Matisse, Turning Scraps of Cloth into Works of Art

Writers are often encouraged to “write what you know.” Logically, it makes sense for any artist to create a work based on their knowledge of a particular subject, but it is also a perpetual and intriguing mystery to know exactly what inspires a great artist.   Henri Matisse was born in 1869 in Bohain, an industrial textile center in France. Both his paternal grandfather and great grandfather were weavers. Surrounded by fabrics as a child, it is perhaps no surprise that a small swatch of fabric, waving out of a bus window, would catch the eye of the budding artist while he was walking down a Paris street. Who knew that Matisse was going to take inspiration from this blue and white pattern, and cast textiles as star performers in many of his paintings? I saw many of these works, and the actual textiles, at “Matisse: The Fabric of Dreams – His Art and His Textiles,” an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The beginning, the Toile de Jouly Matisse called the original blue and white cloth he saw that day his “toile de jouly,” and it was the impetus for Still Life with Blue Tablecloth. Exhibited in 1905 at the Paris Salon d’Autumne, this painting and others became known as the beginning of “Fauvism.” The Fauvists were called “Wild Beasts” for their bold and explosive use of color on the canvas. Matisse’s still life was not only a shining example of Fauvism, but it also hints at the beginning of Modernism. Against an austere salmon colored background, Matisse’s unstill and unruly tablecloth asserts power and dominance over the calm scene with bold brush strokes of blue and green. Overwhelming the pitcher and bowl on the table, the tablecloth reduces the objects on it as soft voices in this heavy metal exposition. Not much should be “still” in this early masterpiece of Matisse, according to the tablecloth. Souvenirs from travel Perhaps encouraged by his early love, the toile de jouly, Matisse soon traveled to and purchased cloth from Munich, Morocco and southern Spain. In the years 1910 and 1911, he painted Seville Still Life and this work represents another way his use of textiles evolved. The scene is the corner of a room, with a small couch, table, and plants. Fabric hangs as drapery, and fabric covers the couch and table. The brush strokes of the fabric are more careful, and less intense than the Still Life with Blue Tablecloth. The patterns are melodic, not aggressive. They remind me of a pop song you hear played on Top 40 radio. You know all of the words, and the song rhymes. The objects in the room not covered by cloth are curved and painted to be consistent with the fabric. Everything seems to be in harmony. Creating the set Matisse took a U-turn from his use of textiles in many ways when he created a series of paintings in the late 1920s. In Reclining Odalisque in 1926 and in Odalisque with Green Culotte” in 1927, Matisse acts as a set designer and manufactures a scene for the painting, with the textiles as a background. The expressionless figures, completely unaware of the painter, are wearing muted colored clothing and seem to be in their own world. The colors of the textiles are what draw your eye into the painting; the figures aren’t trying to engage you. Ironically, Matisse was also doing sculptures at the time, and the figures have a slight hint of Cubism. It’s possible that Matisse was inspired by his own studio, which often had scraps of cloth draped on the walls, on the furniture, and in other unexpected places. The end, Modern Cutouts Matisse moved to the south of France, in 1943, and resided there until his death in Nice in 1954. An invalid for the last fifteen years of his life, his art reflected both the limitations of his health, as well as another evolution in his work with textiles. Paper cutouts became the dominant tool in his art. Matisse described it as “drawing with scissors.” In Composition: Yellow, Blue and Black in 1947 and Snow Flowers in 1951, Matisse creates cutouts that represent a very small part of a textile pattern, and places them on a simple background as a collage. It’s as if he has diagnosed all of the beauty of the textile to be contained in one very tiny piece of the pattern in it. There is no movement to the work, but no apologies either. The modern images are both static and stoic.