Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  The picture was not, after all, only about the woman’s gazing face. It belonged as much—maybe more—to the screen, to the almost effaced, easily ignored limit behind her. The blue prop that held it all together. The scrim that hid another world—and tantalizingly revealed it or at least hinted at it.

  My eye traced the pattern of the screen that formed the painting’s background, a hypnotic blue X/O open-work design that enclosed the woman in the drab solitude of her Western study. Matisse had hauled the subtle North African partition across the Mediterranean back to his studio in France. To build . . .

  The harem, my art history major friend had said, laughing the fresh feminist laugh at the familiar old male leer.

  I “identified” with the northern woman gazing at her aquarium. I even wrote a poem about her that became the title of my first book, a collection of poems: Woman Before an Aquarium. She was modern; she was nobody’s harem girl. She lived safe in her thoughts. She was outside action, beyond assault of any kind from the fierce-paced world. Nevertheless, past her contemplative face that I knew to be my own, my eye strayed to the screen, to what it concealed.

  I was following Matisse, his eye, his mind, son esprit. Behind the blue Moroccan embrasure, I too imagined—that is, desired—a chamber of silks, fantastic patterns in gorgeous disarray, scents of spice and flower, languid poses. A world unknown to the thoughtful madonna alone in her northern cell.

  TWO

  Window

  On May 10, 1906, Henri Matisse caught the early morning train departing the French Catalan town of Perpignan where he had been visiting his wife’s family for several days. He traveled west along the coast to Collioure, the town he would return to in two weeks to spend the summer with his wife, Amélie, and their three children. The summer before in Collioure he had painted the works that had just earned him the attention-getting label wild beast in the galleries of Paris. But on this May morning he passed by Collioure, continuing farther west along the coast to Port-Vendres. There he boarded a ferry for Algeria. After a twenty-four-hour crossing, he reached North Africa. He was thirty-six years old, and had been painting seriously for sixteen years.

  When he embarked on this journey, Matisse joined a long line of French painters trailing after Delacroix who, eighty years earlier, had made this trip south that was really a passage to the East. They sought—but what was the lure? That became my question as I started to read about the man who painted the blue Moroccan screen in the picture I had come to think of as my own.

  Delacroix in 1832 might go to Algeria and Morocco un-apologetically looking for what he jubilantly called the “picturesque” and the “sublime,” seeking a supply of exotic subject matter. He wrote greedily from Morocco that he saw “at every step . . . ready-made paintings that would bring twenty generations of painters wealth and glory.” But Matisse in 1906 was having none of this assumption of exotic transcription. So why go to Africa?

  As late as 1941, when he was an old man and long famous, he could be stung by the suggestion that, in 1906 and again during longer painting trips he made to Morocco in 1912 and 1913, he had gone “just where Delacroix had gone.” In his chilly reply to this remark, Matisse made it clear he went to Tangier for his own artistic reasons, simply ”because it was Africa.” And then added, betraying a dismissiveness that perhaps protested too much, ”Delacroix was far from my mind“ (”Delacroix était loin de mon esprit").

  By the time he was claiming this distance from Delacroix in 1941, Matisse’s odalisques, his enduring subject for years, were hanging in the great museums of Europe and America and were central to some of the most discerning private collections of modern art in the world. These lounging models, draped in richly patterned fabrics (he’d been picking up swatches and remnants at market stalls all his life, even as an impoverished art student, crazy for color), are often seated upon a divan set up in his Nice studio, the low bed layered and surrounded with carpets and textiles, curtained to make an alcove. The bed appears to be a little room of its own, a cavern. The divan is presented as architecture’s most intimate interior.

  Matisse must have known these recumbent figures would forever link him to the great reclining female subjects of the previous century, painted by Delacroix and Ingres. And yet—they do not. He must have counted on that, too.

  For a viewer recognizes the Matisse odalisques in a way impossible to apprehend the figures of Delacroix and Ingres. Though these earlier works are not always earnestly ethnographic or frankly possessive fantasias of “the East” and its “mysterious” ways, the odalisques of Delacroix and Ingres remain foreign, languorous as you and I cannot hope to be. Gaze upon them and sigh.

  Matisse’s Woman Before an Aquarium led me eventually to the odalisques of Delacroix and Ingres, creamy-fleshed, their jewel colors diffused, it seemed, by the dazzled eye of their makers. The earliest of these, the Grande Odalisque by Ingres, she of the backward-looking gaze and famous elongated cello back extending the female curve, is duly accessorized for the harem—jewels about the head, figured scarf tied in a semiturban, peacock fan in draped hand. At the painting’s edge near her naked foot, stands a hookah, dark emblem of delirium. Ingres painted this iconic female figure in 1814, the year of Napoleon’s defeat and exile to Elba, Napoleon who had claimed Egypt and the world of the East for France. The painting hangs now in the Louvre, one of its greatest treasures. Matisse knew it well.

  I HAVE COME TO PARIS, and I stand before the Grande Odalisque, taking my notes as the crowds gust through the gallery. The painting takes up most of a wall. A young father bustles forward, holding his son, a boy about eight, by the hand. He positions the child front and center, and then points to the famous dos, bending forward, indicating the extended backbone with a swoop of his hand.

  The odalisque regards us over her shoulder, me earnestly frowning back with my notebook clutched to my chest, the father claiming space to gesture expansively, the child, looking up, unblinking. The figure is unconcerned, without shame. The world of the picture is hers, a stylized but dead-serious blue divan-and-drapery setup, presented without irony. A picture that is a picture, claiming the territory of the wall. It is a painting obedient to the illusions of perspective, lawbreaking only in the higher service of beauty and the ruling arabesque of the line that has counted out two more vertebrae for her back than the rest of us have.

  The child stares up. His face is purely absorbed as his father directs his attention to the extra vertebrae at the base of the big womby back. There is solemnity in this moment between them: this French father handing on to his boy the patrimoine national unique of his people. The woman inspiring the transaction looks down complacently, as if regally acknowledging that her beauty and the beached whale of her backside are the unreal real estate of their once imperial culture, replete with alien riches, passed securely from one generation to the next in this luxurious image.

  Matisse’s odalisques, on the other hand, their faces often casual strokes, pinkish blobs of visage, tend to be indicative rather than representative. They are tricked out in costumes pulled from a bandbox of rumpled make-believe outfits. We know they’re not real. They’re playing dress-up. That is, Matisse is. These figures are the opposite of exotic—in fact, they look familiar, their turbans and ankle bracelets are the undisguised disguise of make-believe. They do not offer rare glimpses of “the East,” or illicit peekaboos into a real or imagined sultan’s world with its souk’s-worth of colonial loot on exhibit. They display nothing more or less than the mind of Henri Matisse.

  This, oddly enough, is what makes them familiar, passing beyond the apparent foreignness of their costumes and the faux seraglio of the studio, into the arabesques of Matisse’s constructions. This created, not rendered, world follows (or helps to establish) the tendency of modern art to be about the mind of the practitioner, about perception and consciousness, and not about . . . the stuff.

  Yet, how essential the stuff is, how evocative and commanding. Take away the goldfish in the bowl f
loating upon the Moroccan prayer rug and you take away a fragment of consciousness itself. Abandon the fossil of representation that exists in the green stroke down a nose, the persimmon edge of a petal, substitute jots of pure color, abstract and dazzling—and you have lobotomized Matisse’s mind, his esprit.

  MATISSE’S IRRITABILITY over a reading that linked him with Delacroix was not a problem he experienced uniquely in relation to Delacroix. Matisse did not undertake his North African journeys in order to touch the tantalizing flesh of “the other.” But even more to the point, it was antithetical to the core project of his work to discover “ready-made paintings” as Delacroix had delighted in doing—or saying he was doing. How could you pretend to find what had to be made?

  Matisse could admire Delacroix. In fact, he defended and invoked him throughout his life and was given to quoting Delacroix’s dictum that exactitude is not truth. Delacroix, he even argued, was unfairly criticized for not painting hands, but “claws.” This, Matisse told Louis Aragon, his Boswell, was not a fault but the inevitable result of being “a painter of grand scale compositions.” Delacroix had to “finish off . . . the movement, the line, the curve, the arabesque that ran through his picture. He carried it to the end of his figure’s arm and there he bent it over, he finished it off with a sign, you see, a sign! . . . always the same sign.” This evidence of painterly logic won Matisse’s admiration.

  But Delacroix’s imagination, he admitted with regret, “remains anecdotal, which is too bad.” Matisse’s judgment was severe with the severity of the make-it-new orthodoxy of modernity. There was no excuse for vignette-ridden art, for mere telling. The great masters knew better, using humbler materials: “Rembrandt produced biblical scenes with cheap goods from the Turkish bazaar, yet they conveyed all his emotion.” As far as Matisse was concerned, Delacroix was not alone in his “anecdotal” failure: “Tissot painted Christ’s life based on every conceivable document. He even went to Jerusalem. And yet his work is untrue and devoid of life.” Presumably because it did not “convey all his emotion.” His emotion. Not the emotion latent in the subject itself, but the emotion elicited from within the artist.

  A painting must depict the act of seeing, not the object seen. Even if that object represents an entire exotic world, it must pass through the veil of the self to be realized—to be art. For it is the artist’s fully engaged sensibility—mind/ heart/soul—that is really at stake for modernity. For all the critical complaint about the narcissism of modern artists, the twentieth century demanded self-absorption of its great ones: Don’t give us your skills, give us your attitude. We have wanted to look not at the thing but at the mind beholding and rendering itself in the act of attention.

  Worth a pause—for art itself is still rocking from this realization of its modern project, the weirdly spiritual (because personalized) vocation that spawned Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract this, Expressionist that, the masses of intervening and conflicting movements and directions that have tried to define what it means to convey, visually, all one’s emotion in the presence of the resolutely material world.

  This reliance on the self was not for Matisse mere ego (though this is the man whose wooing of his wife included the remark, “Mademoiselle, I love you dearly, but I shall always love painting more”). Matisse saw the self essentially as the maquette for the larger mystery of creation. Like Augustine, that first and greatest autobiographer, he inquired of himself in order to inquire of existence. “There are so many things I would like to understand, and most of all myself,” Matisse wrote in a letter late in 1938, “—after a half century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there. Nature—or rather, my nature—remains mysterious.”

  No wonder Matisse’s frustration at being mistaken for a disciple of Delacroix. He might have claimed just as fairly in 1941 that not only Delacroix, but Orientalism was far from his mind in Algeria in 1906, in Morocco in 1912, even in his studio above the Mediterranean where, during the interwar years, he propped up his girls, looking for all the world like a bourgeois sultan who preferred even in his imagination to stay snug at home. Was he a twentieth-century indulgent fantasist to Delacroix’s nineteenth-century colonial ethnographer? Which one—or both?—is the voyeur? Does it matter?

  LONG BEFORE Orientalism became an evil word, Matisse’s Fauve eye was seeking an elixir in—and from—North Africa quite removed from the “ready-made” scenes that had so excited Delacroix. Yet during his two scant weeks in Algeria, Matisse dutifully followed the well-trod artist-tourist route, sketching, collecting images—the goldfish, the dizzy patterns of perspective-bashing textiles, the grave interiors of Arab cafés, the dry hills “the color of a lion’s skin” as he wrote back to a friend. All the talismans that he would, in time, make his own. Yet what Matisse sought in 1906 was not, apparently, a glimpse of the swooning figures of the harem, nor the hidden life behind the screens and veils. The veil he wanted to raise was the tissue that obscured his own mind, his nature, as he said with enduring frustration in 1938.

  Delacroix, for his part, had been positively feverish, sketching and note taking when—to his astonishment—he breached the divide of the harem in Algiers in 1832. For him the harem, the real one he believed himself to be glimpsing, was the thing. His “nature” was simply the gift and skill he possessed to get it.

  He had been invited for a brief visit to the home of the associate of the chief engineer of the harbor of Algiers who, the story goes, allowed him into the harem, where the women and children of his house lived. Apparently they had been alerted to the artist’s arrival. Perhaps it was a case of giving the visitor a good show. The women were all dressed up, “surrounded by mounds of silk and gold.” Delacroix, according to the report of a friend, “was as if intoxicated by the spectacle he had before his eyes.” He sketched frantically, noting in his sketchbook the colors of garments and furnishings (“pearl blue—black chalk—blue silk—or white?—green and white striped . . .”), even taking down the names of the women in the room—Bayah, Mouni, Zorah. . . .

  This sighting resulted in the most famous of all Orientalist works, the Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. It hangs in a gallery of the Louvre not far from the Grande Odalisque of Ingres. Delacroix finished the painting in Paris two years after his North African trip. Two years—this pause suggests that the experience he rushed to document in his sketches and notes on the spot struck Delacroix so deeply that only time would allow its fullness to be realized.

  So potent was the impression of his brief encounter with the harem, in fact, that fifteen years after his trip to Morocco, Delacroix painted a second version of the scene. Another masterpiece, but this time the lounging female figures are rendered at greater distance, more enclosed in their carpet-bedecked, tapestry-ridden world, as if given back to their privacy by the abashed owner of the earlier intrusive visit.

  Delacroix’s overpowering response to the harem was born in part of the singularity of his experience. He was overwhelmed by having been privileged to see what others (Occidental “others”) had not seen, to penetrate the depths of the unknown. As Delacroix’s friend Cournault says, the fever that seeing the harem caused him was one that “sherbets and fruits could barely appease” (cooling provisions presumed to be on hand in any seraglio). The experience was erotic. Not because Delacroix rendered the women in the soft-porn manner of many Orientalists peddling languid flesh on canvas, but erotic because of the painful ecstasy he experienced in penetrating this hidden realm.

  Delacroix’s women of Algiers are private, contemplative in their social setting, not sexual candy. Their apartment is no fantasy brothel. There isn’t much exposed flesh, in fact. They look up, allow the instant of perception to occur, but the dark, reclusive room and all its meaning, including their draped bodies, belong to them. They are not “displayed.” They remain enclosed, private. At the side, a black servant holds a curtain she will drop in a moment, taking the whole chamber away from our sight forever.

  …


  MATISSE WENT TO North Africa as a tourist, boarding a regularly scheduled ferry. Ingres didn’t go at all, never traveling farther east than Rome, his harems entirely “of the mind” as Ruth Bernard Yeazell describes the lavish imaginative constructions of most Orientalists, artists and writers, few of whom “could resist describing at length what they had not seen.”

  But between the stay-at-home fantasy of Ingres and Matisse’s frank tourism lies the arrival of Eugène Delacroix in Tangier aboard the corvette La Perle on January 25, 1832. Delacroix was a member of the entourage of le comte de Mornay, a diplomat sent by the French king, Louis-Philippe, to the sultan of Morocco in the face of insurrections in Oran. In a sense, Delacroix was a member of the press corps. In the earnest colonial context of the time, he had anthropological and ethnographic intentions and saw himself as responsible to history rather than to journalism. He knew he was making a voyage “that very few Christians can boast of having made,” as he wrote solemnly to a friend from Tangier in 1832.

  This ethnographic instinct was absent in Matisse, and perhaps his colonial (that is, possessive) eye was shut as well. Matisse thought he was making his trip in search of light, that most godlike of commodities. Actually, he was looking for more light, trying to ratchet up the sunshine factor that had inspired him the summer before in Collioure that had resulted in the paintings that gave him his wild beast badge at the 1905 Salon d’Automne.

  In North Africa, Matisse sought a place where color would be even more saturated, more penetrating than it had been in Collioure. To his consternation, the powerful wattage of the desert summer was useless to this enterprise. “The light,” he wrote home disconsolately, “is blinding.”

  He returned to Collioure which had struck him as “insipid” before he went to Algeria. But now, after the disappointment of Africa, he was glad to get home and allowed himself a sentiment worthy of a burgher: “In my slippers, I became myself again.” Then, in the next sentence, the growl of the wild beast: “Painting has totally taken possession of me.”