May 16, 2022 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl makes beautiful sentences. No painter inspires him more than Henri Matisse. In his “Going Flat Out,” in this week’s issue, a review of MoMA’s “Matisse: The Red Studio,” he says of Matisse’s “Bathers” (1907),

Swift strokes jostle forward in a single, albeit rumpled, optical plane. See if this isn’t so, as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery, blue water and sky, and orangish flesh.

That “as your gaze segues smoothly across black outlines among greenery” is superb!

“Going Flat Out” is Schjeldahl’s fifth New Yorker piece on Matisse. The others are “Twin Peaks” (March 3, 2003), “Art as Life” (August 29, 2005), “The Road to Nice” (July 26, 2010), and “Shapes of Things” (October 20, 2014).  Matisse is one of his touchstones. In “The Road to Nice,” he calls Matisse’s “The Piano Lesson” “my favorite work of twentieth-century art.” Here’s his description of it:

The brushy, big canvas (eight feet high by nearly seven wide) represents Matisse’s son Pierre at an oddly pink-topped piano, his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow, in a schematized room: cornerless gray wall; the pale-blue frame of a French window opening onto triangular swatches of green and gray; a salmon rectangle of curtain; and a black window grille that echoes the curlicues in a music rack bearing the instrument’s brand name, Pleyel, spelled out in reverse. There is a lighted candle (indicating that the time of day is dusk), a metronome (indicating time itself), and two earlier Matisses: a small sculpture of a sensual odalisque and a large image from a painting of a stern-seeming woman seated on a high stool, floating free on the gray wall. The philosophical conceit of the quoted works—id and superego, conjoining in music—is pleasant, though a bit arch. Like any successful art, “The Piano Lesson” generates tensions of antithetical qualities—lyrical and harsh, mysterious and blatant, intimate and grand—and resolves them. It’s terrific, but the past century affords many paintings (and not all of them by Matisse and Picasso) that are as good or better. My preference for it is not a considered judgment. It’s a reflex, like the one that twitches when I’m asked my favorite movie, and I automatically, helplessly, say “Psycho.” 

How I love that “his sketchy face inset with a shard of black shadow”! The reference to “Psycho” makes me smile every time I read it.