Matisse: ‘the object is an actor’
It seems like we've had a run of repeat big-name retrospectives recently. Giacometti at the NPG and Tate Modern, Hockney at the RA and Tate Britain, and Matisse at Tate Modern and now the RA. You might be left wondering why another Matisse show is necessary after the Tate's fabulous collection of his cut-outs in 2014, but Matisse in his Studio in the RA Sackler galleries brings a wonderful new dimension to his work.
Readers of this blog will know that I'm a sucker for both material culture and historic house museums, so a show that looks at the objects that Matisse had in his studio is bound to appeal to me. And what objects he had: a voluptuous Venetian 19th-century rococo chair - all silver shells and curling dolphins - a pair of Jomooniw male and female figures from Mali, an Islamic Haiti wall hanging, delftware imitation Chinese porcelain. Across four rooms, his works are brought together that revolve around and repeatedly represent these objects, in drawing, painting, collage and sculpture.
For Matisse, objects were actors that could play many parts in his works. In the first room, a green glass vase appears almost completely different in the two paintings that flank it. In the second room, a wonderful sketch piece shows him trying out how a repeated simple pen drawing of his extravagant hot chocolate pot looks against different coloured patches of paint. In the third, he models a bronze nude in response to African wooden figures, and the bronze in turn appears in his painting.
The exhibition shows clearly how much Matisse was influenced by the non-European objects and images increasingly available in France. There are the now deeply troubling 'ethnographic' soft-porn photographs of African women, which Matisse turned into sculpture. There are stern African masks that influenced how he represented faces, both on paper and in bronze. There are the Islamic tables, textiles and heaters which are as fundamental to his odalisque paintings as the female sitters. And there are the panels of Chinese script that have such a compelling relationship with his late cut-outs. Mimosa must, incidentally, be one of my favourite works in all of art, with its perfect combination of collage and frame.
I'll admit that I did expect there to be more 'stuff'. The exhibition makes good use of photographs showing Matisse in his studio surrounded by a profusion of objects and images, assembled in all their idiosyncratic glory. I'd have liked more of a sense of this profusion in the show, which largely kept the images and objects displayed at standard eye level and carefully separated on white walls and plinths. Of course only so many of Matisse's own objects were available, but a little more immersive design might have made a big difference here in evoking the studio. This is especially in contrast to the sculpture shelf outside of the galleries, which is now brimming with a rich mass of works curated by RA Richard Deacon .
That only goes to show, however, how compelling the show's argument is for how much his studio contents were at the heart of Matisse's practice: the objects as central to his artistic theatre as any of his better-known human models.