Who was the greatest Western artist of the twentieth century? It’s an unfashionable question now, as it has been for nearly five decades. Academics shun such arbitrary ranking and consider more objective questions, rather than indulging in subjective grading. It’s peculiarly hard for the twentieth century too; it might not be unreasonable to proclaim Michelangelo as the greatest of the sixteenth century, but how do we go about comparing Freud with Pollock with Warhol? It’s futile.
Nonetheless, it seems clear that if you were to name the three most important artists (which is not quite the same as greatest) then academics and critics might agree upon Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse. Significantly, all had made their artistic breakthroughs before the end of the Great War, allowing for their influence to percolate through the rest of the century and into ours. They also all worked in Paris, moved in similar circles, exhibited in the same exhibitions, and the three were inspired by the example of Cézanne: to break away from the rigid confines of painting only ‘what you could see’, exposing the fictions of academic art.
Yet from the vantage point of a hundred years on, of this trio, Matisse emerges as the finest, most formally coherent and consistent. If Picasso tailed off in quality after Guernica (1937) and Duchamp became consumed by chess in the nineteen-twenties, never to fully re-engage with art, Matisse stands alone: from his early Fauvist paintings, like the scandalous Woman with a Hat (1905) to the startling, laconic cut-outs of the nineteen-forties, his output was prodigious and luminous.
That’s what makes the new Matisse exhibition at the Royal Academy such a joy. There is little attempt to establish a biographical continuity, or to explain how he continued to exhibit in Vichy Nice during the Second World War. They are questions for another show. What is important is the art and Matisse’s practice of it. As the exhibition title hints, Matisse in the Studio wants to show how his art often sprung from the objects around him, taking inspiration from a diverse set of cultures.
Early on, the curators highlight a marvellous quote from Matisse, taken from a letter he wrote to Surrealist poet Louis Aragon in 1942:
‘I have at last found the object for which I’ve been longing for a whole year. It’s a Venetian baroque chair, silver gilt with tinted varnish like a piece of enamel. You’ve probably seen something like it. When I found it in an antique shop, a few weeks ago I was bowled over. It’s splendid. I’m obsessed with it.’
Here, before the viewers, is the selfsame item, a battered, faded nineteenth-century chair, with a pair of sea serpents’ heads where the arms curve down to the seat. There are a row of paintings and charcoal drawings behind it, showing Matisse’s shifting representations of it, using it as a prop in his still lifes. In one, Rocaille Chair (1946), he represents the chair from a high vantage point, as if we are looking down on it, the arms now sea-green and deploying a flat brass gold for the rest, while the background is a dark matte maroon, folding the background and foreground into one. Not only does this painting emphasise Matisse’s glorious facility with colour (equalled only by Pierre Bonnard), but it points to Matisse’s own guiding artistic ethic: ‘For me, the subject of a picture and its background have the same value… there is no principal feature, only the pattern is important.’ Just as relentlessly formalist as the Cubist Picasso, and sharing many of the same sources of influences in African art, he departs from the orthodoxy of Modernism by his embrace of ornament and pattern, both in colour and line.
This becomes apparent in the most successful gallery of the exhibition, ‘The Studio as Theatre’. The antiseptic white walls of the Royal Academy’s Sackler Wing are antithetical to trying to summon the spirit of an artist’s studiolo, and the placing of Chinese porcelain, totemic figures from Gabon, and French chocolate pots besides their painted representations are not wholly successful. Yet in the penultimate gallery, covering Matisse’s Middle Eastern fantasias, an extraordinary series of women posing as odalisques, surrounded by rich, polychrome tiles and North African textiles, the show comes together. Matisse had visited Algeria in 1906 and spent consecutive winters in 1912 and 1913 in Morocco, collecting furniture and objets d’art, learning the deep lessons of Islamic art.
The gallery creates a set Matisse may have recognised (the fittings are all his): a large, nineteenth-century screen on the back wall, a small, eight-sided ornate painted table known as a guéridon from Algeria, and a Moroccan chair. Buttressing the artefacts are the paintings themselves, including The Moorish Screen (1921), a stunning work of two women in a domestic interior wearing Western clothes but in Arabian surroundings. The palette is astonishing, the line work delicate, his deft handling of the painting’s innerspace and swathes of patterned paint almost comparable to wallpaper. But it is glorious wallpaper, of the type you have never seen before and you will never see again.
It is a relief, after such orgiastic beauty, to leave the gallery and see the cool, clarity of Matisse’s cut-outs, their bold shapes and blocks of colour a reduction in form which cleanses the palette after the complexity of the previous visual effects. It prepares us to return to a duller, greyer world, for we cannot see our world with Henri Matisse’s eyes, and that is our tragedy. Whatever the curatorial weaknesses may be, this exhibition is essential in the sense that great beauty is essential to all our lives and we need to be able to revel in it. Go.
Matisse in the Studio is on at the Royal Academy until 12th November, 2017.
Trump’s team of failures are running out of time
There is, perhaps, no more fitting analogy for the Trump administration than the rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci. Day one: controversially hired as Communications Director. Day five: ranting, nonsensical, abuse-filled phone call to CNN. Day ten: fired.
Scaramucci’s incompetence was so dramatic that there is already talk of a Hollywood film deal. This episode demonstrates a consistent trend within the Trump administration; you have to be desperate to consider working there and unqualified to be considered. There has been a slow purge of competence under the guise of “draining the swamp”, Reince Priebus, an establishment Republican, was banished from the White House by the demands of white nationalist Steve Bannon and the now banished Scaramucci.
The President’s staff are – with perhaps two or three exceptions – all horrific choices. A former Doctor with no government experience is Housing Director, a man who wanted to abolish the Department of Energy is now leading said department, and a pro-segregation Southern lawyer with a history of outspoken racism is Attorney General. When the most competent members of the cabinet are an oil baron at Secretary of State and a general literally nicknamed ‘Mad Dog’, it’s eminently clear that something has gone very, very wrong.
This inability to secure even a shred of professionalism extends to legislation as well as individuals. Four separate Obamacare repeal bills, each one more disastrous, poorly constructed and controversial than the last, have failed. Despite being the soundbite of his candidacy, the much lauded “wall” has yet to emerge in any sense. The divisive and discriminatory limits on Muslims entering the US have been smacked down time and time again. From the evidence thus far, it would appear that the only saving grace of America’s disastrous president is his almost impressive inability to get anything done.
Yet the worst part of this unique series of failures is that it’s becoming normal. Every day I wake up to see ‘Trump Advisor Under Investigation’, ‘Journalists Attacked by Trump Spokesperson’ or some other depressing variation of a similar vein. When George W. Bush was in office, he was the subject of daily ridicule and his policies were decried as reactionary, but even he ensured that those hired had experience, and passed legislation after months of development. When Ronald Reagan revealed that he had lied to the American people about selling arms to terrorist groups, he arranged a special broadcast – not to attack or berate the journalists that revealed the truth – but to acknowledge, at least in a roundabout way, his own crimes. These men are both Republicans who embody a brand of self-serving American Conservatism which I find cruel and cynical to say the least. Yet even they possessed two qualities that Donald Trump fundamentally lacks: a bare amount of common decency and a shred of competence.
Unfortunately, it would seem that Donald Trump is starting to change the way we think. The barrage of headlines, the attempts to invalidate or obscure reports from places such as CNN or the Washington Post, the brash and cruel personal attacks, are all building to a fundamental shift in how politicians act. Gone is the civil behaviour of the past; the dignified letter that Bush left for Clinton at the beginning of the latter’s presidency or the friendly rivalry of McCain and Obama. In their place there is the bitter and divisive mantra of Trumpism.
All of this is beginning to strain the President. As of writing he is currently hiding away on a 17-day holiday, adding to the 40 days of golf trips he has already indulged himself in. The Secretary of State is considering resignation, the investigation into his Russian ties is not only gaining steam but has assembled a Grand Jury to begin the stages of prosecution. Never, in the history of the United States, has a President been such a lame duck, so close to impeachment and so hated within his own party – all within a mere six months of taking office. The Trump Administration is circling the drain, but we mustn’t allow it to drag America down with it.
When historians rank America’s leaders, George W. Bush generally appears in the bottom five of all 45 presidents, Reagan in the top quarter, and George Bush Senior somewhere in between. Donald Trump, however, has a reserved place at the bottom of the pile. Alongside historical disasters such as James Buchanan – who helped start the Civil War – and the utterly corrupt Warren G. Harding, Trump will languish as one of the great national mistakes. He is unique, at least in the modern age, in just how incompetent he is – but we cannot let Donald Trump change America or what we should consider the fundamentals of politics. To do so may result in this era of Trumpism lasting long after his years in office.