 Thank you. I think that Alistair's paper on my own will fit together rather nicely. I want to congratulate the authors of the catalogue. This is too loud. It's okay. It's an amazing achievement, and I so enjoyed reading it. And I'm also very much looking forward to the next two days to listen to people talk about Matisse in a very intensive way. I think he certainly deserves that. And I'm just looking forward to it with pleasure. Thank you also to the organizers of the symposium. It's been a very easy passage, and I'll just get started right away here. Oh, they didn't give me the backup. Okay. Well, it's okay. How can we understand Matisse's pictorial poetics in the 1910s? I want to begin to answer that question by looking at his studio interiors. The pictures I'm considering were painted in Paris and Nice between 1914 and about 1921. And I'm particularly interested in connecting the two periods, as Dominique Fourcade did long ago, when he wrote that in the Matisse, sorry, in the Nice paintings, where the product of mental operations started before Matisse settled there. These studios that you see on the screen, on the top, Paris, on the bottom, Nice, are rooms with windows that open onto the city or the sea. In Paris, the pictures were painted in the artist's studio, on the K. Semi-Show, in 1914 and 1916. In Nice, they were created at the Hotel Beau-Rivage and the Hotel de la Mediterrané between 1917 and 1921. The first of those hotels was a more modest middle-class tourist hotel, where he stayed the first year and the second was grander, with larger, more elaborately decorated rooms, where he stayed for three successive seasons. Matisse was working out a new manner of painting in the mid and later 1910s, and this involved the transformation of his earlier approach to the studio interior in pictures like the Red Studio on the left of 1911 and the studio with sculpture of 1912 on the right. The number and legibility of imported repetitions of the artist's own works in these earlier interiors, and I think you can see examples of them all over those two images, are muted in the later ones, although self-reference certainly still plays a part. The later studio interiors are less freighted with quotations of pre-existing works and often present a more provisional studio space and arrangement. This speaks to Matisse's struggles in this period. Most scholars have registered the turmoil and disturbance he experienced during the war and just after. Hilary Spirling has given us a dense account of it. As he worked towards something new in his art and sought a position vis-à-vis his own past work, the work of his rivals, and the emergent avant-garde. There were also persistent complications of family relations with the art market, especially once Matisse pursued work in Nice that was seen as more naturalistic. The artist remains a presence in these pictures, however, if only by implication, phantom-like appearance, or staged disappearance. So there are connections in contrast to be drawn between the Paris and Nice studio interiors I'm considering. They all share the box-like interior of the artist's room, usually presented with multiple angles of view like a three-sided box whose sides are gently bent outward, registering the movement of the artist's head as he takes in the space from different angles. Generally they include windows, sometimes with curtains or shutters, railings or balconies that offer a view of the Parisian cityscape or the Mediterranean. The outside world makes a brief appearance through these windows with sketchy descriptions of modern life. Traffic and pedestrians in the street or on the promenade are rendered in a shorthand that recalls impressionism and fovism, as in Monet's Parisian boulevard from 1873 on the upper left and Derran's view of Collier from 1905 on the lower left. The Matisse pictures on the right are his interior with goldfish of 1914 painted in Paris at the top and interior with violin case of 1918-19 painted in Nice at the bottom and those are the two pictures I'm going to concentrate on most. And a detail of those four pictures. At top right the tiny, silhouetted figures move with the traffic along the Seine in Paris. At the bottom, I'm talking about Matisse's pictures on the right, at the bottom the schematic strollers are precisely placed between the balustrades and along the top of the railing. These are the bare traces of the external world that will eventually be swept away by the extreme artifice of the Otelisques painted in Nice in pictures where the windows had been expelled. I think we went through, we went forward. That's correct, sorry. The studio interiors share attention to the everyday furnishings of the artist's room. Tables and chairs, wallpaper, flooring and curtains and often in a way of more charged objects and figures identified with the studio, such as models, canvases on the easel, brushes and pallets and sketchbooks. Goldfish bowls, violins in their cases, mirrors in the artist himself. Matisse's Paris interiors tend toward geometric simplification and condensation of form. The Nice pictures respond to the special quality of light of the Mediterranean with an all over luminosity and the objects and figures in them are often more legible and arranged in a more open, fluid and expansive space. Matisse himself spoke of the importance of a distinct quality of light in each location as essential to his work. Let me begin with four important paintings created in the Paris Atelier. Interior with goldfish on the upper left, 1914, you've seen it before. Goldfish and pallet next to it from 1914. Studio K. Sammichel on the bottom on the left, 1916, and the painter in his studio on the right, bottom, 1916, 17. These painted rooms began as real spaces, the artist's working studio in a rented apartment on the K. Sammichel that are transformed by him into spaces of vision, imagination and painterly process. They suggest a drama that unfolds as the artist's room becomes strange through simplification, distortion, the interplay of objects and figures and the layering of color and space. In Paris, Matisse was working in a very familiar place. He had had a studio in the K. Sammichel for more than a decade earlier in his career. Interior with goldfish introduces us to a central motif of his art in the 1910s, a residue of his trip to Morocco, the goldfish bowl. A cylindrical goldfish bowl sits on a tall table in front of a window next to a small plant in a clay pot. Through the window is a view across the river where we see parts of the building's bridge, pedestrians and traffic and the stairs down to the river. Matisse spoke of the distinctive light in this room as warmed by the reflection of the sun on the wall's opposite. The exceedingly long fronds of the tiny budding plant reach out as if through the window into the distant space across the river, confusing foreground and background a la Cezanne and suggesting continuity between the artist's room and the city. Orange-gold reflections of the goldfish are cast over the couch and its pillows, the side of sessions with the model. To the right of the table, the window girl work appears as incomplete black tracery. Matisse has covered it with solid blue under the table and the thick horizontal of the dark orange railing also rhymes with the color of the fish. The picture is disciplined by numerous rectilinear bands of color and the rigorous geometric structure of the tables, railings, window frame and chair that are echoed in the architectonic forms of the buildings across the river. Transparent like the goldfish bowl but flatter still, the window and its view are the picture within the picture so common in Matisse's interiors, a flat screen hanging between the blue planes of the walls, a luminous projection of the world that the tiny plant bridges. But this sense of fluid movement from near to far is countered by the way the goldfish bowl on its table is hemmed in on every side and our entry into the central space is blocked by a table and chair in the foreground seen from above. This reinforces the idea of the goldfish bowl as an object of contemplation at a distance and also implies the artist's and our presence just beyond the limits of the canvas behind the table and chair. The shadowed form in the left foreground has been interpreted as a chair or chair back or seat seen from above but there is some ambiguity here. It could also be a canvas on the floor leaning against the back of the chair, some previous completed work of the artist or a work to come. The chair itself is not incidental. Chairs serve in Matisse's studio interiors as informal but essential supports for his works in the absence of an easel and as seats from which the artist can contemplate his Matisse and make his painting. They are familiar studio objects. In the sketch for this painting on the left side of the screen Matisse considered a more open entry into the central space. The form next to the table in the foreground looks more clearly like a chair back. In a sketch related to the second goldfish picture he produced that year, on the right the artist shows himself in a chair contemplating the motif with his square palette in hand. The sketch for interior with goldfish places the goldfish bowl in table in front of a narrower window opening that is framed by a long curtain and Matisse includes a picture over the couch presumably one of his own. The legibility of the foreground and these additional elements of decor are eliminated when he decides to concentrate the focus on the goldfish bowl and create a barrier to that central space. In the final painting the glowing tabletop in the right foreground with its luminous bowl that picks up the greens of the distant pavement has more prominence than in the sketch taking up more than half the width of the painting. A number of scholars have eloquently discussed how interior with goldfish suggest a self-contained world and the invisible presence of the artist. I want to look at the painting again to push this reading a little bit further. Examining the goldfish bowl and the way the window frame and wall are seen through its glass and water mediums we see that Matisse pictures the displacement or refraction of light and color. As we look through the water in the bowl the lighter blue of the window frame is deflected to the right side of it. The deeper blue of the wall to the left is also displaced to the right coloring the left half of the water. Again confusing inside and outside the wedge of blue under the arch in the distance continues these blue refractions as if transmuted through the bowl the medium of the bowl in the window pane. The gray wedge on the surface of the water in the bowl first appears to be a past shadow and I don't know if I have a pointer. Do I have a pointer? There we go. Right there. This is what I'm talking about. Thank you. As we look through the water in the bowl the lighter blue of the window frame is deflected to the right side of it. The blue of the wall to the left is also displaced to the right coloring the left half of the water. So I'm going back a little bit. Again confusing inside and outside the wedge of blue under the arch in the distance continues these blue refractions as if transmitted through the bowl in the window pane. The gray wedge on the surface of the water in the bowl first appears to be a cast shadow but on closer inspection seems to be an exaggerated refraction of the gray black shadow on the wall behind the bowl. Matisse diagrams these refractions on the stacked ovals of the bowl with wedges of gray and blue on the surface of the water and wedges of blue and gray green inside the oval of the top of the glass cylinder. The light and shadow on the bowl is both perceptual, stimulated by a particular moment of refracted light and conceptual. It also generates far-flung refractions that are cast deep into the pictorial space over by the river. Matisse's conceptual treatment of light is also demonstrated by the bowl in the right foreground. A soft gray wedge of transparent shadow appears on its right side. Here. Through which we can see through to the rim of the bowl. So it's a partly transparent shadow and a lighter green shadow appears on the left inside the bowl. In between these two shadows is a highlighted wedge of paler green. The shadow to the left inside the bowl is a concave quarter moon and registers shadow created by light coming from the left and hitting the edge of the bowl. But the gray shadow on the right is created by light that comes from outside the picture. Implying a body or object outside the frame to the right, the artist himself were perhaps his palate. Like the chair in the left foreground, this shadow was another sign of the artist's implicit presence in the studio and signals another confusion of interior and exterior. Not just the arc of the plant reaching through the window to bridge the distance between studio and world or the blue into the bridge as if refracted from the interior but the sign of the intrusion into the canvas of something that lies outside its borders. The round vessel on the table is also a foil for the fishbowl. Ceramic rather than glass round and shallow rather than cylindrical and tall. And the contrast of its green interior with the pervading blue of the picture on the illuminated table surface make it stand out all the more. The interior of the bowl is shadowed by light that comes from the room but not directly from the window. The shadow on its right side is cast from outside the picture. Leo Stein reported just how difficult the process of making this painting was and how long Matisse worked on it in early 1914. The layering of colors and changes to the canvas have been chronicled in detail. Several scholars have suggested that the patio interior is a meditation on enclosure, isolation and interiority. The windowed room like the goldfish bowl nested within it. A room of shadows, silence, solitude, the artist's immersion in mental space, claustrophobia or alternatively fear of open space, its temporality either a moment or an extended duration depending on the interpreter. All of this is very suggestive and I'm going to add another layer of interpretation to these. I want to propose what I'll call a refractive poetics for this painting. Light and color pass through the distorting mediums of glass and water of the goldfish bowl and window and are displaced and dispersed. Nesting spaces, bowl within room, room within city are imagined as far-flung projections and deflections and intimate reversals of distance and proximity, face and back. There is a variety, whether it be spatial, subjective or conceptual, insided or displayed by the goldfish bowl and the artist's windowed room is less about enclosure I think than a refractive poetics that in the end does not leave the world outside or the artist's viewer stuck at the threshold. This ordinary work-a-day room has been transformed into a truly strange room. A strangely impersonal one that resists the presence of the artist Henri Matisse. It's only through his disappearance his refraction through the medium of paint and the durational activity of painting. Whatever poetics of space, vision and art-making the painting signifies proceeds from this aesthetics of displacement and distortion through the mediums invoked by the painter. The subsequent pictures in the Paris Studio series continue to elaborate the artist's disappearance. Henri Matisse reduces the artist studying the motif in the sketch I showed you earlier to the analytic forms of pictorial construction. The view through the window in the earlier painting onto the quay, the buildings and the traffic on the street is now reduced to a field of blue that is interrupted by a thick vertical band of black, a translation of the window mullion perhaps and the grill work of the railing. The window structure has become part of the room. The bowl and the painter are now quite close to us but only the rear view are now quite close to us but only the rectangular palette and the ghost of a thumb remain of the painter along with diagonal lines and rectilinear forms that might indicate brushes or arms and legs and geometric forms in the vicinity of the head. Studio K. Sandmichel imagines the studio situation with a reclining new model rather than a still life as the artist's motif. The artist is again strikingly missing from the scene. His empty chair is opposite another bearing a sketch of the nude that reveals only a fragment of the body on the couch and reizes a mirror image as much as one oriented to the model's pose. The nude on the bed is defined in gray, black and warm tones her reality not much more convincing than that of the table in front of the window. The light rectangles of the illegible works on the wall in the background float on the blue-gray plane. The zigzag pattern of the floorboards peters out behind the chair. The white outlines of the ghostly table in front of the window are nearly transparent and the tabletop bends toward the picture plane as if striving to become another picture within the picture like those on the wall and the chair enhancing its unreality. The circle within the table's square top is a bright yellow plate at the center of which is poised a small glass another alluring appeal to the senses like the view through the window and the female nude. The glass in the window pane overlap high above the blue river itself a potential reflective surface the associations rich but obscure. They suggest different modalities of the transmission and reflection of light and analogies and transformations of glass window pane water and mirror I've lost my images and the different kinds of vision and pictorial poetics these make possible. Matisse reworked the yellow plate in glass giving them a material chromatic glow. The opaque curtain in the corner to the left of the window becomes transparent at its edge to reveal the ghostly half of a picture that seems to merge with it. The curtain in the right foreground is a hooded lurking this is the one in the background that's partially transparent and this is the one in the foreground. The opaque curtain in the corner to the the curtain in the right foreground is a hooded lurking spectral presence ready to shut out the view and the light it appears fold around itself its black center ominously shadowed or as if cut away. The striations indicating the stairs on the K in the distance are repeated on the curtain surface suggesting transmissions between interior and exterior and intimations of passage from one space to another aligns during curtains and movements downstairs. With the empty chair set up before the canvas at the center of studio K.S. Matisse paints himself in absentia the everyday studio set up in mise en scene of artistic creation are organized around that absence signaled to us however by the nude on the couch who gazes out at the painter painting and thereby exposes his vanishing act. In the artist in the studio most likely the last in the series the artist does appear but now he's a phantom puppet in a straight chair facing off against the model in her double on the easel in the most austere and dreamlike studio interiors. Nothing blocks us from the room except the spatial disorientation Matisse induces with his fields of black and white that conjoin the planes of wall and floor. The architectonics of the easel and the painter in his chair are stiffly rectilinear and the swathing of the model in a green robe no arms or hands are articulated suggests a bound captive. The flesh tones of the painter make it seem as if he is the nude and he is as bound as she is. Seen in profil perdue the unarticulated bowl of his head is defined by thick black contours that echo the black contours of the window and railing. It appears as if the window frame has wrapped itself around his head and the tall easel looms over him. Here the world outside the window remains distinct. Inside and outside do not interpenetrate. The studio is a protected enclosed space of a strange encounter with a view of a city that is now a distant other world, the window grow work setting the boundary between the two. Only the decorative arabesques of mirror and window railing reveal the strenuous reduction of forms and confrontation of figures. But the exterior world has still been influenced by this austere studio regime. Even the sketchy black silhouettes of the passersby on the street are put in order, lined up in space like the regular railing and window openings on the buildings and a bright yellow bar of light on the window frame succinctly sums up the communication between interior and exterior. It's color reflected in the face of the model and her twin on the canvas. It's notable that the window mullion is not included in this picture. Either the angle is such that we are only seeing a small portion of the window or the window is uniquely in this series open. Yet we also see no curtains, shutters or window panes. The actual window structure and transparency do not register and the associations of transparent and reflective surfaces that we saw in studio case and Michel are contradicted by the opaque brown surface of the decorative mirror high up on the wall that reflects nothing. The tense confrontation of painter model and canvas is relieved only by the decoration on this mirror's frame. The box of the room is distorted by bending fields of black and white set side by side. The L shaped black band on our right locking into the white one on the left making floor and wall continuous and enforcing the inescapability of artistic striving. Painter and model are moored in the black, the painting on the easel and the mirror on the white. A conceptual divide you might think between the painters face off with the model and the product of that engagement, the painting on the easel. But all three figures appear equally unreal and the model poses in the scene between the black and white zones. The compact forms of the model and her image on the canvas confront the artist with an uncanny doubling he has to face. The mirror is there to remind us of the artifice of picture making and in this view of the studio interior it really does seem to be a strain. The presence of the artist seems to excited degree of abstracting simplification that turns the figures into radical reductions with an anxious and slightly absurd gravity. Matisse would produce an extended series of studio interiors and niece. I'll only have time to talk about one of them in detail. In the photo on the left we see him soon after his arrival in a room at the Hotel Bourriage with his self-portrait on the chair. On the right is the hotel seen from the Esplanade. In the first few years he would work in the provisional studios of hotel rooms that looked out over the water. Anonymous private temporary spaces far from Paris, his family and the war and its aftermath. He would move to more permanent apartment and studio in the fall of 1921 and this led to the increasingly elaborate staging of objects and models in pictures of odor leaks and interiors like these. Seated odor leaks on the left in 1922 and interior with phonograph of 1924 on the right. There is a general mutation in Matisse's work as he turns from the modern construction of the Paris interiors to the all over emanation of light and niece. In niece the hotel room studios featured ornate patterned walls, floors and ceilings dressing tables upholstered in wood chairs and mirrors decor in a somewhat outmoded style that was found not collected. Afterwards Matisse spoke of the Hotel de la Mediterranean calling it fake, absurd, amazing, delicious. He mentions its Rococo style with its Italianate ceiling suggesting an almost camp appreciation for these places. The ready-made decor of these hotel rooms and the artist status as a stranger in that city seems to have stimulated his reimagining of the artist's studio interior and reflections on making art and it inaugurated a new phase of work which I don't think is Matisse falling asleep. These provisional studios afforded different mise en scene. There are few personal items no goldfish bowls, works by the artist rarely appear nor do reclining nudes or the artist himself although he does paint a self-portrait in 1918 as we saw in the photograph and two pictures of the artist at work in the studio with a figure in 1919. There are sketchbooks and empty chairs to suggest the absent artist or model and occasionally a stray work that might be by Matisse on the wall. This is before the Nice studio turns into a congested theater of artifice obsessively arranged but it is still a kind of stage set in which constellations of objects are arranged. In this early Nice series there are still windows and a fascination with the quality of the light that Matisse would later characterize as silvery. The pictures seem to be more relaxed spatially and more improvisational engaged in rhythmic repetitions and variations that suggest the animation of the room. The viewpoint is higher than in the Paris interiors often floating high up on an imaginary back wall. But despite this loosening of the flow of light in space interpreters have still located a sense of anxious solitude sometimes even imprisonment in these Mediterranean rooms. In contrast to the Paris studios the windows of French doors are generally open. They also shift position as the artist looks through them more directly and at less of an angle shifted from the wall closer to the center of the picture. Multiple layers of curtains and sometimes shutters often frame them. Interior with violin case on the top right was painted in Matisse's second season in Nice in 1918-19 a larger more ornamented space in the Hotel de la Méditerranée than the room with the Hotel Bauré Vaj you see on the upper left from the previous year. The plane of contrasting patterns services striking in these Mediterranean rooms the yellow wallpaper and the red curtain but also the bits of ceiling decoration in the tile floor. The floor patterns of the wallpaper and the irregular grid of the floor set up rhythms that give the picture a beating pulse. The upholstered chair holds a violin case sign of the artist violinist whom he might imagine playing or painting out of frame. While the French doors to the balcony are open at the top the curtain falls over a fixed arched and peddled window that casts bright outline pedals onto the interior surface of the fabric. We see a blue shadow in the center of the window pane on the right. It could be a reflection of the green form out the window to the left but it is not visible through the transparency of the curtain although the curtain is transparent above. The reddish brown line of the trim at the top of the window is set at a diagonal like all the rectilinear forms in the picture. To my mind this is the closest Matisse comes to these pictures of interiors to integrating the view out the window and the interior space bringing that light into the room. There are of course pictures that he makes of the balcony itself reviews from the balcony but in any case bringing this light into the room there's still more than that more than just light and rhythm in this picture. The dressing table is placed near the window an arrangement that doesn't get repeated I believe except in an earlier related picture that shows the table with the mirror closer to hand and at a diagonal on the left. There the mirror does reflect the room. In interior with violin case the black chair, the black sketchbook the black mirror all line up before the open doors. We can see the traces where Matisse moved the chair over to the right adjusting their relation. Light streams onto the table and onto the tile floor. Tiny strollers seen through the stone ballast route are also sketched in black. They are illuminated by the irregular grid of the spaces between the ballasters. There's something witty about Matisse's simplification and segmentation of forms in this passage with the squat ballasters, the distant strollers and the irregular streams of light that flow across the floor. Those ropes of light on the floor recall his reminiscence that the light at the hotel came from below like quote footlights in a theater unquote. The resident black forms the mirror and the black sketchbook explicitly counter the incidental inconsequence of the sketchy black silhouettes of the wandering strollers outside. Canceling the floor of light that floods the room, the mirror refusing its optical reflection surrounded by the syncopated rhythms of the ballast rod, floor, walls and ceiling. These accretions of black bring the room back to ground zero. This artist is doubly absent of Matisse's room as both musician and artist. But the music he does play fills the room via the rhythmic structures of patterned surfaces. The black forms especially the mirror and the notebook with their greater density emanating blackness as if it were light I think Matisse would say. Our pools of concentrated darkness and stillness in a room of implied movement. The curtains as they rustle from transparency to opacity. The pulsation of the field of irregular patterns of the tiles on the floor or the floral designs on the walls. Another way of saying it is that the animate breath of light in this room its Mediterranean music is accompanied by the silent depth of the black mirror and the black sketchbook. This black as absence is as powerful as the light that enters the room the artist paints. Work in the studio was at the center of Matisse's practice and he was clearly compelled to reflect on that space and his experience of it. He depended on the presence of the model or the motif whether that was an object, a view or a figure. And in the first free seasons in Nice experienced the liberation of his new environment and in particular its light. One of my favorite statements by Matisse is the one that goes the model is a springboard for me it's the door that I must break down to reach the garden in which I am alone and also happy. The paintings of the studio interior in both Paris and Nice are seeking out that garden through a mise en scene of appearance, artifice and ultimately disappearance. As the poet Mallermey might say quote the almost vibratory disappearance according to the play of the word. Thank you.