Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  I go to the galleries; I stand before the paintings ranked on the walls. I buy the postcards in the museum shops. Over the years my deck of cards rises. I’m a two-bit Claribel Cone, caught up in this modest “silly foolishness.” The odalisques even have their own desk drawer. Occasionally, I mount a small show for myself, propping a few cards against the lamp and along the raised edge of my desk. Sometimes I do a group show, positioning Ingres’s Grande Odalisque off to the side, Delacroix’s Algerian women facing. Manet’s Olympia, purchased after standing in line outside the Musée d’Orsay in a whipping rain for over an hour, is on display too, her insolent mouth wiping away the Giaconda smile that ruled Western art for centuries, replacing it with knowing contempt, the breathtaking smirk of a woman who knows her price.

  Claribel Cone thought of collecting as a killer—the beautiful saris strangle out everything else, she said. She had a point. Collecting is not a simple matter of possessing. It’s a way of looking: a looking that is itself a kind of craving. To look this way is to be possessed, lost.

  Some of my cards are soft, almost frayed at the edges, dog-eared like a book handled over and over.

  MATISSE WAS FORTY-SEVEN in 1916 when he first settled in Nice. He devoted more than a decade of his prime years to his odalisque, his “silly foolishness,” to use Claribel Cone’s exasperated term. Between 1919 and 1929, the count comes to about fifty major canvases of harem girls, not to mention countless preliminary drawings, sketches, vignette details. Even his artist friends thought it extreme. There’s a famous photograph of Pierre Bonnard, a close friend of these years, roguishly mocking Matisse’s single-mindedness. In the photo Bonnard appears fully clothed in a three-piece suit lying on Matisse’s studio couch before a patterned drapery and a vase of flowers, his booted leg crossed and raised in a mock-odalisque gesture. His face in profile bears the neutral calm of the Matisse harem.

  Matisse employed a series of professional models to play his odalisques, if by “professional” is meant young women, often foreign and displaced, who had no easy way of making a living and who drifted as extras and walk-ons into the early makeshift movie studios around Nice. Here, about the same time, Scott Fitzgerald’s visiting American movie people in Tender Is the Night mingled their new fame and wealth shyly and then more boldly, and finally fatally, with the older American leisure class in residence on the Riviera. These children of Fitzgerald’s Midwestern robber barons, who had linked the continent with railroads, lounged, thanks to their trust funds, on the “bright tan prayer rug of a beach” on the Côte d’Azur. The moment Dick Diver—hapless name—falls for the starlet Rosemary Speers—pitiless name—serves as well as anything as the moment when celebrity culture takes the American dream hostage, apparently forever. The moment when pop culture first claimed the ascendancy it now so fully possesses.

  Matisse’s models often belonged to the margins of this world. They were, in effect, actresses. These young women entered and expanded his fantasy, offering him poses, conferring about costuming and furnishings, firing the psychological atmosphere of the paintings. Of these women none was more important to the odalisque enterprise than Henriette Darricarrère who incarnated Matisse’s harem world for seven years, from 1920 to 1927.

  Henriette was not a refugee, not a girl alone and unprotected. She was the daughter of parents who moved from Dunkirk, where she was born in 1901, to Nice with their children who included, besides their pretty daughter, two younger sons. Henriette was drawn to performance, and was posing as a ballerina for the film cameras at the Studios de la Victorine when Matisse first observed her. In a twist on the Schwab’s drugstore story, she was discovered in the movies rather than for them. She seems never to have looked back, and served Matisse faithfully as muse and fellow fantasist until she married in 1927 and left his employ. Her own daughter later posed for Matisse.

  There seems to have been no love affair, in case that comes to mind—how can it not? It appears that Matisse was something of an uncle-figure. Her family remarked with approval that Matisse encouraged her piano and violin and ballet lessons, even “allowing her time” to paint and attend social events. This overall time-ownership (“allowing” her free time) suggests the link was intense, profound, not just a job with an hourly wage. So does the fact that she quit the work at the time of her marriage, as if no matter how virginal the work of modeling, she could not, as a wife, continue to participate in the fantasy it required.

  Henriette was the model for the famous Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background of 1925–26, where she reigns in semiprofile with regal calm amid battling decorative motifs, her swirling world anchored by a bowl of lemons at the side. She sits in an anti-Ingres ramrod position just as improbable in its straight edge as the Grande Odalisque is with her supine extra vertebrae.

  But this is just one of many languid reclining semi-nudes below an open window or (less often) closed up in a fiercely decorated chamber, the moist niçois air cloying the room, the grit of modernity coming in from the boardwalk below. I shuffle through my deck of cards, I page through the art history books I have also collected, my eye passing over ballooning Turkish pants, running down medallions of ferocious wallpaper, on to a carelessly exposed bosom, past a finely shrouded face, one after another, these ripe fruits. I collect them all, which is to say, I love them all.

  As surely Matisse did. But not a single figure commends itself as “the one,” not even Henriette as the Decorative Figure. There is no odalisque supreme, it seems. No Matisse figure who does for him what the Grande Odalisque did for Ingres or the Algerian Women did for Delacroix—epitomized it all. Matisse’s girls, all the rooms and divans, the wallpaper and patterns, are variations, inevitably incomplete, part of a larger idea or desire. They are a collection. And therefore rely on each other to approximate the idea of a whole.

  No single odalisque compels my attention and completes my search. I find myself returning, instead, to a grainy snapshot that seems to turn up in all the art history books and biographies, dated imprecisely from the mid-1920s, when Matisse was working with Henriette at 1, place Charles-Félix in his third-floor studio.

  The photograph is black-and-white, of course. This in itself makes the now-familiar Matisse-designed harem more arrestingly foreign, as if it weren’t, after all, a pretend home theater, or an artist’s color laboratory, but a postcard photograph snapped behind the closed door of the women’s quarters. The dark-haired beauty, not Henriette but an Italian model named Zita he used only briefly, is tucked into the recess of her bower-of-textile-bliss divan, one leg raised to display an ankle bracelet, her kohl-eyed gaze directing the focus of the picture to—the artist himself.

  For there is Matisse at the left, in his suit and tie, jarringly not part of this harem dream, slightly lower on the picture plane than Zita on her divan but larger than she because he is in the foreground, holding his drawing tablet on his knee, right hand in midstroke. He brings to mind Freud, perched at the side of the couch, dressed impeccably as a doctor in his clinic, ready to take his diagnostic notes, a painting shrink.

  Even the divan is much the same as Freud’s Berggasse consulting couch that went into exile with him when he was forced from Vienna to Hampstead in 1938. Like that couch, Matisse’s divan is a draped daybed covered with Persian rugs and the higher math of intricately woven tapestry. The divan upon which the mind and its secrets were opened to view in the twentieth century.

  But Matisse is not really drawing. He’s posing. He looks straight at the camera, obediently having his picture taken. And therefore cannot know what we, regarding the picture, know: that his odalisque is taking an illicit look at him as he is being framed by the photographer. Her body dutifully holds its draped Matisse extension, but her eyes are on the loose, hungrily taking in her boss who, for once, is not looking at her.

  A strange moment. Zita’s mouth teeters on the verge-of-smile but does not quite fall into pleasure. The barest amusement as she turns her eyes, not her head, as if now he were caught,
if only for an instant, as she is always caught. But there is—I’ve taken a magnifying glass to her face—something closer to worry passing across her features. Not fear, I think—she’s not afraid of him. But worry of some sort. That they have been interrupted? That the photographer is taking too long? That the fragile border of their fantasy has been breached by a stranger?

  Or is it—and I give over to this thought—that she feels a surprising empathy that perhaps only a model could feel. It is an abashed look, a kind of protopity, a brief solidarity that he has been reduced, as she is daily, to a pose.

  AND WHAT OF my own excursions to the East?—the reenactment of the search for the exotic, the other, or whatever it’s called now. A week into the Friendship Tour of Israel with a brief detour to Petra in Jordan and I asked to be taken to a hospital. I was possibly dying, and I thought I should say so.

  Our guide, roaming the hotel to round up his charges for the morning tour, looked down where I had flung myself on a low padded bench against a wall in the pretentious lobby, and laughed out loud. Hooted. Then he turned and walked away, down the desert-colored marble corridor that swam with ominous gold light.

  I had been stricken suddenly. The day before we had “done” Masada, stopping first to float in the creepy buoyancy of the Dead Sea. Then back on the bus, passing Qumran but not stopping to see the caves where, in 1947, Bedouin shepherd boys looking for a stray goat had found the Dead Sea Scrolls rolled up in ancient amphoras. I had walked without trouble to the top of the Masada citadel, surveyed Herod’s realm in the fierce high wind, and readily imagined the Roman armies advancing mercilessly across the terrible openness of the plain as our guide described, feelingly, the mass suicide of the Jewish forces as they faced certain Roman victory. This is the landscape, I thought, that gave religion God “out of the whirlwind.” God as whirlwind.

  Then, as we all stared out stung, as our guide intended, with elegiac sentiments, he murmured, as if it were a minor footnote of no great matter, that “the historians” now dispute the suicide story. A legend, he said airily, but a beautiful one, yes? Then, his usual gesture—a finger tapping his gold wristwatch on his upraised arm—we must get back down to the bus.

  Later, at the hotel, drinks on the terrace as the setting sun turned the baked gold of East Jerusalem sweetly pink. Everything we looked at from the Hilton on King David Street was ancient except for the hotel, built to mimic the old stone. And of course ourselves, sitting with our vodka tonics.

  But then, without warning, this swoon just after breakfast. My eyes ached all along the optic nerve; my body was no longer in my possession. Waves of nausea hit and slammed. I held the sides of the bench so I wouldn’t be pitched overboard, swept off in a stream of murky gold liquid that was—I could still make the connection with part of my mind—also the floor of the lobby of the Jerusalem Hilton. I closed my eyes and turned to the wall like an old peasant in a hut whose time has come.

  Our guide, who had told us he had fought in the Six Days’ War and who had a wry leathery face I had liked until our last exchange, returned. He touched my shoulder. He held out a can of Sprite. “Drink this,” he said. He made me sit up, which I thought was extremely unwise.

  Then he was gone, but other people, members of our “friendship mission” gathered around. They too urged the Sprite on me, and then, apparently reassured, one by one they left for the bus, though two women I had been avoiding during the trip for complex reasons I could no longer recall, stayed behind. They sat down wonderfully close, one on either side of me, stationed like abutments holding up the wobbly span that was me. I drank the Sprite. They, too, insisted. I mentioned again the hospital—and realized with shame that I was whimpering.

  Oh no, no hospital, I was told with a pat, though neither one of the women laughed, thank God, the way the veteran of the Six Days’ War had laughed.

  These women I had not liked assured me I wasn’t dying. They spoke with the same brisk certainty they had used several days earlier when, over drinks on the Hilton terrace with its heart-stopping views of the everlasting hills of the Old City, they had attested stoutly to their atheism as to a matter of basic hygiene. Culture—yes, they had said. But religion? A ruinous mixture of nonsense and trouble. Evil, one had said.

  Now, hips snug against my own, they displayed an unmistakable lack of alarm about my situation, drifting away from my desperation to chat about the day’s itinerary. We were going to Caesarea, we would see the Roman aqueduct. A good lunch was promised. I sipped the Sprite, peevishly thinking, Nobody takes me seriously. Story of my life.

  I was dehydrated, one of the women was saying. It was not serious. It could be serious. But it wasn’t. Not yet. Finish the Sprite.

  I tried to explain that I wasn’t thirsty, that I couldn’t be dehydrated. I indicated my water bottle. We all drank prodigious quantities of water. This is a desert, remember, we kept telling each other.

  “Electrolytes,” the heavier woman said. “Your electrolytes are out of whack. It happens in the desert.” She was a financial officer for a museum but spoke as one accustomed to sandstorms, camels, dry blowing nights, though all of us were from Minnesota where the license plates read LAND OF 10,000 LAKES.

  She went somewhere and came back with another Sprite. She snapped open the can and handed it to me. As I raised it to drink, the sweet fizz of carbonation sprayed my face, and a brilliant collision of ecstasy and shame struck me as my mind and my body, lost lovers, found each other again in an instant. I saw in a saving flash that I had been wrong, that the war veteran tour guide was right and the two kindly atheists were right. I wasn’t dying. Feeling the grainy champagne of Sprite spark through me, I was distinctly not dying. I was becoming, once again, that thing I call “myself.”

  PERHAPS THE SHOCK of disorientation with its tincture of fear renewed my spirit on this guided trip through Israel and as far as Petra in Jordan. “What gives value to travel,” Camus said, “is fear.” And like most people, I prefer to think of myself as an independent traveler, not given to group tours. Yet I had gladly joined, when invited, this busload of American Midwestern “community leaders and artists” (the two categories being understood as mutually exclusive). A junket to the ancient place, stage set of history and myth I had grown up calling, from years of Catholic schooling, the Holy Land.

  It was about two years before the second—and still current—intifada, and I think all of us on our big bus felt safe, safe enough to have come in the first place. It was still possible to see “incidents” as separate, widely spaced, unlikely. We didn’t talk about our safety. We discussed the politics of the region as if everything were either in the past (violent, impossible) or somewhere in the future (hopeful, though indistinct). None of us really knew anything about it.

  We had been toured around Israel and Jordan with stops at opposing camps for the past week. The Palestinian mayor of Bethlehem gave us sweet dense coffee in minute, intricately patterned cups passed from a brass tray in a serene second-floor office where a ceiling fan whirled slowly as if in a scene from Casablanca. He seemed to think we were influential in some way, and he gave us more time than any of the Israeli officials did, speaking with great courtesy, without bitterness, appealing to our better selves as he described the situation.

  The American Israeli householder we visited later in his weirdly bland air-conditioned split-level in the subdivision, which he insisted on calling a settlement, handed around a huge container of Coke with plastic cups. Out the window of his American-style house, we could see, in the lower distance, a fenced area where Palestinian families were camping in a kind of shantytown of tarps and sagging cardboard.

  Camels and SUVs, the persimmon walls of Petra, the depressing vacancy of emotion I felt at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the groaning buffet tables of the Israeli hotels, the conservative Catholic op-ed page writer from Minneapolis who said loudly to the Holocaust survivor before we were taken to tour Yad Vashem, “I’m not going along if this is intended to make me f
eel guilty.”

  Group tourism, in other words. By the time I collapsed in the Hilton lobby, I had reached a stress point of crabbiness, a sense of being held hostage by our handlers, a feeling of being . . . well, a tourist. Worse, a functionary in the middle-management of culture, greedy hands across the cultural divide. Why had I come? I was furious with myself for going on this freebie junket, my paw held out for experience, a gluttony like any other.

  Tourism, that dishonored if massively indulged modern habit, bears its voyeuristic taint with a shrug. We all want to go . . . elsewhere. We all want to see . . . what’s there. Much has been written in recent years about the toxic nature of “the gaze”—the man staring boldly at the woman, the vacationing rich gawking at the local-color poor, the unfair advantage of being the observer.

  Yet what does the world come to if to look, that once unabashed gesture, is understood to be an evil? Even Adam and Eve were allowed to gaze at the Tree and its fruit, after all. They were even instructed to enjoy it—an object to be regarded, if not touched or tasted. The world’s first museum moment, if we’d just left it at that. But who ever just leaves it? We keep reaching, eating up the world.

  That afternoon, after our handlers had returned us from our round of gawking in Caesarea, the gentle atheist who had gone for the second Sprite and had given me back my life, invited me to go with her while everyone else napped. She wanted to visit the souk in East Jerusalem. Perhaps to shake my sour antisocial feeling, perhaps because I was still wary of being alone, I went along, trotting beside her purposeful self like a good pet.