Sometimes, however, it was more subtle. Matisse had done the sets and costumes for a Diaghilev ballet a few years before, which irked Picasso when he heard about it. A balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it! The visual analogies are obvious: they both distort the classic theme of the Three Graces, that trio of Greek goddesses who dispense charm and beauty.
The Three Dancers , like the Demoiselles , was a kind of exorcism. By the s, the two painters had drifted apart. Matisse was ensconced in a hotel in Nice painting luxurious odalisques and drawing portraits of women in plumed hats. But even then they kept an eye on each other. In the late s Picasso fell in love with Marie-Therese Walter, a young woman almost Grecian in her grace. To paint her, Picasso found himself borrowing the more flowing lines, rounded figures and vivid colors of Matisse.
For his part, Matisse continued to distill the luminosity of Nice in his paintings. Nice is so beautiful! Alight so soft and tender, despite its brilliance. Matisse, in ill health, defended Picasso against his critics. He is living in Paris quietly, has no wish to sell, asks for nothing. Yet both men were far too prickly to keep their peace. I can imagine the room with my pictures on one side, and his on the other.
Some of these were huge, others small enough for him to manage from bed. When a Dominican priest invited him in to design a chapel in the town of Vence, he prepared some of the images for the stained-glass windows and wall decorations by cutting out paper.
Picasso, too, took up a pair of shears. He made a series of sculptures that look like paper cutouts, though they are of sheet metal. The portrait was his last painting of her.
Delectorskaya reacted to being banished among other sorrows, which included a thwarted ambition to study medicine by shooting herself in the chest with a pistol, to remarkably slight effect. Soon the artist and his wife were legally separated and Delectorskaya was back.
That was how it was for me, and that was how it had been for Mme. In this, Spurling is up against a climate of cynical received opinion. Indubitably erotic, the pictures diffuse arousal. Their sensuality never fixates on a breast or a thigh but dilates to every square inch of canvas. Might the tension have been so precious to him, as the engine of what gave his life meaning, that its only end could be exhaustion? It may count that, according to Matisse, he never ate even the fresh food that he used for still-lifes—including oysters, from a restaurant in Nice, that were returned in time for the lunch crowd.
During the war, Matisse was isolated in Nice and Vence. He was old and ill with cardiovascular, renal, and abdominal disorders; he underwent a colostomy in and, a year later, almost died. Beyond that, Cone primarily cites wartime interviews, in which Matisse chatted amiably about his work, as evidence of irresponsible disengagement.
Pierre had by that time become an art dealer in New York. Matisse was so consumed by aesthetic sensibility that his responses to life, when not baffled and distraught, were like unwitting prose poems. He had warm but awkward dealings with his sons, realizing late in life that he had burdened them with the sort of hectoring pressures to meet his standards that he had suffered from his own father. He relieves himself of his passion in his pictures, but also in spite of himself on the people round him.
That is what normal people never understand. Picasso is often said to have recommended that Matisse decorate a brothel instead. He also drew book illustrations for a series of limited-edition poetry collections. After surgery in , Matisse was often bedridden; however, he continued to work from a bed in his studio. When necessary, he would draw with a pencil or charcoal attached to the end of a long pole that enabled him to reach the paper or canvas. His late work was just as experimental and vibrant as his earlier artistic breakthroughs had been.
It included his book Jazz , which placed his own thoughts on life and art side by side with lively images of colored paper cutouts. This project led him to devise works that were cutouts on their own, most notably several series of expressively shaped human figures cut from bright blue paper and pasted to wall-size background sheets such as Swimming Pool , Matisse died on November 3, , at the age of 84, in Nice.
He was buried in nearby Cimiez. He is still regarded as one of the most innovative and influential artists of the 20th century. We strive for accuracy and fairness. They were followed by a tidal surge of cutouts flooding Matisse's interiors, sweeping round corners and over doorways, immersing fixtures and fittings under successive waves of fruit and foliage, acrobats, dancers and swimmers diving, floating and swooping round the rooms from floor to ceiling.
Portrait heads swarmed under the cornice: a slender, hoop-shaped girl in a blue bodysuit with green stockings and a skipping rope bounded up to the height of the lintel. At one stage, the sleek, lithe, pantherine Negress — a minimalist giant created largely from slashes and slits — very nearly strode off the wall on to the floor. Images took over all available space, commandeering salons, dining rooms, bedrooms and studios wherever Matisse went from his Parisian apartment to the little suburban house he rented on the outskirts of Vence in wartime, and even the mighty marble halls of the vast deserted apartment block high above the city of Nice where he ended up.
The stained-glass windows for the chapel at Vence — a project that took Matisse four years to complete at the height of his powers — were designed from his bed entirely in cut and coloured paper. Matisse grew old but his work did not. People who visited him in his late 70s and early 80s described him sitting up against his pillows with scissors and paper, twisting and turning the coloured sheets beneath his blades to release a steady stream of fragile spiralling shapes that floated down to subside on the bedspread below like flotsam washed up by the sea.
The paper scraps were retrieved, pieced together and meticulously pinned in place according to the artist's instructions. What baffled Picasso and enchanted his companion was the streamlined ease, speed and cutting-edge modernity of the entire procedure. Matisse had given his life to projecting an inner reality strong enough to withstand the competing claims of the external world.
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