Karen Yuan’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
The Destiny, Henri Matisse, 1943.
In the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse couldn’t paint anymore. He sat post-surgery in a wheelchair in France’s Hôtel Régina, often barefoot and wearing a blue cardigan with no shirt beneath. Régina: a hotel named after a woman, maybe somebody’s wife, likely beautiful.
Matisse’s own wife, Amelie, had left him several years earlier. He missed her. But this isn’t an unhappy story.
“During the summer of 1946,” said his studio assistant Lydia Delectorskaya once, “Matisse had cut out a swallow from a sheet of writing paper and, as it distressed him to tear up this beautiful shape and throw it away…he put it up on his wall, also using it to cover up a stain the sight of which disturbed him.”
Matisse added more and more shapes – leaping dolphins, curling coral, random pomegranates – to the wall. Soon it was covered in cut-outs.
When I arrive to view Matisse’s The Cut-Outs at MoMA on the exhibit’s final weekend in February, it’s 5:00 a.m. and I stop feeling lonely as I stand among the paper collages. All tickets for other times have been sold out. I’m alone because I don’t know anyone who’d go with me at this hour, and because I’m used to being alone. It’s my first winter at school in New York City, where I know many good people but somehow still feel cold. I miss my friends who live far away.
On the 1 train downtown, I chat with the old woman who sits beside me. Do you work at MoMA? she asks.
No, I’m meeting people, I say. I think I lie because it’s hard to tell the truth even to a stranger. On the scale of depressingness, going to a museum alone is probably above eating fries at a restaurant alone but below shopping at Wal-mart alone.
The exhibit is quiet but full of expectation, like a concert hall in the moment between the lights dimming and the first violin playing a note. Matisse’s cut-outs are rough. I see a piece that looks like Hulk Hogan’s mustache, but upon reading its description, is actually a woman stretching. It’s red and yellow. The entire exhibit thrums with color.
“A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public,” said the critic Camille Mauclair about Matisse’s paintings in 1905. Matisse and his mangy artist friends were called “les fauves,” or “wild beasts,” for their untamed use of color.
Blue Nude II, Henri Matisse, 1952.
The Blue Nudes, which Matisse translated from paintings to cut-outs, are naked women sitting with their arms behind their heads, as if the artist imagined them doing yoga in early 20th-century France. Swimming Pool is a whole room covered in cut-outs of the sea: blue seaweed near the ceiling, blue jellyfish by the door, blue shapes of swimmers arcing through it all.
Seismic joy. Matisse created his cut-outs as an old man, in pain, sitting alone in a wheelchair, but his art suggests something childlike and luminous, like sunflowers facing the dawn.
In 1942, he told the writer Louis Aragon that “perhaps after all I believe in a second life…some paradise where I shall paint frescoes.” At his exhibit, I imagine him wrestling a parakeet out of green paper. He’s optimistic, thinking broad thoughts, and Amelie is only a dull ache.
I feel a strange kinship with the other baggy-eyed visitors around me. Sorry, I say when I realize I’m blocking the view of a dark-haired guy in a black parka.
Don’t worry about it, he says. We look at the piece before us for a moment before he asks, So why are you here at five in the morning? I find out his name is Ronan, he’s a senior at NYU, and he smoked a bit of weed before heading uptown. We visit a few more works together and then part ways.
Maybe what I really want in this city isn’t a friend, family member, or lover, but just a passenger for my car—someone to share the present with.
Near the end of the exhibit, I sit on a bench and listen to a little girl and her father talk in Japanese. She’s chatty for 6:30 in the morning. Cute kids have the superhuman ability of making anyone who looks at them smile, and this girl is no different. There’s a man and woman who likely don’t even realize they’re smiling. They’re buried in matching fur coats. I think some people go to museums to be looked at.
The Snail, Henry Matisse, 1953.
I can wax on about color theory or his use of whitespace, but really I just like Matisse’s works because they make me happy. Sitting on that bench makes me happy, even if a collage of scattered rainbow squares mind-bendingly called The Snail is in front of me and I still can’t understand it.
I don’t know if art needs to be understood, if it even needs to have a purpose. Last term, I took a workshop with a former Poet Laureate. He asked us to bring in a favorite poem to read, and I chose Dean Young’s Ode To Hangover:
…Chug, chug, goes the arriving train, those on the platform toss their hats and scarves and cheer, the president comes out of the caboose to declare, The war is over! Corks popping, people mashing people, knocking over melon stands, ripping millenniums of bodices. Hangover, rest now, you’ll have lots to do later…
After I read it, he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, Why did you choose this?
I beamed and said, It’s just so fun.
Poetry isn’t supposed to be fun, he replied.
He’s a wise man with a Pulitzer and I’m not, so maybe I am on the wrong track about art synonymizing with joy.
The winter of Matisse’s life bloomed in color. On top of his existing aches, his best student Rudolf Levy was killed in Auschwitz in 1944, the same year Matisse made The Destiny, a piece of white paper curved like smoke framed by blocks of yellow, blue, purple, and green.
Pain into beauty. “Les fauves” means “wild beasts,” but its more literal translation is “the fawns.” It’s art not made by a wolf or lion, but in fact a deer – not savage, but tender.
It was snowing heavily a few weeks ago when I went outside, pulled up my hood, and lay down in the middle of a field on campus. Snow seeped into my coat, and for a moment all was silent and I imagined I was far away from the city. Then a police siren keened in the distance. Or was it someone singing? I thought about how interruptions of peace may just be invitations from a world with more color and a little more sun. Chaos isn’t an obliteration, but instead a homecoming.
Matisse’s cut-outs were always impermanent. His body was immobile, but his art wasn’t. He constantly had Lydia reassemble the birds and pomegranates stuck on his wall. “I am cutting out all these elements and putting them up on the walls temporarily,” he said. “I don’t know yet what I’ll come up with.”
I often feel alone as a new student in New York City. I feel alone as someone who bounced around six schools before graduating from high school. Change can be lonely. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a word for the feeling. Social constipation? It’s the same longing I feel when I pass by an apartment’s open window alone as music spills out of it.
But as I emerge from MoMA into the 7:00 a.m. lagoon of Manhattan, I think about Matisse moving his decorations around, each new wall a gift to himself. Blue dawn shrouds the few people outside, as if they’re Matisse’s women, and swimmers around us. I turn a corner and get startled by Times Square, quiet but glittering, an arcade even in this early hour. A flurry of shapes that turn out to be pigeons convene by a trashcan.
The Parakeet and the Mermaid is a mural of flowers with a tiny parakeet hidden on its left and a mermaid tucked into its right. Matisse felt like that lone bird among flowers. “I had to make…this parakeet with colored paper,” he said. “Well, I became a parakeet. And I found myself in the work.”
Second lives, third lives, fourth lives. Somewhere, Matisse paints red in a fresco of what could be poppies or sleeping women. Lydia has told him a joke, and he is laughing.
The Parakeet and the Mermaid, Henri Matisse, 1952.
Tags: art, beauty, henri matisse, karen yuan, museums
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Yes. Yes. Yes!
Love this! That’s a good way to explain what has already attracted me to Matisse’s work–they make me happy. It’s enough to enjoy the bright colors and vibrating shapes. And some of the compositions that made me shrug when I saw them in art books were stunning in person–The Snail is a good example, it’s HUGE and it’s quite different to look at it in scale than it is to see it on a page. It fills up your vision and makes you react to it.
By the way, going to the museum alone is awesome. I got into the habit of going to museums and galleries alone years ago when I worked at night and all my roommates worked during the day. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else there to share the experience with, but it can also be very nice to move at your own pace and think your own thoughts as you look. Besides, when I’m with someone I end up whispering in their ear the whole time, describing what I’ve read about this or that and what other art it reminds me of and how it fits in with other art of its period–which is, let’s just say, not how everyone wants to experience MoMA.
I wonder if you had used the word “joy” with that poet he’d’ve had a different response – so frequently a certain kind of person draws a line between “fun” and “joy” (my dad is one). It is bullshit, I think! Joy can and should come from a place of fun, and it is not less valuable for it.
My favourite art is fun, too.
I loved this. Thank you for sharing with us! I’m sad I missed the exhibit now. 🙁
🙂
I saw this exhibition last year when it was at Tate Modern (and I was 6 or 7 months pregnant). It was so wonderful. I’ve always loved The Snail. I forget how big it is and then when I see it in person again, I’m wowed once more. I could stare at it for hours. I’ll always remember it as the last exhibition I saw before my daughter was born and the joy of the colours connected with my joyful mood.
“I often feel alone as a new student in New York City. I feel alone as someone who bounced around six schools before graduating from high school. Change can be lonely. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a word for the feeling. Social constipation? It’s the same longing I feel when I pass by an apartment’s open window alone as music spills out of it.”
Thank you for this. I move often, in childhood as well as now as an adult. This is how I feel so often. All my life. An open window can be heartbreaking in a certain mood that has persisted for too many days. But you have the word skills I lack. So thank you.
I love Matisse so much. There was a museum right at the edge of my college campus, and it housed a large collection of his works. I used to go there all the time. Almost always alone, too. It was the perfect break, especially when I was feeling tired or overwhelmed.
Yes! Looking at certain art can be so cooling and energizing for the mind. I had a customer servicey job at an art museum a few years ago, and I often took my afternoon fifteen in the galleries. My favorite place to go was the Brancusi gallery–you had to walk through impressionists to get there–and even if I was harried and flustered from scores of customers, I walked out feeling refreshed.
I never knew about these. Just looking at these makes me feel tremendously better (I’m fighting off another depressive episode). Thank you so very much for this article!
So… I just fell down a Google rabbit hole searching for images of his cut-outs.
I have fallen completely in love with this one: The Horse, The Rider, and the Clown (1947). He shows the fluidity and grace of an agile hot horse. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/mar/…
Every time I look at The Parakeet and The Mermaid, I just feel better. I don’t know why. I don’t even like birds -they are little dinasaurs [sp?] and give me the creeps.
I like that one a lot! If you’ve ever seen a horse take a spirited step, or break into a canter, it looks just like that. And I was imagining someone who has never really seen a horse IRL, but who has seen this painting, seeing a horse for the first time take that step, and I imagine the look on their face as they realize Matisse had it exactly right. Getting something right with such a simple figure is amazing.
You said exactly what I was trying to get across! Thank you!
This was a beautiful piece. Thank you so much for writing it! It prompted me to go searching for more of Henri Matisse’s cut-outs and I found one I really liked: ‘Polinesia, The Sky’. There’s just something about it that makes me feel so happy. Like this sense of unrestrained joy is leaping from the paper.
Thanks so much for this beautiful piece. I was there just a few hours after you, it seems!
Thanks so much for this beautiful piece. I was there just a few hours after you, it seems!
Thank yoou for reminding me of how strangely beautiful it felt to be all alone in my first year of college in a big city, frequenting museums at unholy hours, just like you 🙂 Enjoy the loneliness!
I saw this in London and it was exhilarating. I wish I could have spent the day there rather than a couple of hours after work, but I still enjoyed seeing old friends. Particularly A Thousand and One Arabian Nights–it’s the most narrative and complex of all the cut outs (imho). I was so glad it could be included; I remember it from childhood visits to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and it’s not always on display for conservation reasons. The colours aren’t as vibrant as they used to be, but it was such a comfort to see it again alongside its siblings.
I love going to museums alone? I like being silent with my thoughts and I’m a chatty soul so I often find people to talk to if I need to. But yes, these are glorious (and hmmmphhh to grumpy Poet Laureate.). Fun is awesome! Color! Joy!
This was a great piece and, like a lot of other folks, both nailed a lot of what’s great about Matisse and makes me oddly defensive about how much I like going to museums alone. I kinda hate having to wait for other people or to feel beholden to their experience…
One quibble: Fauves isn’t “fawn” so much as “faun.” Not deer; goats.