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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Matisse in the Car

posted by on October 10 at 13:31 PM

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I recently discovered these paintings by Matisse, the only ones he made from the interior of a car, and I can’t get them out of my mind. They were made in 1917 and 1925 respectively. [I found them in Lawrence Wechsler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (Christopher Frizzelle loves The Convergence Contest) and on the Cleveland Museum of Art web site (damn, its collection is a glorious time-suck).]

I didn’t know Matisse ever painted from inside a car. Far more common are his views of hotel rooms with open windows (he often used a hotel room as his studio), and in the reviews I’ve found of the car pictures, they’re compared with the hotel scenes, both discussed as refuge pictures—pictures in which the artist and the viewer consider calmly the world beyond from the safe haven of a private enclosure.

But these cars seem anything but a safe haven. Aside from the framing, the car and the hotel pictures are totally different. The car scenes are cramped and anxious, especially the one made in 1917; you can almost feel the other cars zooming uncomfortably by, as if they were too close, even though they’re absent from the pictures. Anxiety is not a state often associated with Matisse, so it’s particularly intriguing to find it. Did he drive? I don’t know. According to the Cleveland Museum of Art, the 1917 picture was made with his son at the wheel. The two were enacting the reverse of what would become an American (chiefly American, that is) teenage ritual. Strange to traverse through a single artist—remember Matisse’s Bathersfrom ancient culture to suburban high-school parking lot.

RSS icon Comments

1

Thank you for posting; I hadn't seen them before and I'm a Matisee fan.

It's weird how even then, the outside world looks like TV when you are in a car.

Posted by stephanie | October 10, 2006 1:47 PM
2

I suspect his "refuge" paintings had more to do with relative lightness and darkness in regards to painting, so the same would be true with these car paintings. and as he never stopped working I doubt he took these seriously...as for evoking "anxiety" ...um...(you're projecting?) his feelings were never emotional, but always sensual. his subjective paintings tended to be for horny old men and $$$.

Posted by nipper | October 10, 2006 1:57 PM
3

Also a Mistress Matisse fan. She has KSAs that I hardly dared imagine.

Posted by Mistress Oprah Milhous | October 10, 2006 2:49 PM
4

Nipper: Fair enough on the refuge stuff, but anxiety is the most sensual of emotions. (And where is the line between feeling and feeling?)

Posted by Jen Graves | October 10, 2006 3:13 PM
5

There's a great 'creative non-fiction' story in a Paris Review a couple issues back about the first big Paris-Marseille car race around the turn of the century. People were getting killed by the hour because many rural peasants had never seen a car before and by the time they figured out to get out of the street (for use by pedestrians, bicyclists and flocks) they were killed. The president of France shut the race down before it even ended. There's a common sense in that, and in these pictures that has been entirely erased. Look at the responses to the post about Steinbrueck to see how car-mad we are. And 9/11 was a drop in the blood-bucket of how many people are killed by cars, (and by the by products of their manufacture) every year.

Posted by Grant Cogswell | October 10, 2006 3:14 PM
6

Thanks for this, Jen (I really appreciate the thoughtful stuff you post here). This forces me to adjust my understanding of Matisse. As for anxiety in the images, I also find them cramped, but more as a sort of applied control: the windows act as frames for the landscape. I guess that's in part what Stephanie meant...

Posted by heather | October 10, 2006 4:13 PM
7

The difference between emotional feelings and visual feelings is...emotions direct our moods, or how we FEEL, and vision as a sense, is a way to FEEL whats in front of your eyes. Your eyes feel/sense like your hands, but with light (and thats all they do, your brain names objects, not your eyes)!

Anxiety is an emotional reaction, or feeling (real, remembered or imagined) to a threat (the MOST sensual? could be, like if you're about to die). And it only takes a moment to feel anxious if you see some THING that might trigger your anxiety. Let's say you see...a hated ex-BF, the Tacoma Dome (natch! HA!), OR a tiny road seen in a Matisse painting...and if you HATE tiny roads you might get anxious and uncomfortable imagining youself and Matisse bumping around, like BJ & the Bear. And that is some scary shit!

Posted by nipper | October 10, 2006 5:23 PM
8

From these painting, it looks like you're advocating for the boulevard replacement of the viaduct.

I'd have anxiety too if I were trying to paint while driving.

Posted by him | October 11, 2006 11:07 AM

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