 for the introduction and thanks to the organizers of the symposium. It's a real pleasure to be here to celebrate the publication of the wonderful catalogue that Yvalin and the person I know is Kate, but now apparently is called Karen Butler. Claudine and the conservators have put together a superb piece of scholarship, really exemplary and filled with revelations from the first page to the last. Revelations about technique, about historical context, about the development of Matisse's work and so forth. It's also a real pleasure to have had the double treat yesterday, second, but not perhaps second in rank, of listening to Yvalin speak about Matisse, which is always a great pleasure, but also to have had a chance as the participants in the symposium did to look at Le Bonheur de Veve. It's a painting that however often one has seen it can still yield new insights, can still surprise you sometimes if this isn't too much of a contradiction in expected ways. Yvalin has written that one tends to remember it as being larger than it in fact is due to the expansive rhythm of the Matisse system. I think that's right and I have my own recurrent surprise or double surprise whenever I see the painting, namely that however much I brace myself, I'm still shocked as on all previous viewings, both by how forcefully the image strikes the eye of the beholder and, relatedly I will be arguing, by how it's diverse elements overwhelm one's ability to make sense of what we see as we stand before it. I want today to think about what causes this experience, what it is that leads to this sense of ungraspability and intensity, both in Le Bonheur de Veve and in other Matisse's of roughly the same period. On one level of course the answer to the question of where the sense of overwhelming intensity comes from is relatively straightforward. Matisse's works of 1905, 1906 and beyond are bright. The colors are generally richly saturated. The pigments radiant. Indeed as the catalog has very usefully shown, in the case of Le Bonheur de Veve the painting was originally even brighter. The cadmium yellows that were in the central section of the painting and also in the top left corner have degraded which means that the painting is much faded compared to its original state. I would suggest however that the effect of Matisse's work is down to something more than literal brightness. Certainly the initial audience thought so. They frequently described his paintings not just as luminously bright but as something more like an assault on the eye, something incomprehensible, an act of violence even that might threaten the viewer with blindness. We'll come back to Le Bonheur de Veve towards the end of my paper. I want to begin exploring the nature of this optical disturbance by looking at phobism for it is there that we find for the first time the kind of intensity that troubled the critics. As we shall see the root cause certainly for phobism is what Matisse does with or to the legacy of symbolism and more generally with or to the legacy of post-impressionism. Consider for example La Japanese au bord de l'eau, Japanese women by the water which shows the artist's wife perched on a rock by the sea and dressed in the Japanese robe that gives the work its title. With its small dimensions apparently rapid execution and incompletely covered ground the painting might seem to lend itself to an account that views phobism as a continuation of the impressionist or neo-impressionist sketch as a kind of unmediated and direct response to the facts of vision. However when it was exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Autombe in the room christened by Louis Vosel as the Sal de Fove, the Room of the Wild Beasts, the critics worried that they saw here not naturalism but a refusal of painting's ability to refer in any stable way to the external world. Their concerns centered on the images remarkable diversity of facture. From the staccato strokes in the upper left corner to the meandering lines that mark out the pattern of the robe and from the roughly scumbled section at the lower left to the thicker and more fluidly applied areas of paint in the center. Nothing here sits still. Chromatically the surface of the work is equally contradictory with complementary contrasts the red and green in the center of the canvas for example appearing alongside more random juxtapositions of color. Any lingering sense of technical cohesion is further undermined by the insistent presence of the white ground and by the visible remnants of a pencil underdrawing and crucially as the critics sensed this unstable pictorial vocabulary begins to undo representation. Consider for example the relationship between Madame Matisse's back and the water behind her. In the juxtaposition of woman and ocean a series of what might be termed false identifications operating at the level both of color and of facture can found two objects that ought to remain distinct. Blue and turquoise evoking pattern and shadow in the robe slide imperceptibly towards green as they move from figure to watery ground. The short brushstrokes on the figure's back abbreviated remnants of the fabric's arabesque design reappear in the surface of the water as the crests of waves or perhaps shadows even here there is ambiguity. If representation thus falters here if we are momentarily unsure as to what we are looking at as to what particular bits of paint might refer to it is in large part due to the painting's dismantling of the mimetic logic of near impressionism. Witness the way in which la japonese stands effectively in inverse relationship to young women with umbrella. A more obedient point list effort Matisse painted earlier in the year. In young women each of the picture's elements coastline, horizon, figure and umbrella is firmly delineated by the precise ink underdrawing before being filled in with color. In la japonese in contrast the figure disperses into its surroundings as the underdrawing multiplies into a massive repeated but non-coincident lines around for example the figure's feet. Note how the left foot confusingly is turquoise like the robe. In young women the gridded surface orders the image around the horizon and around the vertical line that follows the front of the figure's dress allowing even unpainted areas of the canvas to read as coherent spatial elements. In la japonese again in contrast spatial relations are less clear. Considered in isolation Madame Matisse appears to be viewed straight on yet the sharply rising surface of the sea behind the figure, the lack of horizon line and the rock in the upper right corner each stress the downward angle of our view. And most importantly where young women make systematic use of complementary contrasts to reproduce the chromatic effects of nature. Green dots in the surface of the sea shifting to blue next to the yellow of the figure's dress for example. La japonese as we have seen allows color to blur distinctions between figure and ground between one object and the next. What we see in la japonese is not the wholesale rejection of neo-impressionism nor of representation. We still identify with relative ease what we see here. It is rather a rendering unstable of the pointillist system. Replacing the consistent factor of young women with free floated and disconnected fragments la japonese leaves the signifying codes of neo-impressionism in disarray. Severing the logical connections between one mark and the next. A similar disruption of representation of the ability of painting to refer in stable and coherent fashion to the appearance of the external world is to be found in standing figure. Painted a year or so after la japonese and now here in the Barnes collection. The paint, as was increasing in Matisse's practice, is applied in somewhat broader areas. The image moves somewhat in the direction of La Bonneau-Devive but there are similar uncertainties at the level of representation. The spatial relationship between figure and ground is indeterminate as are the contours and orientation of the lower part of the robe. Such ambiguities mean that for all that the image, as Karen Butler has rightly noted, allows us to imagine that the figure stands in a sunlit glade. This I think is absolutely correct. The roughly applied areas of yellow, orange, blue and green sitting flatly on the surface present themselves equally as a refusal of the ability of paint to record the eye's engagement with the world. Now one way to make sense of what we see here would be to label it as abstraction and the critics as we will hear use this term at times. Matisse we might suggest was becoming more interested in paint than in sight but we should not push the argument too far in this direction. It would be more accurate to say that these works sit halfway between two kinds of vision. On one hand the naturalist eye, all eager regard, scanning the shifting and sunlit surfaces of the world. On the other the eye of modernist visuality, absorbed in the formal qualities of the painting's own surface. The works bear witness that is to say to the dismantling but not the banishment of the tools of representation which begin to be reduced to a disconnected residue near shards of a broader mimetic syntax. This quality I think, this dismantling of near-impressionism has much to do with the critic's sense of optical disturbance so the kind of assault on the eyes they looked at this kind of painting. I want to park that question just for a moment and look at another dismantling, another kind of dismantling that takes place in phobism. If Les Japonais put near-impressionism to the sword and being its logic rendering its representational devices incoherent much the same can be said of what Matisse's faux portraits did to another variant of post-impressionist painting namely symbolism. Here the best example is woman in a hat perhaps the most famous or infamous of the paintings exhibited in the Sal de Vauve. It was quickly singled out as one of the more deranged entries in the exhibition with the critics resorting repeatedly to a vocabulary of the insane, the aggravating and the violent presumably at least in part because of the paintings roughly an inconsistently worked surface and its rather brutal indication of form. The figure's left hand for example is crudely rendered by a few sparse strokes of a too dry brush whilst Madame Matisse's fan the sitter is again the artist's wife is composed of thickly glutinous dabs of paint whose sticky viscosity contradicts the treatment of the hand that holds it and makes difficult now on impossible in fact to picture what the fan might actually have looked like. Over to the right the scabrous paint layer stammers into incompletion allowing the schematically penciled indications of a preliminary design to show through. The hat in turn are not as thickly painted as the fan seems equally ill equipped to convey information about the nature of Madame Matisse's accessories. A dab here, a dab there adding up to not to nothing much of anything an imprecise mass balanced improbably atop her head. The difficulty of identifying all the details of what we see here led the critics to talk not only of violence but also as I mentioned a moment ago of the abstract. The anonymous critic for the Daily Le Matin for example worried that Matisse's paintings were a bit too abstract. The tone is seductive but the subject remains confused and the eye remains disquieted. That link I think is important for this critic at least the abstract the difficulty of making sense of what we see here went hand in hand with the feeling that the painting caused problems for the eye. He or she was turning out quick reviews for a daily paper and had neither of the time nor in all likelihood the inclination to expand upon this observation. It was left to other more significant writers to try to tease out the link between the abstract and the violent. Writers such as the painter and art theorist Maurice Denis. In a long article published a month or so after the 1905 Salon d'Autombe, Denis noted that while Matisse's paintings were all violently colored one feels oneself fully in the domain of abstraction. He then fleshed out this insight in a passage that's worth quoting at some length. Without doubt this is Denis. Without doubt as with the most ardent ravings of van Gogh something remains of the initial emotion of nature but what one finds above all is the artificial. Not the literary artificial as would be the case with an idealist search for expression nor the decorative artificial such as Turkish and Persian carpet makers have imagined it. No, it is something still more abstract. It is painting outside all contingency, painting in itself the pure act of painting. Denis' invocation of the pure act of painting makes it sound for a moment as though he wishes to propose a strictly formalist account of Matisse's work. But that's not quite what he was driving at. The introduction of the term expression and the name of van Gogh alongside mention of the artificial and the abstract signals that something else was at stake. Van Gogh was valorized by Denis though not without some reservations precisely as a powerfully expressive painter. One who was engaged with his fellow symbolists in what Denis referred to here as the idealist search for expression. And it is against this that Denis positions Matisse's abstraction. Something of the kind of expression that one saw in van Gogh remains this is not pure abstraction, it's not a colored carpet but the emotion is attenuated. Unpacking exactly what Denis was driving at is not easy in part because in the rest of his article he co-opts this observation about Matisse for an argument that is very much about Denis' own obsessions the importance of sensibility and of grounding oneself in the national tradition. But what he gestured towards with his initial insight linking but also differentiating Matisse and van Gogh was, I would venture, that Matisse's paintings recalled certain aspects of the Dutch master's work and more broadly of symbolism. Apparently expressive brushwork, apparently expressive color but that it operated according to a very different set of rules. In a van Gogh, non-naturalistic color and agitated brushwork would have had stable meaning. To take a rather obvious example in this self-portrait the swirling brushwork and blue color range rined with the mournful facial expression to convey the idea of the suffering artist. In Matisse in contrast the link between signifiers and signified is at least partly broken. The restless brushwork, the hastily applied patches of color, the pencil lines scratched into the surface. All of this suggests and certainly would have for an early 20th century audience of famous symbolism that this ought to be an impassioned image and yet despite these cues there is a notable lack of emotional engagement. The sitter's gaze is somewhat averted and her blank mask-like countenance reveals little of her interior state. Even the title of the work maintains a stubborn neutrality. It is, I would suggest, this mismatch between the works apparently symbolist devices and a certain blankness or abstraction that bothered Denis and the other critics. Which the same we might note in passing might be sort of another portrait of Matisse's wife. This one painted just after the 1905 Salon d'Automne. This is the green line on the left which co-opts some of van Gogh's trademark devices, most notably the jarring complementaries and the subdued violence of the brushwork, but twins them again with a marked lack of engagement. An emotional distance that is once more underlined by the figure's averted gaze. Symbolist devices, this is to say, are thus emptied at least to some degree of their expressive cargo. The result, however, as Denis sensed, is not pure abstraction. Just as Le Japonais reduced neo-impressionism to a stammered residue but left its representational tools in play, here we see not the exclusion of expression, but rather it's unmooring from the person of the artist. Where in van Gogh color and form could be understood to make visible the psychic state of the individual. In Matisse, Symbolism's expressive tools appear disconnected from the artist's effective world. Fragments of expression floating free within a painting that no longer follows the rules. Such painting in which representational and expressive elements remain in play but fail to produce coherent sense might best be characterized following the literary critic Svetan Todorov as a kind of schizophrenic malfunctioning. I should say immediately this is not a diagnosis of Matisse. There are plenty of critics at the time thought that phobism could only have emerged from madness. Rather, what I'm arguing, what I want to talk about is how the images produce or do not produce coherent meaning. Todorov sets up a distinction between modernist writing that can be thought of as schizophrenic and that which is paranoid. Symbolist literature was, in Todorov's terms, paranoid in that it replaced the world of external reality that which was typically represented in naturalist literature with an imaginary substitute or that could be read as a coherent parallel universe linked to our own by series of legible stable correspondences. Literature produced after the symbolist period, he argues, exhibited a tendency towards what he calls the schizophrenic. Rather than creating a consistent picture of an imagined world, the text becomes internally contradictory, preventing the reader from organizing the elements into a coherent narrative. Everything is thus experienced as fragments, as in schizophrenia, a condition in which the subject loses his or her ability to synthesize sensation and thought. Bangov's portraiture, it seems fair to say, answers to Todorov's account of the paranoid text. Not again as a diagnosis of the artist himself, but as a description of the operation of his work. A series of symbolist correspondents promote expressive legibility. What he shows does not look quite like the world, but it expresses clearly the artist's emotional universe. Fovism, in contrast, is rather more like the schizophrenic text. The tools of representation and of expression are present, but fail to add up to coherent communication. Here you might note that Henri Gide, like Denis, a perceptive observer of contemporary painting, wrote, when faced with woman in a hat, how far from the lyrical excesses of a van Gogh, before adding, art cannot do without syntax. It's the failure of the pictorial science to work together, the lack of syntax as Gide had it, that renders Fovism incoherent. To say this is to think in terms of how the paintings communicate, of how we might characterize them as signifying systems. But we can also ask, and certainly this was the pressing question for the initial audience, what it is like to look at such paintings. The critics talked constantly of stupefaction, of the feeling that they couldn't make sense of Fovism's disarticulated signs. They also talked, as we have heard, of violence and of the disquieted eye. The two things go together. The experience of looking at Fovism, I would suggest, is akin to what Frederick Jameson, following Lacan, has described as the schizophrenic experience. An experience of isolated signifiers, without sense or temporality, that pushes the materiality of the signifier more insistently, more intensely into view. For the schizophrenic this can be highly distressing, but it can also be accompanied, Jameson suggests, by a feeling of euphoric elation. Rather than being processed, rather than being folded into a coherent image of the world, sense data are experienced as it were raw, experienced in all their irreducibly forceful and concentrated presence. Something similar I am suggesting happens with Fovism. Pictorial signifiers that might have suggested expressive or representational content are dispersed across canvases that no longer cohere. A short circuiting of meaning that collapses our attention onto the surface, that allows us, that forces us, to experience the formal properties of the image, and in particular its color, in undiluted intensity. We are not, of course, any more than Matisse was as he painted, mad when we look at Fovism, but our senses, the better our ability to make sense, to understand what our eye beholds, is deranged, derailed, diluted. And it's the lingering presence of meaning, meaning destabilized, but still operating fitfully. Fragments of expression that the eye cannot grasp alongside the consequently unredeemed presence of pigment that made the critics talk of an assault on the eye. What then of Le Bonheur de Vive? Like Fovism, it dismantles its sources, undoes their syntax, as Jid would have put it, though the sources are both different and more diverse. There may be occasional echoes of the kind of agitated brushwork seen in Famel-Chapeau, but the painting, as has often been noted, for the most part speaks a different set of languages. One of these is the classical. The figure furthest to the left, for example, recalls Ang's famous La Source, whilst the image's theme has been linked to the pastoral tradition. Note that Matisse titled this 1905 painting, which predicts a number of Le Bonheur de Vive's elements, pastoral. Alongside the classical, the painting also, as Margaret Worth, who's about to follow me on to stage, has demonstrated, mobilizes, but also refuses, a pictorial vocabulary drawn from the anarchist utopia of his one-time friend and colleague, Paul Sceniac. This is Sceniac's, The Golden Age is not in the past, it is in the future. Or perhaps this is not the future at all, but the distant past. The goats to the right of Matisse's image resemble the prehistoric cave paintings that have been coming to light since the later 19th century in France and Spain. This particular example was unearthed in 1904, so some of these photographs, or black and white photographs, have been appearing in the press. It's not to suggest that this is a specific source for Matisse, but these things are in the air. Though the painting's components are somewhat different from those seen in erfogism, and though the range of those components is wider, the net result is not dissimilar. The diverse stylistic and thematic references collide with and interrupt each other. As Matisse himself, though he generally insisted on the unity of his work, came close to acknowledging. Le Bono de Ville, if he admitted, was a painting made from juxtapositions of things conceived independently. Those juxtapositions mean that the pictorial languages that Matisse mobilizes do not add up to coherent meaning. The picture's sense remains elusive, as the wide range of interpretations in the art historical literature testifies. And again, as with the folk portraits and landscapes that we've considered, with the picture's visual signifiers, thus floating free as fragments of which the viewer is unable to make sense, those signifiers, the patches of color, the arabesque contours and so forth, are left insistently in view. Their material qualities experience as a forcefully inescapable presence in the eye of the beholder. It is this, I would suggest, that lends the picture its sense of overwhelming intensity, at least in part. But the painting also differs from the works of the preceding year in ways that push the intensity to an even higher pitch. The first of these is the way in which this quality is allied with a theme that, for all its indeterminacy, itself speaks of euphoria, or at the very least of idyllic pleasure. The pastoral and the idea of anarchist utopia both suggest something of this. Perhaps the echoes of a prehistoric past also bespeak an archaic arcadia. And so too does a further source for the painting. When the picture was shown at the 1906 Salon des Andes-Pendaux, the critics were quick to name Gauguin as a component in the picture's complex genealogy. And I think they were probably right. Where do we come from? What hobby where are we going, as the Gauguin on the right, is one likely precedent. It's pale gold upper corners and its array of ambiguous human and animal figures set against an expanse of water. It's always seemed to me one of the possible inspirations for Matisse's picture. Mahana no Atua is another. Gauguin's paintings tend of course to be rather clearer, rather more univocal in their meaning. Mahana no Atua, for example, uses sensuous color and arabesque contours as rather straightforward, symbolist correspondance for the idea of tahiti as tropical idyll. But it is that idea of the idyll that Matisse picks up and reconfigures in Le Bonheur de Vieve. Thus, whereas in the faux portraits, the critics sense that disjunction between the image's expressive intensity and the blankness of the sitter. Now the experience of hallucinatory intensity generated by the painting's shards of meaning and expression is brought into sync with the overall theme of the painting. With the idea that, for all its ambiguities, sits at the heart of the image. Namely, sensuous pleasure. The second big difference between Le Bonheur de Vieve and faux visum is the fact that for all its fractured meanings, for all its diverse sources, the painting is in the final, in the final count, as Ivalin has compellingly argued, tightly suited. Possessed of a unity not seen before in Matisse's work. This, as Ivalin again has argued, imposes on the beholder a further form of blindness. An absent-minded peripheral gaze scattered to the edges of the picture. An eye that loses its way unable to focus. If then, as I have been arguing, we are in part asked to look with a schizophrenic eye. With Le Bonheur de Vieve another kind of vision joins the fray. This look revolves around desire. Around the feeling of a sensual immersion in the expansive circulation in the taut rhythms of the painting's surface. And it is this, finally, that lends the painting its overwhelming and concentrated visual force. The idyllic theme, the intensity that follows, as I have been arguing, from the painting's dismantling of the symbolist legacy. Each of these is brought together in an image that absorbs a viewer in an encounter from which we cannot step back. Which the mind therefore cannot grasp. Hence, I think, my recurrent difficulty in recording the work's power. And it can only really be experienced in the flesh, standing before, immersed within, the painting's possessive pictorial logic. Thank you.