Page 34 - Studio International - July August 1968

Intérieur rouge: nature morte sur table bleue 1947, oil on canvas
45½ x 35 in
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfahlen, Düsseldorf
La musique 1939, oil on canvas; 45+ x 45+ in.
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
bravery, endless courage, that he could go on, building from the
directness of his sensations, without any of his tremendous love and
knowledge of art as art ever being allowed to get in their way or take
their place.
Phillip King: I feel that in a sense Matisse, towards the end of his
life, without ever losing the intimate feeling for the subject, saw
painting much more in public terms. A lot of his late works are to be
seen in public places, like Vence chapel. A lot of his late pictures
point away from easel pictures and using canvas and stretchers,
towards using a much larger scale and format, just colour on walls
perhaps, or colour through glass; abandoning the idea of canvas and
even the ordinary use of paint as pigment in liquid matter. He
thought much more in terms of pigment burnt into the surface like
ceramics. I feel a lot of the late work points in that direction, and I
feel that's the relevant direction for today.
Andrew Forge: You could argue that these are ideas inherent in, say,
the Barnes decorations or even the Schukine decorations, La danse
and so on. And then the actual physical change that comes later
perhaps has to do with his illness and with his not being able to sit
up at an easel. But, apart from this change of emphasis, do you think
there is a new content in the papiers découpés. Do you think this
change of emphasis actually constitutes a qualitative change?
Phillip King: No, not really. I just feel he remained himself all his
life. I don't think he underwent any physiological change in his later
life, although I do believe possibly getting old was a contribution
towards his later work.
Howard Hodgkin: And a liberating one. I think he was doing some-
thing he always wanted to do. Some of his earlier pictures are some
of the largest, until the papiers découpés were made. I don't think I
entirely agree with Phillip there, because even in his smallest and
most luxurious pictures there is an arrangement of forms which can
be paralleled in his more public and large-scale works. I think he
probably needed to make many pictures which celebrated a certain
very specific, intimate feeling, and which in some cases can be
compared with the most radical works of Vuillard. But probably
only as a stage in an unselfconcious movement towards the very
grand making of forms that he achieved later on.
Phillip King: Yes, I still want to emphasize the link to a very intimate
experience of painting. I don't feel he suddenly felt he was on a new
wave-length, later on in his life. He kept drawing from the figure
right to the end of his life, and needed the contact of models and the
experience of the real world around him, drawing inspiration from
that. Always there is a link.
Andrew Forge : How about this extraordinary episode, which I suppose
lasts from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties, when it was said
that Matisse had come to the end and was just repeating odalisques,
the same old odalisque, the same old Nice interior.
Howard Hodgkin: I think the Ornamental figure on a decorative back-
ground, of 1927, was one of his most extraordinary works, and that
one day it will be a very influential painting. It contains all kinds of
ambiguities which have simply passed people by up till now.
Andrew Forge: But there was for many a long year the view that the
late twenties were a kind of fallow period.
Howard Hodgkin: Isn't this partly because of what else was going on
at the time? He was particularly opposite and out on a limb at that
moment. He was surely also a very instinctive artist. One couldn't
possibly call him an Expressionist but he made objects from his
feelings very directly and I think that this explains a lot of the paint-
ings which have been criticized as being slight or weak. And the same
I would have thought applied to his drawings, which vary in quality
a lot. I can't see that this is any reason for pejorative criticism.
Phillip King: I feel that in a hundred years from now some of the
very late work will fit much more easily into a sort of evolution.
Possibly today the feeling one has about some of the late work is
rather as composers must have felt about the late Beethoven quartets