HENRI MATISSE, 1907, Baltimore Museum of Art.
The paint is thin and ink-like, applied in translucent layers over time.
Some areas in the background show the brush running out of paint. The marks fade with a sense of the artist vigorously scrubbing the last bits of pigment onto the canvas.
The palm trees in the top right of the landscape are left in this state: a gesture and an idea created from imagination, using minimal materials. There is no concern that they should be accurate, realistic, or finished.
Matisse varies the level of finish present in different areas of the painting.
This keeps the viewer's mind constantly reacting and adjusting, and therefore constantly seeing.
The viewer cannot make assumptions. We cannot apply the experience of one part of the painting to another.
The work feels immediate and fresh because every zone of the painting is unexpected compared to the others.
The sense of unexpectedness continues in the color relationships. We must grapple with pink palm trees, purple grass, and blue skin. Expectations are thwarted at every turn.
The only truly sensical depiction is a patch of violets in the foreground, shown in naturalistic colors and form.
The violets anchor the composition and rest immediately below the figure's navel, holding us in focus for an instant before our mind is made to flex and crack along the strangeness of everything else.
The nude figure is glowing and weightless, a luminous sculpture set along the diagonal of the canvas. She is too big for the space; her left elbow disappears outside the top edge of the frame.
There are repetitions of forms around the edges of her: lines at her right elbow, left forearm and left breast. These suggest a phantom version of her body in space, as if she is moving from one position to another.
Gravity does not apply here. Her breasts float off her chest, and her limbs rest on nothing. Her body is an impossibility.
She is large, muscular and abundant. Her left hamstring and glute are those of an athlete; her right bicep is bulging and articulated. Though she is nude, she is not vulnerable.
This is not a woman who can be easily dominated.
In her is the possibility that the artist did not just love women; he respected and revered them to the point of submission.
Her downward gaze is not demure, but rather thoughtful.
She is engaged in contemplation that does not include us. We are not part of her consideration.
Like Matisse's handling of paint and color, she is a woman who thwarts expectation.
She defies the gaze with her muscularity and weightlessness. She has thoughts, intentions and power we cannot take for granted.
She is something new in the history of art. She participates fully in the genre of the female nude, even as she breaks it apart. ❧
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