MATISSE IN THE STUDIO Royal Academy of Arts, until 12 Nov MATISSE IN THE STUDIO (original) (raw)

2017, Times Literary Supplement

The belief that even ordinary objects can unlock a person or period is hugely popular with both academics and the wider public. The most famous example is Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in a Hundred Objects, but there are countless books with titles like The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, Wittgenstein's Poker and Flaubert's Parrot. Just as the naturalist Georges Cuvier claimed to be able to reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone, so every self-respecting New Historicist or Thing Theorist can see a world in a shawl, cushion or hat. Matisse in the Studio is the latest manifestation of this contemporary cult of (mostly) small things. A resident repertory cast of studio props, ranging from pots and furniture to textiles and sculptures, is juxtaposed with the paintings in which they appear, and for which they are assumed to be not just fillers but catalysts. The exhibition implies that Matisse is even more in love with humble, handmade and homemade objects than he is with his more transient female models, and keeps the same objects with him wherever he goes, like a child's soft toy collection. The rationale for the show is statements made by Matisse in the 1940s-" I have worked all my life before the same objects. " " The object is always there. It's your feeling that hooks you in. " " The object is an actor. A good actor can have a part in ten different plays ". Many of these props are non-western, acquired from Parisian dealers and in Morocco, but few were expensive collectibles. The exhibition offers " an intimate invitation to the creative process ". Crucial to the success of Matisse's best pictures, however, is the realisation we can never really possess the painted objects, or reach out and hold them. Once Matissified they become, at the very least, passive-aggressive. Even in the early, Chardin-inspired Still-Life with Peaches (1895) the glass of water in the foreground is on the corner of the table, with a cut lemon perched precariously beside it, so that any effort to take the glass would topple the bitter fruit. Chardin is hospitable, so that the handle of a knife will overhang the front of a table, requesting our hand. Here the handles of a spoon and coffee pot face away. Matisse's still-lives are traps for the unwary, obstacle courses for the clumsy. A voluptuous silver gilt chocolate pot received as a wedding gift in 1898 variously becomes livid, phosphorescent, spoutless; while the projecting pole handle, turned on a lathe, is phallic and weapon-like (in a fascinating sheet of colour studies, the pot appears alongside a heron, with its rapier beak). In Bouquet of Flowers in a Chocolate Pot (1902), the pot is brutally repurposed, with a garish bunch of flowers stuffed unceremoniously into it: they explode from the pot's mouth, forcing the lid back, as if being vomited. In Interior with Young Girl Reading (1905-6), the pot appears lidless and dalek-like on the dining table where the girl sits reading. The girl's absorption, face bowed down low over her book, is intensified by the cacophanous pyrotechnics of colour that surrounds and shapes her. It is a domestic version of Goya's The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters, with the girl as the table-top sleeper, and the chocolate pot as presiding owl or cat (Matisse said Goya gave him " the gift of life "). It is hard not to assume that the often violent dysfunctionality of this prized wedding gift is a comment on marriage and domestic life. With its combination of sensuousness and malice, Matisse's chocolate pot feels like the parent of Giacometti's surrealist Disagreeable Object. By comparison, even a Cubist guitar seems reassuring and stable.