Pablo thought it wasn’t successful. “If Matisse had realized that the light inside the chapel was going to become this pinkish mauve,” he said after one of our visits to the chapel, “he would have been better off to have used some other colors inside the chapel to counteract that effect. If the chapel was supposed to be white and black, there should have been no color except maybe a spot of red or something very clear-cut, but not that pink-mauve. That makes the place look like a bathroom.”
One afternoon we went to call on Matisse while he was working on his projects for the stained glass, the chasubles, and all the ornaments to decorate the chapel. Father Couturier, the principal intermediary whom Matisse saw in connection with his work, was there that day. He was no stranger to me. At the Dominican college which I had attended in my teens, I was looked upon as one of the leading rebellious spirits, and they had often been obliged to send me to have discussions on a high theological plane with several priests who, they hoped, might be able to satisfy somehow my perverse questions—I always had a great deal of trouble accepting certain notions they put forward as fact, such as the idea that there is no salvation outside the Church. In that connection, I had met Father Couturier.
On our previous visit Pablo had said to Matisse, “You’re crazy to make a chapel for those people. Do you believe in that stuff or not? If not, do you think you ought to do something for an idea that you don’t believe in?” Matisse was telling this to Father Couturier as we arrived that day and Father Couturier replied, “You can say what you want to about Picasso, but he paints with his blood.” Obviously that was designed to please Pablo, but Pablo wasn’t in the mood to be seduced by a phrase, however flattering it might be, and he began to repeat what he had said to Matisse on our earlier visit. “But why are you doing these things? I’d approve of your doing them if you believed in what they represent, but if you don’t, I don’t think you have any moral right to do them.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Matisse said, “this is essentially a work of art. It’s just that I put myself in the state of mind of what I’m working on. I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some kind of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.”
Father Couturier was clearly determined to draw out of this whatever spiritual advantage he could, however much it might exude an odor of Buddhism. He turned toward me and said, “But you know very well, don’t you, that we are open to all ideas. We don’t attempt to make everyone conform to us. We are more interested in opening ourselves up to all kinds of spiritual possibilities.” And then, as evidence of their intellectual broad-mindedness, he referred to the discussions he had had with me when I was at college.
I smiled and told him I remembered them well. But if the Dominicans were that way now, I said, it was because they were relatively weak. “With all the charm at your disposal you’ll do anything—even to going into the theater and the movie world—to fish for whatever few poor souls are still available. You’re ready to make all kinds of concessions,” I said. “But when you had the power with you, what did you do? It was the Dominicans in Spain who were at the head of the Inquisition. Your weapons vary according to your strength or weakness.”
Pablo was rubbing his hands together, pleased to see me react, for a change, in the kind of aggressive manner that he frequently reproached me for lacking. I noticed often that he seemed to be giving me plenty of rein in situations like this one and whenever I rose to the occasion, he began to beam like the proud owner of a filly that has turned in a promising performance.
As for Matisse, whether Buddhist or Christian, he radiated a serenity that I found very moving. I told him so one day.
He said to me, “I didn’t expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I’m living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.”
Before the operation Matisse had been a rather bourgeois person in temperament and habits, Pablo told me. He said he had never liked Matisse very much when they were younger, and had found it impossible to spend much time with him then. But from the time we started living in the Midi, they saw each other more and more. Pablo had almost a reverence for Matisse because Matisse’s manner reflected an inner balance, a calm that brought peace even to a man like Pablo. Also, I think that Matisse had eliminated from his thinking any sense of rivalry, and this made their friendship possible. His detachment from self was certainly the positive element in their relations. Matisse could afford the luxury of being Pablo’s friend. It was more important for him to see Pablo, even with the sarcastic remarks and occasional ill temper that Pablo indulged in than not to see him. He had a kind of paternal attitude toward Pablo and that, too, helped, because in friendship it was always Pablo who took and the others who gave. In their meetings, the active side was Pablo; the passive, Matisse. Pablo always sought to charm Matisse, like a dancer, but in the end it was Matisse who conquered Pablo.
“We must talk to each other as much as we can,” he told Pablo one day. “When one of us dies, there will be some things the other will never be able to talk of with anyone else.”
Later, when Matisse was again living in his apartment at the Hôtel Régina in Cimiez, we used to go see him about every two weeks. Very often Pablo would bring him his latest paintings or drawings, and sometimes I would bring canvases and drawings of mine. Matisse would have Lydia show us things he had just done, or if he had been working on papiers découpés, we would see them pinned up on the walls.
One day when we called, Matisse had just bought a Chinese mandarin’s mauve-pink silk robe, very long and lined with the fur of a Gobi desert tiger. It stood up all by itself, and Matisse had posed it in front of a pale mauve Arab wall hanging. The robe was very thick, with a high white collar that flared up on each side of the face.
“I’m going to have my new model pose in it,” Matisse said, “but first I’d like to see what it looks like on Françoise.” Pablo didn’t like the idea but Matisse insisted, so I tried on the Chinese robe. It came right up to the top of my head and I was completely engulfed in its triangular form. Matisse said, “Oh, I could do something very good with that.”
“If you do,” Pablo said, “you’ll have to give me the painting and give her the coat.”
Matisse began to back down. “Well,” he said, “the robe looks nice on Françoise, but it wouldn’t be at all right for your painting.”
“I don’t mind,” Pablo said.
“No,” Matisse said, “I’ve got something that’s much better suited to you. It’s from New Guinea. It’s a full-sized human figure that’s completely savage. It’s just right for you.” Lydia went out to get it. It was carved in arborescent fern, streaked with violent tones of blue, yellow, and red, very barbaric looking and not really old. It was larger than life-size, rather battered, its legs attached by strings—just bits and pieces barely hanging together, topped by a feathered head. It was much less handsome than many things of New Guinea I had seen. Pablo looked at it and said that we didn’t have room in the car to carry it away. He promised Matisse he’d send for it another day.
Matisse acquiesced. “But before you go, I want you to see my plane tree,” he said. I wondered how he had managed to bring a plane tree into his hotel apartment. At that point a giant of a girl, who looked about twenty years old and was surely six feet tall, walked in.
“This is my plane tree,” Matisse said, beaming.
After we had left, Pablo said, “Did you notice how Lydia’s nose was out of joint? Something’s going on there, you may be sure. But don’t you find that a little exaggerated, for him to be carrying on like that with women, at his age? He ought to be a l
ittle more serious than that.”
I told Pablo I was surprised he could be such a puritan for others as long as he indulged in whatever he wanted himself. Moreover, I said, I didn’t see any harm in the fact that a man as old and as ill as Matisse should find joy and warmth in letting his eyes and spirit follow, appreciatively, the curves of a young girl’s body.
“I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind,” Pablo said, “played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who ‘appreciate’ beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There’s no such thing. I never ‘appreciate,’ any more than I ‘like.’ I love or I hate. When I love a woman, that tears everything apart—especially my painting. Everybody criticizes me because I’ve had the courage to live my life in broad daylight—with more destruction than most others, perhaps, but certainly with more integrity and truth, also.
“What annoys me even more is the fact that because I’m uninhibited and live that way, everybody thinks I don’t like refined things. When I became interested, forty years ago, in Negro art and I made what they refer to as the Negro Period in my painting, it was because at that time I was against what was called beauty in the museums. At that time, for most people a Negro mask was an ethnographic object. When I went for the first time, at Derain’s urging, to the Trocadéro museum, the smell of dampness and rot there stuck in my throat. It depressed me so much I wanted to get out fast, but I stayed and studied. Men had made those masks and other objects for a sacred purpose, a magic purpose, as a kind of mediation between themselves and the unknown hostile forces that surrounded them, in order to overcome their fear and horror by giving it a form and an image. At that moment I realized that this was what painting was all about. Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange, hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires. When I came to that realization, I knew I had found my way.
“Then people began looking at those objects in terms of aesthetics, and now that everybody says there’s nothing handsomer, they don’t interest me any longer. If they’re just another kind of aesthetic object, then I prefer something Chinese. Besides,” he said, “that New Guinea thing frightens me. I think it probably frightens Matisse too and that’s why he’s so eager to get rid of it. He thinks I’ll be able to exorcise it better than he can.”
Shortly after that visit, Pablo went back to Paris and stayed there a while, but all during the time he was away Matisse held fast to his idea. He called up the Ramiés at the pottery, not knowing that Pablo had left for Paris, and said that the object was still there waiting for him. Then he wrote to him twice reminding him that his gift was still uncalled for. He obviously had his heart set on transferring it to Pablo’s possession. “It’s not something you can remain indifferent to,” he wrote. “And it’s not sad, either.” But Pablo was still put out to think that Matisse believed it was better adapted to his temperament than something Chinese. He didn’t like the idea of Matisse thinking that he was the intelligent painter and Pablo just a creature of instinct. Finally, Matisse had it sent over to Vallauris. Once Pablo had it, he was rather happy about it and we made a special trip to Cimiez just so he could thank Matisse.
PABLO HAD AT LEAST eight paintings by Matisse, of which he had bought perhaps three. The others he got from Matisse in exchange for paintings of his. One of these exchanges was a characteristic Matisse still life of white tulips and a plate of oysters on a brick-red table against a black background scratched with small white checks. Also from that period he took a painting of a woman seated in a brown armchair. The woman is in mauve and the background is green. Those two canvases were very successful in their color harmonies and very free and spontaneous. Matisse told us that sometimes in the evening he used to wipe out with cotton and turpentine whatever he had done during the day if it didn’t please him completely. He would start the same painting again the next morning, from scratch, always with a completely spontaneous approach. He did that because, he said, “When I have a feeling for something, my feeling for it doesn’t change. That feeling is at the center of my conception of the painting and I try all possible expressions of it until I find one that satisfies me completely.” In the same spirit he had made all sorts of trials for the illustrations he did for the Letters of a Portuguese Nun. From his model, the future Soeur Jacques, he made about eighty drawings exploiting all the plastic possibilities of her face: in one, he accentuated it in the form of a square; in another, all the round features were strongly exaggerated; in another, the eyes were small and very close together; another was sharply linear; another, very softly modeled with charcoal. And yet those eighty drawings, which were all very different, one from another, expressed complete unity; throughout, one had the sense of art embroidered on the same feeling. As Matisse said, “When I look at a fig tree, every leaf has a different design. They all have their own manner of moving in space; yet in their own separate ways, they all cry, ‘Fig tree.’ ”
From Pablo’s work, Matisse had chosen a head of Dora Maar and a 1943 still life with a pitcher and a glass. The still life was very austere with little color and with somber harmonies, stressing his way of constructing the objects in the composition. The head of Dora Maar had its planes brought over from the profile onto the front view, in blue and the black-gray-white gamut with ochre that is one of Pablo’s typical combinations. Each one had chosen what was most characteristic of the other.
During the winter of 1951, Pablo showed Matisse a picture he had painted of a dead tree, a very sad landscape, rather like Cranach, with a gray sky and a black-gray-white color harmony with just a bit of ochre and a touch of green. It had a strong, clear-cut design. It pleased Matisse tremendously. There was some talk of making an exchange but Matisse was already rather ill and the swap never came about. Matisse was frequently rather tired. At one time they would talk about making the exchange, then later on, when we would go back, Matisse would have been ill and everything would have to be started all over again. Pablo didn’t really want to let go of the painting anyway because, as he said, “Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping-stone to other things. One doesn’t like to part with those pictures, as a rule.” That, for him, was one of those pictures.
ONE DAY WHEN WE WERE VISITING MATISSE, he showed us some catalogs he had received from his son Pierre, an art dealer in New York. They contained reproductions of paintings by Jackson Pollock and others of that persuasion.
“I have the impression that I’m incapable of judging painting like that,” Matisse said after we had finished looking at the catalogs, “for the simple reason that one is always unable to judge fairly what follows one’s own work. One can judge what has happened before and what comes along at the same time. And even among those who follow, when a painter hasn’t completely forgotten me I understand him a little bit, even though he goes beyond me. But when he gets to the point where he no longer makes any reference to what for me is painting, I can no longer understand him. I can’t judge him either. It’s completely over my head.
“When I was young, I was very fond of Renoir’s painting. Toward the end of the First World War, I found myself in the Midi. Renoir was still living, but very old. I still admired him and I decided to call on him at Les Collettes, his place at Cagnes. He received me in very friendly fashion and so, after a few more visits, I brought him a few of my paintings, to find out what he thought of them. He looked them over with a somewhat disapproving air. Finally he said, ‘Well, I must speak the truth. I must say I don’t like what you do, for various reasons. I should almost like to say that you’re not really a good painter, or even that you’re a very bad painter. But there’s one thing that prevents me from telling you that. When you put on some black, it stays right there on the canvas. All my life I have been saying that one can’t any longer use black without making a hole in the canvas. It’s not a color. Now, you speak the language of color. Yet you put on
black and you make it stick. So even though I don’t like at all what you do, and my inclination would be to tell you you’re a bad painter, I suppose you are a painter, after all.’ ”
Matisse smiled. “You see, it’s very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows. Little by little, as one goes through life, one creates not only a language for himself, but an aesthetic doctrine along with it. That is, at the same time one establishes for himself the values that he creates, he establishes them, at least to a degree, in an absolute sense. And so it becomes all the more difficult for one to understand a kind of painting whose point of departure lies beyond one’s own point of arrival. It’s something that’s based on completely different foundations. When we arrive on the scene, the movement of painting for a moment contains us, swallows us up, and we add, perhaps, a little link to the chain. Then the movement continues on past us and we are outside it and we don’t understand it any longer.”
Pablo said, with a sarcastic air, “Ah, well, then we pretend to be Buddhists—some of us, at least.” He shook his head. “I don’t agree with you at all,” he said. “And I don’t care whether I’m in a good position to judge what comes after me. I’m against that sort of stuff. As far as these new painters are concerned, I think it is a mistake to let oneself go completely and lose oneself in the gesture. Giving oneself up entirely to the action of painting—there’s something in that which displeases me enormously. It’s not at all that I hold to a rational conception of painting—I have nothing in common, for example, with a man like Poussin—but in any case the unconscious is so strong in us that it expresses itself in one fashion or another. Those are the roots through which the whole human substratum communicates itself from one being to another. Whatever we may do, it expresses itself in spite of us. So why should we deliberately hand ourselves over to it?
Life with Picasso Page 30