In The Unknown Matisse, the first volume of her excellent two-part biography, Hilary Spurling reminds us that this master of radiant hues and dazzling evocations of light spent the first twenty-one years of his life in gritty, industrial north-eastern France, near the Flemish border, a region he never returned to, apart from obligatory family visits, after he left it for Paris in 1891. Not only was the landscape dreary and the light flat and gray, but the places where Matisse was raised were devoid of significant architecture, museums, or galleries; virtually no public art was on view. What was there in the way of visual stimulation in these bleak towns? Textiles, for which the district had been celebrated since medieval times. Matisse’s own ancestors had been weavers for generations. His birthplace, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, was famous for its woollen mills, and St.-Quentin, where he attended the lycée, was known for its lace industry. Most interesting and important, Spurling points out, Bohain, where he grew up, was a renowned center of silk-weaving. Spurling argues persuasively that the luxurious, extravagant, and complex fabrics produced by the weavers of Bohain provided the young Matisse with his earliest and possibly most crucial encounters with color, pattern, texture, and shape.

Spurling states her thesis simply: “To a child already dreaming of escape the only available outlet for a nascent visual imagination came from the sumptuous, shining, multicolored silks produced in weavers’ cottages and workshops all over Bohain.” The proof? That throughout his adult life, Matisse collected textiles, treating their acquisition as a necessity, even in his early years of grinding poverty, surrounding himself with a steadily growing assortment of fabrics, carpets, curtains, and cushions. In his last decades, his studio was filled with ikats, embroideries, patterned rugs, and exotic costumes from around the world—everything from African wall hangings and Polynesian bark cloth to Japanese brocades and fragments of mass-produced European silks and cottons. He referred to his collection as his “museum of swatches,” his “traveling library.”

And, of course, as any attentive observer of Matisse’s work knows, almost from the start of his career, textiles, both exotic and domestic, are crucial elements in his paintings—not merely textiles in general, but very specific, distinctive cloths, spreads, and throws. Just as you gradually become familiar with the narrow board walls and immense window of his studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux and with certain pieces of pottery and furniture from their appearances in his paintings at various times, you also begin to note the presence of particular cloths, carpets, embroideries, and hangings. They are as unmistakable and as frequently repeated as the quotations from Matisse’s own work—the restatements of his paintings and sculptures—that populate his interiors. A cloth printed with stylized baskets of flowers, now rendered more recognizably, now less, interpreted in terms of varying amounts of blue, makes frequent appearances, beginning with Matisse’s Fauvist paintings. So does a red-bordered prayer rug with a dark center and a spectacular blue cloth with florid arabesques, usually rendered in pink against saturated ultramarine. When Matisse began to spend extended periods working in the south of France, and after he settled there, an entire lexicon of striped and embroidered cloth makes its appearance, some lush and floral, some geometrically patterned, some deployed on screens, others draped, folded, or hung. A striped Arab woman’s robe, an elaborately embroidered peasant blouse, and a couple of stylish evening gowns also compete for attention during these years. And more. Over the course of his life as a painter, Matisse’s fascination with various textiles, as revealed by his paintings (and by photographs of his studios), seems so intense that one article on the subject speaks of it as an “affair.”

Last winter, this interesting aspect of Matisse’s evolution was examined in a thoughtfully chosen, modestly scaled exhibition, “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams,” organized by Ann Dumas and a number of her colleagues, with Spurling as consultant.[1] First seen at the Musée Matisse, in Le Cateau, the show traveled this spring to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, where I caught up with it in April. From late June through late September, it will be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A wide selection of textiles owned by Matisse, including the North African costumes and elegant evening dresses in which his models posed, are exhibited amid a representative group of the paintings, drawings, and prints in which they appear. “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles” encompasses the artist’s entire career, through a satisfying mix of well-known works and more intimate, less familiar examples—the precise selection varies slightly at each location. Yet it is by no means an exhaustive survey; Spurling refers to the exhibition as “a footnote.” For the usual reasons—fragility, the dangers of travel, politics, the caprice of museum officials—several major paintings that you might expect to see, given their emphasis on textiles as subject matter, are conspicuously and regrettably absent in all three settings. The copiously illustrated accompanying catalogue, which probably represents the curators’ wish list, offers a far more complete account of the role of textiles in the evolution of Matisse’s art and his rethinking of pictorial space. (It includes informative essays by Dumas, Spurling, Rémi Labrusse, and Dominique Szymusiak, plus a fascinating discussion by Jack Flam of the role of “decoration,” including patterned cloth, in the painter’s lifelong quest to reconcile his complex perceptions of the world with the two-dimensional reality of the canvas.)

Whatever discrepancies there are between an ideal wish list and the reality of the show, the questions raised by the included works are absorbing indeed. Any disappointments in the assembly of paintings and works on paper are minor, short-lived, and more than compensated for by the strangely moving thrill of seeing the actual textiles and costumes that triggered such astonishing, ferociously intelligent reinventions of pictorial possibilities in Matisse. In the context of the show, for example, confronted by a wealth of patterned and embroidered fabrics and an assortment of Arab robes, jackets, and hats, you are more aware than ever of the artifice of Matisse’s odalisques, their exotic indolence invoked by props and stage dressing. The garden paradise of Islamic poetry, represented in the miniatures that interested Matisse so intensely, is conjured up in hotel rooms in Nice by flowered and figured cloth. (In volume two of her biography, Spurling connects the painter’s “stage-set” studio set-ups and the nascent movie industry. French filmmakers were drawn to the Riviera—just as Matisse was—for the same reasons that their American colleagues were drawn to California: good weather and good light; Matisse apparently watched several films being shot in Nice, fascinated by the way reality was evoked with minimal means.)

In London, the installation of “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles” confronted visitors, at the very beginning, with a rather battered fragment of rather coarse white cotton printed, in two shades of blue, with overscaled baskets of flowers and arabesques of leaves. The shock of recognition was staggering. It was like suddenly encountering someone—say, a writer—whose work you knew well and with whom you’d been corresponding for years, without ever having met face to face. So that was what it really looked like! The blue and white cloth, which Matisse always referred to (inaccurately, as it turns out) as a “toile de Jouy,” plays a starring role in many of his most radical paintings of the years before World War I, or, it might be more accurate to say, the cloth seems to have triggered some of his most daring inventions. It appears first, around 1903, not surprisingly as a table covering or as a wall hanging, its blue-on-white patterns rendered with a reasonable amount of naturalism, relegated to backgrounds and used to enliven economically structured interiors with still lifes and figure studies. After Matisse began to reconceive pictorial structure in terms of patches of brilliant, virtually unmodulated color, set side by side—in what is now known as his Fauvist period—the “toile de Jouy” ceases to be a means of animating a relatively naturalistic interpretation of space. Instead, the repetitive, rhythmic character of its pattern starts to be the organizing principle of some of Matisse’s most ambitious and surprising canvases.

It’s tempting to speculate about the relationship of Matisse’s efforts to make his acute sense of materiality coexist with his equally acute sensitivity to two-dimensional imperatives and his enthusiasm for the “toile de Jouy”’s combination of stylized, but more or less illusionistic, baskets and the “abstract” or, at least, purely decorative, declarative curves of garlands of leaves, all of it already translated into two-dimensions as flat cloth. What is undeniable is the dominance of the fabric’s pattern in pictures such as the iconic Harmony in Red (1908, the Hermitage, St. Petersburg)—unfortunately, not in the exhibition—in which the arabesques bind the entire picture together as they flow over table and wall, with subtle inflections to suggest spatial articulation. The arabesques ripple through everything in the picture, turning into a kind of pattern against the saturated rose-red of the ground, tipping the woman forward and swaying the supple branches of the trees—are they in a painting or seen through a window?—on the left. The rhythms of the “toile de Jouy” resound in many other of Matisse’s most daring pictures of these formative years, including the exhibition’s Still-Life with Blue Tablecloth (1909), also in the Hermitage, which makes the point brilliantly. The cloth, here interpreted as a pas de deux of ultramarine and clear cerulean, all but fills the canvas, almost congruent with the surface. Only the combined visual weight of the coffee pot, the compote, and the carafe carves out a shallow strip of space for the objects.

Good as many of the included works are, “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles” is not to be enjoyed primarily as an exhibition of pictures that include references to the painter’s “museum of swatches.” The chief pleasure of the show lies in the dialogue between the paintings and works on paper and the large assortment of textiles, all of which once belonged to the artist. Spurling’s thesis is reinforced by the presence of swatch books of the amazing silks produced by Bohain weavers—not only repeated patterns, both floral and geometric, but also stripes, checks, and plaids; a riotous pink, green, and black ikat tartan from the mid-1890s looks utterly contemporary. Was it a recollection of these Bohain fantasies that made Matisse, toward the end of the 1930s, acquire a chic Parisian couture taffeta dress and jacket, with a purple, red, and cream plaid skirt, to add to his collection of Turkish trousers, Moroccan vests, Romanian peasant blouses, and Arab robes? (Both the dress and a number of works in which it figures are in the show.)

In the London installation, groups of textiles alternated with groups of related paintings and drawings, sharpening your awareness of the presence of highly recognizable fabrics or garments in the works that followed. The danger, of course, is that mere recognition of sources would substitute for other kinds of attention. But the lack of one-to-one correspondence of textile to image, in many of the exhibited examples, kept the focus not on the fact of Matisse’s inclusion of a particular length of Indian embroidery displayed a few feet away, but its transformation into paint or line and its function within a complex composition. This is not to discount the delight of realizing that the three-part, arched, lattice-patterned “screen” that appears behind so many of the deliberately posed odalisques of the 1920s was, it appears, made of a series of North African pierced and appliquéed cloth hangings of a type known as “haiti,” although ultimately what held your interest was not the inclusion of the haiti itself, but the way Matisse used it, along with a wealth of other striped and exuberantly patterned fabrics and wallpapers, to emphasize the physicality of his figures.

Since not all the textiles represented in the pictures are present in the show and not all of the textiles on view are identifiable in the paintings and drawings, the exhibition became as much a test of your knowledge of the artist as a source of enlightenment, which was part of the fun. A fabulous appliquéd Egyptian hanging with a central pattern like a rose window, its reds and yellows still vibrant against black and white, its blues and greens faded, produced the same shock of recognition as the “toile de Jouy.” So that’s why that wonderful 1948 painting in the Phillips Collection—the one with the palm tree exploding outside the window and the extravagantly patterned drape on the right—is called Interior with Egyptian Curtain! But where was the painting?

And where was the dark blue cloth with the scrolling designs, familiar from such stunners as the 1912 masterpieces, both in the Pushkin, Moscow, The Pink Studio (promised, but unavailable at the last minute) and Corner of the Artist’s Studio (happily included)? The cloth was nowhere to be seen even though the wall texts and catalogue mention Matisse’s acquisition of the piece, a blue- and cream-colored coverlet with a pattern of pomegranates: “very pretty,” he wrote to his wife, from Madrid, “not in a good state, but I reckon I’ll be able to work quite a bit with it.” Was the fabric’s state so poor that it didn’t survive? That A Corner of the Artist’s Studio is there is enormously important, not only because of the picture’s intrinsic merits—the intriguing conversation between the green amphora, the leaves of the cascading plant, and the arcs and swirls of the pattern of the coverlet, among other things—but also for what it suggests about the function of this piece of cloth in Matisse’s paintings of the period.

When the coverlet appears, the pomegranate motifs have usually been transformed into pink on a dark blue ground, a palette that, along with the motifs’ supple curves, have inevitable associations with the rosy limbs of the agile nudes in the first version of The Dance, circling against a deep blue sky. The Dance often appears in Matisse’s interiors of more or less the same date as A Corner of the Artist’s Studio, as, throughout the Teens, do images of many other paintings and sculptures, both the artist’s own works and classical casts. Matisse seems to have used these “quotations” both as declarations of his presence and as surrogates for the model, as if responding to the figure already translated into a work of art provided a liberating distance for the excruciatingly sensitive artist. (There is probably similar justification for Matisse’s habit of making two versions of the same picture or returning to certain poses.) Did the Spanish coverlet become, in turn, a surrogate for the surrogate, an even more abstracted version of The Dance, capable of provoking remarkable pictures, such as Corner of the Artist’s Studio, ostensibly about “nothing,” but utterly compelling?

In the end, the cumulative effect of “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles” was to underscore the apparent paradox of the artist’s clear dependence on perceived reality and the relentlessness with which he subjugated his perceptions—his “sensations”—both to the demands of invention and his desire to evoke his intense responses to the real thing. Being able to compare actual textiles and costumes to their reincarnations within particular paintings and drawings reinforced your awareness of the important role of real objects, real places, and real light in Matisse’s fictive universe and, at the same time, heightened your sense of how radically he transformed them. Being confronted with actual prototypes, for example, made it impossible to ignore the fact that the painter had often dramatically altered the colors of his cloth models each time they appeared. This evidence vividly brought to life the well-known discussion, in Matisse’s 1908 “Notes of a Painter,” of how his responses to the sensations of hues evolved in the course of working. “A new combination of colors will succeed the first,” Matisse wrote, “and render the totality of my representation. I am forced to transpose until finally my picture may seem completely changed when, after successive modifications, the red has succeeded the green as the dominant color.”

The last of Matisse’s “affairs” with various textiles could be described as a kind of sublimation: his creation of a set of chasubles, designed for the Dominican nuns of Vence, to be used by the priests officiating at the Chapel of the Rosary, which he decorated. Here, the textiles were not acquired by the painter, but conceived by him and, instead of functioning as triggers for images in other media, were embodiments of motifs that he had already explored—and would continue to explore. (These explorations are well represented in the exhibition.) The chasubles could be said to be the culmination of Matisse’s long fascination with the possibilities of textiles, a literal fusion of perception and making. I suspect that this fusion is somehow related to the way the painter described cutting shapes out of painted paper (a technique he employed both in his late gouaches-coupées and in the design of the vestments and stained glass of the chapel) as fulfilling his life-long desire to work directly with color. “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles” connected the vestments with a range of gouaches-coupées improvisations on related motifs, made about the same time, and with the costumes the painter designed thirty years earlier, for Serge Diaghilev’s 1920 production of the ballet Le Chant du rossignol At the Royal Academy, the show ended, pianissimo, with these interesting comparisons, but as you headed for the exit, you passed once again the tattered remains of the “toile de Jouy” that marked the beginning of the exhibition. The shock of recognition was as intense as it was at the first encounter, so much so that the temptation to go round once more was irresistible. I found that I needed another session with a series of “theme and variation” drawings of a model in one of those smart evening gowns. Admittedly, classifying these marvelously varied, economical images as being about textiles is a stretch; they are patently about the charm of an attractive, relaxed young woman in a low-cut gown, the potency of scrutiny, and the authority of line, but if the appearance of the pleated dress is what justified the inclusion of this marvelous run of drawings, far be it from me to argue. And I found I didn’t care whether the dress was on exhibit or not.

Notes
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1. “Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams” was on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from March 5 to May 30, 2005. Go back to the text.