The
Egyptian Curtain
(oil on canvas, 1948)
The
Phillips Collection, Washington
Still
Life Painting
Henri
Matisse was one of the great masters of 20th century art.
Artists are usually seen as people of their own time who
reflect the world they live in. Not so Matisse. He lived
through an age of unprecedented technological growth that
totally reshaped the world in the 20th century. Matisse
also witnessed some of humanity's darkest moments: two
world wars, the holocaust and the dropping of the atomic
bomb to name but a few. Yet despite his exposure to this
era of uncertainty and change, there is nowhere in his
work that can you find any hint of protest, or an ideological
stance, or even any reference to the momentous events
of his time. His art is oblivious to the problems of the
world and he retreats behind the walls of his artistic
vision to a sheltered haven where only a sense of comfort
and joy exist. Matisse said that he wanted his art to
have the same effect as a comfortable armchair on a tired
businessman and many of the paintings he left us seem
to be the view from that armchair. 'The Egyptian Curtain'
is one such view.
‘The
Egyptian Curtain’
is a wonderful painting whose colour radiates sunshine.
Matisse understood that the more you reduced and simplified
the drawing of an image, the more you could increase the
expressive power of its colour. He would extract a few
of the key colours from a scene and use them to intensify
our experience of the subject. Matisse also realised that
the simplification of his drawing and the looseness of
his brushwork added to the joy and vitality of the work.
Although
'The Egyptian Curtain' is a simplified and stylised image,
it is still an accurate reflection of the way we look
at things. If you stand inside a room on a sunny day and
stare through the window at something outside, your eyes
become adjusted to the brightness of the sunlight. Then,
when you turn to look at something inside the room, you
are partially blinded while your eyes adjust to the change
of light. By contrasting the sunlit objects in 'The Egyptian
Curtain' with its dark interior, Matisse uses the same
optical phenomenon to increase the luminance of his colour
to an extreme pitch. The palm outside explodes in a sunburst
against the black window frame and the vitality of its
brushstrokes emphasises the energy of its light. This
colourful drama continues inside the room through contrast
of the fruit bowl and curtain with the dark interior.
The
tone and colour of the painting, elements traditionally
used by artists to describe form and depth, are simplified
and flattened to amplify their expressive power. To counterbalance
this abstraction, Matisse returns to traditional methods
in order to define the organisation of space in the painting.
The illusion of depth is conveyed by the shape of the
table, the ellipse on the bowl of fruit and the suggestion
of a wall to the left of the window, whose angles all
roughly conform to the rules of perspective
drawing.
Depth
is further suggested by the scale and position of the
objects in relation to one another. The curtain, which
is the largest object and emblazoned with the boldest
shapes, fills the foreground of the picture. It overlaps
both the table and the window indicating that it is the
nearest object to the viewer. The position of the window
as the highest object in the picture suggests that it
is in the background and subsequently the fruit bowl and
table take up the middle ground. The tone and colour of
the painting may have been flattened for expressive effect
but its shapes are arranged in a hierarchical order to
allow a spatial reading of the work.
Matisse
was one of the leaders of 'Les
Fauves' - a group of artists who enjoyed painting
pictures with outrageously bold colours. The title 'Les
Fauves' which meant 'wild beasts' in French was coined
by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles who was amused by the
exaggerated colour in their art. However, the artistic
establishment of the day were offended by their paintings
as they respected control and restraint in the use of
colour. 'Les Fauves' believed that colour had a spiritual
quality which linked directly to your emotions and they
loved to use it at its highest possible pitch . The
function of colour in their paintings was not to describe
their subject matter, but to express the artist's feelings
about it. Their ideas liberated the use of colour for
future generations of artists who ultimately explored
colour as an abstract subject in its own right.
Henri
Matisse Notes
