shows seven figures, arranged awkwardly in
a small space; and Le Bonheurde vivre contains ten figures in the foreground,
with the six dancers in a circle in the distance. All of these ungainly compo-
sitions contain individual figures, or groups of figures, that were later de-
ployed in more coherent, more aesthetically satisfying pictures. The reclin-
ing nudes become his odalisques, and in Dance(I) (1909) and in Dance (II)
(1909-1910), the dancers from Le Bonheurde vivre reappear, seen close up.
Luxe, calme et volupte and Le Bonheurde vivre show ideal worlds. In 1905
Matisse could only create an ideally beautiful harmony by setting his pic-
tures apart from everyday reality. In the next few years, some pictures also
present unreal scenes, but others depict his studio. Then his visits to Mo-
rocco, in 1912 and 1913, showed him how to site utopian paintings in real
world settings. Matisse's development in the next few years, just before the
permanent move to Nice, is complicated. The Painter's Family (1911), Piano
Lesson (1916), and Music Lesson (1917) show family life; and he did portraits
of his children and Amelie. He wanted to set harmonious pictures of ideal-
ized family life in the here-and-now, not in some imaginary world, or exotic
Morocco. But once his children were grown, and he was alienated from
Amelie, he ceased to show relationships. He turned instead to the life
within his studio, which for him became all that existed. Like Luxe, calme et
 Beauty of Matisse 87

volupte, and Le Bonheurde vivre, his Nice pictures show an ideal world, but
now set in the present and centered on the model. Studio life provided him
with the utopia he depicted in his beautiful pictures.
Looking back, we see that Baudelaire's aesthetic and "Notes of a Painter"
predicted this career. When commentators treat Matisse's Nice pictures as
stylistically conservative, they fail to grasp the place of this body of art in
his career. In fact, The Painter and His Model and The Painter in His Studio
develop directly out of his ostensibly more experimental earlier art, extend-
ing his concerns in highly original ways. Like his art, Matisse's career is
tightly unified. Set in the context of his development, his depictions of the
female nude in Nice have a quite different significance than hostile com-
mentators give them. Matisse's lovely models remain immediately present
to us, even though his artistic and personal style belong to a world that has
disappeared. No one today could convincingly paint models as he did, for
his whole aesthetic is rooted in a time that is lost. How surprising that the
beauty of such art, so easy to appreciate, can simultaneously pose so many
intellectual challenges.6

NOTES

1. ElaineScarry,On BeautyandBeingJust(Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress,
1999),33.
2. Henri Matisse,quoted in JackD. Flam,Matisseon Art (New York:E.P.Dutton,
1978).Thisbook will be cited as MA in the text for all subsequentreferences.
3. See David Carrier,High Art: CharlesBaudelaireand the Originsof Modernism
(UniversityPark:PennsylvaniaStateUniversityPress,1996).
4. LawrenceGowing,Matisse(New York:OxfordUniversityPress,1979),154.
5. John Elderfield,PleasuringPainting:Matisse'sFeminineRepresentations (London:
Thamesand Hudson, 1995)and JohnRussell,Matisse:FatherandSon(New York:
Abrams,1999).
6. This essay is for John Elderfield.Originally,James Miller, editor of Daedalus,
asked me to submit an essay on Matisse that would avoid academiclanguage
and referencesto the literatureto see if it was possible to describethese paint-
ings without using reproductions.In the end, this accountwas not published
and appearshere for the firsttime.