Blue Arabesque
Page 13
Matisse liked women, she says, liked to have pretty women around, draw them, paint them. She smiles happily at this fact, this memory. He was always correct with me, of course, she says, in case I thought she meant something else, though there is nothing of the prude about this remark. Apparently it is part of her vérité. She speaks happily, not like a nervous virgin, but with the knowledge of the nature of the love they had. We were friends, we cared for each other.
And what of Lydia Delectorskaya? I ask. The faithful muse of the long, late years, what became of her?
Ah, she committed suicide. Only a few years ago, as an old woman.
Suicide? I’m genuinely shocked, not simply that she killed herself but that she had lived so long.
I realize, looking at Soeur Jacques-Marie’s old face, finely lined, burned by the sun (she had spent her life at a convent in Biarritz, far from the chapel she had inspired, working as an occupational therapist) that she is now about the age Matisse was when she came to him as a night nurse and won his heart.
It was very sad, she says then of Delectorskaya. Her face holds the thought of this sadness a moment, as if in loyalty. Then she shrugs again, accepting it, apparently.
IN THE CHAPEL my main task was to create an equilibrium between one surface that was filled with light and colour and the opposite wall which was relieved only by the line drawings in black on white. For me, the chapel meant the fulfillment of a whole life devoted to my work. It was the flowering of hard and difficult but honest labours.
Matisse considered the Chapel of the Rosary his master-work, the culminating attempt—to achieve the essence and depth of blue he had sought all his life, and to respond to question after question he had been asking of line, color, surface, over his long years on canvas and paper. The chapel was his opera, the big theatrical, living work.
And it was a place of worship. A church made with ferocious attention to the detail and to the iconography of Christianity by a man who had long ago fled the Church and its dark and devious prohibitions, its powerful denials of the flesh he had devoted his best years to worshipping and rendering. The year the chapel was dedicated, 1951, Matisse responded to a series of interview questions from a writer named André Verdet who asked him if there was any part of his work he felt was misunderstood by critics.
The odalisques, he said, they had not been understood. “Did I paint too many Odalisques,” he asked,
was I carried away by excessive enthusiasm in the happiness of creating those pictures, a happiness that swept me along like a warm ocean ground swell? I still don’t know . . . I had to catch my breath, to relax and forget my worries, far from Paris. The Odalisques were the fruits of a happy nostalgia, of a lovely, lively dream and of the almost ecstatic, chanted experience of those days and nights, in the incantation of the Moroccan climate. I felt the irresistible need to express that ecstasy, that divine nonchalance, in corresponding colored rhythms, the rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors.
Divine nonchalance—that was it, the double aspect of his long passion coupled with his extraordinary discipline, the daily stroke of the brush, pull of the pencil. In all that nonchalance, the glory of ease, to experience the ecstasy that is our only sure link with divinity. No wonder there were all those lounging women in their complicated interiors, and he had the guilty sensation of perhaps painting “too many” of them, being incapable of moving past their languor. They aren’t weary; they’re necessarily careless, bred of the imagined ease of creativity even as their maker worked like a Trojan to accomplish their languor.
It takes time to do this, the cloistered nun said to me of her job all those years ago. This divine nonchalance, the leisure of great, private endeavor, was a grace that suffused all four of the plunging-neckline portraits of Monique Bourgeois. Matisse managed to rest the sacred ease of creation upon her image. A form of love, to be so at ease in the frantic world, to be so at peace in the presence of beauty.
And then, a true odalisque, his model, perhaps all his models, trumped him. She drew herself back, keeping her mystery to herself, even as the artist thinks he has it safely inscribed on canvas, as a writer thinks the truth of the ineffable can be lured onto the page.
The model rises. She discards the alluring costume, the bright yellow beads, the masquerade that was so necessary to beguile her truth to canvas. She leaves it all, she walks behind the cloister screen, into her own life, where she cannot be seen but only imagined. Maybe not even imagined—only longed for. It is a life he would not have chosen for her, a life he can only gaze on as she disappears into the blue backdrop of her own divine nonchalance.
Acknowledgments
Personal essays belong to the amateur tradition, to the “common reader” as Virginia Woolf put it. In my case, the common viewer. Given this amateur status, I’m especially indebted to the scholarship of others, and in the bibliography have tried to note the works I have quoted from or that figured in my thinking. Pierre Schneider’s magisterial study of Matisse was essential, and I’m particularly grateful to Hilary Spurling whose meticulous reconstructions have made the personal life and artistic process of Henri Matisse vividly available as never before. To Claire Tomalin whose work on Katherine Mansfield corrected narrower readings of her life I am most thankful as well.
I was greatly assisted by a residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, originally the home of Jerome Hill, and established by him as a residence for scholars and artists. The University of Minnesota has generously supported my work and travel as a Regents Professor of English.
Generous friends and correspondents encouraged me, stood with me before paintings in museums as I scribbled in notebooks, challenged and corrected me along the way, and sometimes made possible essential travels and encounters. I remain grateful to them all: Mark Doty; Deborah Chasman; Helene Atwan; Rhoda Weyr; Carol Houck Smith; Sybil Kretzmer; Susan and Steffen Kyhl; Michael Blumenthal; Peter Day; Janet Landay; Lynn Freed; Eva Hoffman; Robert Zaretsky; Samuel Heins and Stacey Mills; Phebe Hanson; Mary Gordon, Deborah Garfinkle, and Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books; Linda Gregerson and Steven Mullaney; Burton Shapiro; Charles Sugnet; Charles Baxter; Thomas Mallon; Andrea Barrett; Edward Hirsch; Carol Conroy; Nancy Larson Shapiro; Steven Sorman; Terrence Williams; Kate Martin, OSC; Judith Zinsser; Rosemarie Johnstone Weinstein; Eric Marty; Imi Hwangbo; B. J. Carpenter; Cynthia Gehrig of the Jerome Foundation; John W. Chapman of the Minnesota Historical Society; Lyndel King of the Weisman Art Museum; Stephen Williams; Jonathan Williams; Susan Jesenko and the late Mark Jesenko; Maureen McAvey; Robert Clark; my stalwart agent, Marly Rusoff; meticulous—and hilarious—Managing Editor David Hough; and my ingenious editor, Ann Patty.
Bibliography
Aragon, Louis. Henri Matisse: A Novel. Translated by Jean Stewart. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.
Calasso, Roberto. Literature and the Gods. Translated by Tim Parks. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2001.
Cowart, Jack, et al., ed. Matisse in Morocco: The Paintings and Drawings, 1912–1913. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New York: H. N. Abrams, 1990.
Cowart, Jack, and Dominique Fourcade. Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice, 1916–1930. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New York: H. N. Abrams, 1986.
Delektorskaya, Lydia. With Apparent Ease—Henri Matisse: Paintings from 1935–1939. Translated by Olga Tourkoff. Paris: A. Maeght, 1988.
Djebar, Assia. Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1992.
Flaubert, Gustave. Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1979.
Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
Lemaire, Gérard-Georges. The Orient in Western Art. English ed. Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001.
Matisse, Henri. Matisse on Art. Edited by Jack Flam. Rev. ed. The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art. Berkeley: Univ
ersity of California Press, 1995.
Russell, John. Matisse: Father and Son. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1999.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 25th anniversary ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
Schneider, Pierre. Matisse. New York: Rizzoli, 2002.
Spurling, Hilary. Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Conquest of Color, 1909–1954. New York: A. A. Knopf, 2005.
———. The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henri Matisse, The Early Years, 1869–1908. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1998.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
About the Author
PATRICIA HAMPL is the author of A Romantic Education, Virgin Time, Spillville, I Could Tell You Stories, and two collections of poetry. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. She lives in St. Paul and is Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota.