 I wanted to start, can everybody hear me okay? I wanted to start just with a thanks to Martha Lucy, Sylvie Patry for the invitation to speak here and also to Alia Palimbo for all of her work helping to get me ready for this. It is really an honor for me to be speaking in front of this group of people, partly because Philadelphia has a sort of special place in my heart. It was the first place I lived after I left my hometown but also this room is filled with so many people who have been my teachers and who still are my teachers and of course it feels good to be welcomed into your company and to have your attention. So this talk originally was going to be about the Barnes Dance mural and this is because I'm working on trying to work out a dissertation project on later Matisse, Matisse in the 30s and I had thought I'll start at the beginning the Barnes Dance kind of inaugurates the whole period and this talk would sort of jump start everything. So I developed a whole theory about the Barnes Dance. I thought it looked really good and I thought what'll really clinch it is to show the exhibition of paintings he did right after it and I'll point to the legacy of all my ideas and it'll really be convincing. And I got my hands on photographs of that exhibition which I hadn't seen before and it was like the house of cards fell down and what was really interesting was this other show that I hadn't really looked at carefully that I hadn't heard much about in the literature and which I'm still kind of trying to get over. So what this talk is is a first pass at trying to deal with this show which I think is really not known well enough. So let's take two works by Matisse. One from the period of radical decoration before World War I, one from the 1930s. If we can find our view of these works to the way they're structured, they may seem very much the same. Both works exemplify a variety of drawing that divides the overall surface into differently qualified compartments of pure flat color. But from a historical point of view, they are not the same. In the case of Matisse, when he did it the first time, he was a relatively young man and it was a radical way of working. 30 years later, he was older, working in a different context and the meaning of the method was inevitably bound up with the earlier iteration. How Matisse regarded this return is well documented. The most outstanding thing to look at is a statement he gave to his friend Terriad which was published in the October 1936 issue of Minotaur alongside reproductions of recent paintings including the window at Tahiti II. Starting with what appears to be an oblique reference of his refined or conservative early niece period, he says, when the means of expression have become so refined, so attenuated that their power of expression wears thin, it is necessary to return to the essential principles that made human language. These are after all the principles that go back, that restore, that give us life. Pictures that have become refinements, subtle degradations, disolutions without energy, call for, and here he seems to refer to his recent work, beautiful blues, beautiful reds, beautiful yellows, materials to stir the sensual depths in men. This is the starting point of fovism, the courage to return to the purity of the means. A little later on, to ground these oblique references in concrete reality, he adds, in my latest paintings, I have united the acquisitions of the last 20 years, that is, back to the start of the early niece period, to my essential core, to my very essence, which is implicitly fovism. I'm sorry, I don't have any water up here, or there is water. All that's to say for Matisse, the return was a great triumph. Now Matisse is part of his own reception history. He may be the earliest viewer, and the one most intimately acquainted with his work, but he was not the only viewer, and the context of interpretation was not entirely his to decide. One of the things I'd like to do in this talk is try and recover something of the early context of interpretation for works of the 1930s, so that we may see for ourselves how these works may have been seen at the time, and even what Matisse was responding to, or interpreting, when he wrote that statement for Minotaur. To do this, I propose to focus on one of the earliest and most significant historical situations in which Matisse's return, what we might call his neophobism, made itself known. The exhibition Recent Works by Henri Matisse, which ran at the Paul Rosenberg Gallery in Paris for May 2nd to the 30th, 1936. One of the other things I'd like to do is just bring this exhibition more into the mainstream of discussion about Matisse's art. The Dance Murals for the Barnes Foundation easily qualify as an earlier moment in the rolling out of Matisse's neophobism. The dance is the work that inaugurates this whole period, but think of the mural's visibility in the 1930s. The Barnes mural went straight from Matisse's studio into the foundation, which granted very limited access to its collections. The alternate Paris mural stayed in Matisse's studio, and reproductions, all in black and white, only appeared in a handful of magazines. The 1936 show at Rosenberg's is a huge contrast. This was a genuinely public event taking place in a major metropolis, and an opportunity for the public to see a large body of work with the capacity to contextualize individual works in a way that does not or could not occur with a single large painting like the dance. It was moreover the first show in which a large body of Matisse's neophobial easel paintings appeared anywhere. All of which is a roundabout way of saying the Rosenberg show is where Matisse's neophobism most powerfully entered the public sphere. Under the circumstances, you might think this show would figure prominently in the literature on Matisse's work in the 1930s. In that case, you would be mistaken. The show has hardly ever been discussed in much detail. Why this is the case is hard to say, but an important factor is surely the accessibility of images. Installation photos have rarely or perhaps never been published until now. I wanna show you the group of photos from the archive of the Paul Rosenberg Foundation in New York, which the foundation has kindly allowed me to share with you. These photos are what first excited me about this topic and what bring the show to life. This is the long wall of the main paintings gallery. Most familiar probably is the large reclining nude or pink nude second from the left. It didn't yet belong to Edith Cohen at this point. She bought it from the show. Matisse thought very highly of this painting and today it's generally considered one of the most outstanding of the mid-30s. One of the things that's intriguing about the photo that got me intrigued about the show is that it's paired with an obscure work on the right side. One that seems almost slapdash and in general the nude doesn't any more jump out as a special painting. Of course that may be a function of the photo or the installation and on that note I should say it's unclear to what extent if any Matisse determined the actual installation. Documents I've read suggest he didn't arrive in Paris from Nice until two weeks into the run of the show. If he did determine anything, it would have been by mail. I suspect he was fine letting Rosenberg install the show in his usual style. The installation here with pictures in a line is typical of other shows Rosenberg had in these years. Probably Matisse felt that the body of work he submitted cohered well enough as an ensemble that one could install it variously within Rosenberg's conventions without creating any problem. According to Lydia de Lector Skye's catalog of Matisse's art in this period, the central painting worked on for a long time was among the last to be completed. In a letter from early in its development Matisse refers to it as a fawn playing the flute to a sleeping faunesse. The catalog of the show calls it simply love your juror and all the titles and dates I'm giving here are the ones that appeared in the catalog except translated into English. The painting is better known in its current state after further painting campaigns from 1937 to about 43 and it is often thought to be unfinished. I don't find good evidence however for thinking of the painting as unfinished at this earlier time. On the contrary Matisse exhibited the painting. The catalog doesn't include any special caption or qualification and it was reproduced with Matisse's permission in the issue of Minotaur mentioned already. I won't go through every painting right now, we'd be here forever. But I should also point out these trios of small paintings including one nude with blue necklace that is one of two works purchased from the show by Albert Barnes. This is a, whoop, yeah, that's it. These belong to a series of about 11 paintings on wood panel all very small that Matisse started just before the show opened and continued to work on into the summer in Paris. These have not garnered much critical attention over the years with the notable exception of an entry in the new catalog of Matisse and the Barnes Foundation. But these paintings were thought by some at the time to be among the best works in the show. Mary Hutchinson, the partner of Clive Bell who came to have her portrait drawn by Matisse while the show was on view, wrote back to her son in England mentioning only these pictures. I'll give you the full view again. She wrote, he is now painting little tiny brilliant pictures like jewels. There are several in his show just larger than the side of a book. A woman's head, a figure with stripes and flowers but unbelievably brilliant and fitted into the space. An anonymous reviewer for art news who is notably underwhelmed by the medium and large sized canvases calling them impersonal and outmoded. She too felt nevertheless that the small canvases were outstanding examples of quote, brilliant coloring and almost barbaric sense of design. Why Matisse went small is addressed in the Barnes catalog entry. Kate or Karen Butler suggests he was extending one of the lessons he relearned in the course of the dance mural project that is one can as Barnett Newman later said, transcend size for the sake of scale. As to the strange choice of wood panel I suspected had to do with his observation that one can paint very lightly on wood and still achieve very dense rich colors. In 1941 in what seems to be Matisse's only recorded remark about oil on wood paintings, he told Pierre Cordeon quote, there are very rich paintings like those of Cézanne and others very lightly painted that have real density all the same. The Rubens painting on wood in the roof portrait of Alain Fourment and her children is painted mainly in colored oils yet how deep and solid the colors seem. This is another wall of the same paintings gallery at Rosenberg's probably adjacent to the long wall. The dream is in the center. From a technical standpoint, this is a strange work, especially coming as it does in the wake of the barn's dance mural where as you may recall, the surface is divided into compartments each with a single flat hue. We can see that Matisse follows the procedure he noted down in Delecture Sky's album of these years. He said to her, in the picture of the sleeping woman, I attempt to introduce a second tint into the surface, one which does not divide it. I've already found one for the blue and it remains for me to look for the pink. Isn't it simply tint upon tint? This allows me to enrich my color by increasing the volume of each color. Trying to sort of underscore with the oil on wood paintings is painting the diversity of processes that kind of kaleidoscope of process that is characteristic of this show. Flanking the dream, we find Le Javel Bleu and a painting that does not appear in the catalog at right, the flowered hat. Because it doesn't appear in the catalog, I don't know if this was an oversight or it was included at the last minute. In any case, a lot was at stake from Matisse in the inclusion of these two works much more than you might think. To give you a sense of it, I have to relate some behind the scenes drama. In March, 1935, when Matisse's work for this show was already several months underway, Pierre Matisse wrote a letter to his father in which he said, I continue not to like the two brilliantly colored pictures, Le Javel Bleu and Le Chapeau Fleury. And I greatly preferred the great, the grand expression of the large reclining nude. Matisse's complex and sort of rambling response is written in an extraordinary letter that will come up again and again in this talk, dated July 11th, 1935, from Beauvezet, a vacation spot in the French Alps. Matisse said in response, as to the two brilliantly colored canvases, they are the beginning of a group that I propose to do in an afternoon like I do my drawings with line. So as to conceive by color as I'm conceiving my line. What I find in these two canvases is the subtle use of the expression of colors and their mutual reactions. I would be very content if someone versed enough in the usage of strong colors gives me his impression. It's always necessary to judge things according to their goal and their future. The artist doesn't only do masterpieces, especially, and this seems to be sort of acknowledging that these are not exactly masterpieces. Artist doesn't only do masterpieces, especially if he doesn't establish himself in a manner that he has only to perfect, but works for the spirit free enough not to reject without tests, all the suggestions that come to him during his work. I've always been this way, even if it's a defect. I couldn't get away from it. Why don't you show them to Miro? I'm not embarrassed of my work as it is sincere. I hide nothing. I have to keep doing the rest of my exposition in this spirit. The implications that for Matisse, these paintings were part of an experiment to bring the method of making rapid pen and ink drawings into the realm of painting. They assisted for the vulnerability that was the price of making better paintings at other times, and they were perhaps the touchstone for the development of this whole show. The last two walls of the painting gallery at Rosenbergs were probably on either side of a door. They're anchored by works in the catalog called Window at Tahiti Oil and Window at Tahiti Distemper, though I tend to call them for simplicity's sake, Tahiti One and Tahiti Two. The larger painting to the left of Tahiti One was Albert Barnes's other purchase from the show, reclining nude with blue eyes. Beyond this gallery, there were two other rooms. One was installed with charcoal drawings, most of which feature motifs that appeared with some variations in the paintings gallery. The other room presented a selection of rapidly executed pen and ink drawings of the kind he had shown with pride at slightly earlier exhibitions in Paris and London. These would continue to be major emissaries of his neofovism as the year went on. He had a different selection of them published in a special issue of Kaidar. I hope I haven't exhausted you too quickly with this annotated inventory. I'm about halfway through at this point. When I consider this entire body of work together, in my mind's eye, what strikes me first maybe is the diversity of the deployment of the same few traditional artistic means. There are paintings that are rough and agitated like Love or Deer, works that are very dense and suave, like the Pink Nude. Works where color and contour are absolutely harmonized, like Tahiti II. And works where line and color, drawing and painting operate in dynamic counterpoint. A good example of the last type is figure sur fond verdure, which hangs directly to the right of la verdure. There are also paintings made very quickly emulating the way he makes pen drawings, like the flowered hat. And there are other small paintings with dense, heavy colors. What sort of meaning could be ascribed to this diversity? Although we're seeking to get beyond Matisse's perspective on Matisse, the artist's own words are worth revisiting. In the Beauvezé letter on the subject of the flowered hat, he said to Pierre, when he said that the artist doesn't only do masterpieces, he added, if he doesn't establish himself in a manner, as if he doesn't work in a way that's like perfecting a style, but rather works with the spirit free enough not to reject, without tests, the suggestions that come to him during his work. The last part is a description of how he thought he worked and how he had to keep doing the rest of the exhibition. You could call it, if you want, procedural logical determinism, that it's a kind of feedback loop that he puts down something on the canvas and responds to it. What he doesn't quite clarify is that this way of working had developed in the years of radical declaration before World War II. And it works according to the principle that his art is a matter of expression. It is not a moment of nature, as you would say, but a moment of the artist, to put it another way. As he paints, he responds to the work on the canvas and is released of the emotion that started the work along the way. It seems to me this idea is crucial to the structure of the show. To be sure, the ensemble makes a theme, even a massive demonstration of the idea. One of the key instruments of this demonstration is the window at Tahiti. A viewer at this exhibition would see the first iteration of it and a second transposed to a different color, or a color harmony. She would then see it in the background of four different paintings of women and it takes a minute to see, I think, especially with the portrait, how what seems to be the chair that she's leaning on actually kind of doubles as a balustrade from one of the Tahiti paintings. And then you would see the Tahiti again in this odd and deeply underrated painting paired with the pink nude interior of the studio, which is a kind of third-person diagram or allegory of the activity in Matisse's studio. One sees in this painting, the interior of the studio, one sees Tahiti, one of the paintings of a woman in front of Tahiti, specifically the blue dress, and then the artist and his model in the pose of Michelangelo's dying slave in front of that model. Each time the repetition amplifies the point that he cannot or will not do a moment of nature. It's always a moment of the artist and he's always changing. So each time Tahiti comes back, it's to use a phrase he liked before World War I, it has to be reconceived according to his feelings. What you see, especially in the women in studio paintings, is that he's actually describing his own work, become his model. He responds to it in the same way he responds to an external being or a part of nature, and it's available to him as a vehicle for his emotions for that reason. That's also to say every mark, every picture that he exteriorizes is for him available as nature, something that prompts him to emotions and propels his expressive work forward. A second set of paintings amplifies this already exceedingly amplified point, paintings of his female model, and here I'm showing just a sampling. A number of these have a humorous tone once you see them in light of the idea that his work is a moment of the artist. They very flamboyantly demonstrate that the model can be in any state. She doesn't have to be posing per se, she could be caught by surprise or resting because the work is about his feelings about her, and his feelings, unlike his female models, are always ready, always coming of their own accord. In the context of the exhibition, these works, and again in interior of the studio, they demonstrate quite clearly that the woman is analogous to the finished work of art in the studio. Both are things outside himself, forms of nature that serve as stimuli to emotions and vehicles for his emotions. So the model group replays the feedback loop between the artist and his finished painting that we saw with Tahiti, as a feedback loop between the artist and his quote, unquote, servant woman, presumably because it's, I say this, she seems to be sort of characterized as a servant, that his model of modeling is the slave. The place where the demonstration of Matisse's working method climaxes is perhaps the painting at the center of the large wall, Loverger. When you see this painting in the context of the show, you can rapidly gather how all of the artist's various techniques, his arrangements with the model, and so on, could be condensed into a single work. Not incidentally, this was the last painting he worked on before the exhibition, with the exception of the oil on wood paintings. Everything comes together here. It's like the emblem or cover of a mammoth handbook on Matisse's artistic process. As to what you can rapidly gather, follow me on this topic for a minute or two more. Loverger is next to a painting of a model resting in an armchair. In this situation, one can see that the artist's view over the model is analogous to the satyr's view over the fawn. You can also see Loverger in tandem with the pink nude. There, it's not so obviously the emotion that's carried over. It's the nude's pose that's almost dragged and dropped, left, right, reversed, as one can easily do with cut paper, which is what Matisse used to work out the pink nude at some points. And then you could trace the name figure back even further to charcoal drawings that study the motif or model of the pink nude academically from different sides. The implicit lesson seems to be that he charges himself up with emotions in one painting or situation, and then deposits them in another. This is, in fact, exactly what he tells Pierre in his letter from Beauvezet, quote, the drawings in charcoal, the nudes, are my studies. It's my way of regarding my subject to enrich myself with emotions, to brim with sensations that allow me to compose things like the reclining nude that you prefer. And I beg you to believe that the drawing is not easy because it's traditional. In the show, one might observe too that like interior of the studio, Loverger is a kind of third person diagram of how he understands the making of his art, here in outrageously polarized, gendered, and mythical terms, which echo across both canvases. Self-sufficiency identified with masculinity is one of the major themes across this whole show. Matisse demonstrates again and again that he doesn't need anything really except his own works of art, productions that become nature or models, inspiring further productions. But I wanna suggest, and I regret that this hasn't emerged more naturally from my discussion, that this is a kind of pose that works repeatedly reach out, not just to a general public, but to the surrealists in particular. In support of this hypothesis, let me point out quickly, as my time is winding down, some of my evidence, most of which has actually already come up. The Sleeping Woman, given the unusually poetic title of the dream, invokes one of the central subject matters of the surrealist movement, as Jack Flam has noted. When Matisse writes to Pierre in defense of Ligebeau Bleu and the flowered hat, he suggests to him, why not show it to Miro? The self-perpetuating process I've been talking about, based on a feedback loop between artist and model, evokes automatic operations, such as automatic writing and drawing. And lastly, Matisse's announcement that he had returned to the starting point of fovism appeared in Minotaur, a surrealist-affiliated journal. It's when you hold on to this implicit audience that alternative historical terms for thinking about these works emerge most vividly. Just think how this show would have looked to a surrealist figure like Miro or Breton. The show would have had the tone, I believe, of the letter Matisse sent to Pierre, himself a dealer of surrealist art in New York. A tone that is defensive, but also didactic, even, I think, maybe authoritarian. The part of the Beauvezet that always, the Beauvezet letter that always gets me is when he says, to repeat, the artist doesn't only do masterpieces. I'm not embarrassed of my work as it is sincere. I hide nothing. I have to keep doing the rest of my exhibition in this spirit. I haven't presented myself as a great artist, accomplished or not. I am as I am, after having tried to develop myself in all senses. To me, it's like he's not hearing himself. He admits to doing non-masterpieces at the same time he refers to himself grandly in the third person as the artist. Then he says he doesn't present himself as a grand artist, only to shift into a statement evoking both God the Father and the litigator out of arguments, I am as I am. Under the circumstances, I wonder, would it be reasonable to think that in the 1930s, Matisse recovered the bold primary color language of phobism as a language of authority, rooted in temporal priority over surrealism, partly to protest his artistic eclipse? Or to put the question differently, did neo-phobism harness the once radical language of phobism to a conservative agenda? Or again, to use the language of Romy Golan, was neo-phobism a reactionary modernism? Think one more time of the extreme repetition or amplification of certain lessons in the show, the artist's strenuous protesting of his self-sufficiency, the zeal and completeness with which he elaborates what I've called a mammoth handbook of how to make a Matisse. This could be creative exuberance, the evidence of a great artistic renewal, but could it also be indicative of a crisis? My intuition sometimes is that Matisse has made this vast handbook of his process because he suspects there won't be others working like him in the future. The way his art worked, how it was used, the grammar, the syntax, the vocabulary in some sense, it seems like it's all being catalogued for posterity as one does when a language seems to be in decline or dying. This is only an intuition, one that I'd like to talk about after this talk, I hope, will be possible, because I'm not sure how far I want to go forward with it as an argument. But by way of conclusion, let me just point out again that the river of time, the idea that the artist can't repeat himself because he's always becoming a different person, was one of the hallmarks of the period of radical decoration for World War I. So if in the 30s, Matisse didn't credibly return to the ethos of phobism, he was still paradoxically and unintentionally reconnecting with one principle of his younger self, as Heraclitus put it, you can never step into the same river twice. It's not the same river and you're not the same man. Thank you.