Tuesday, April 12, 2005
A. S. Byatt
For some reason it took me a long time to appreciate Matisse. I used to go to the Museum of Modern Art, in Manhattan, every Saturday, and I learned to love Monet and Picasso and Feininger and many others, but I never had a visceral connection with Matisse. I'm not an artist, of course (at least not a visual one, although I occasionally take a good photograph), and perhaps it takes an artist's eye to see without instruction just how interesting Matisse really is.
Now that I'm much older, I do see that, but it's a mature appreciation without that memory of excitement that I still get when I look at, say, a great Turner. I never had that moment that Gully Jimson had (in the novel; it didn't get into the film of The Horse's Mouth) where he looked at a Matisse and it "skinned [his] eyes." I suspect that A. S. Byatt did have that moment.
Matisse is not at the center of each of the three stories in The Matisse Stories -- his work is clearly near the focus of only one of them -- but the author's love of his work comes through, even where it does not inform.
In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse is the painter of a nude, a print of which hangs (for much, but not all, of the story) in a beauty salon where the protagonist has her hair done every week. The story is really about the relationship between this middle-aged, donnish woman and her hair; no, between her and her self-image; no, between her and her hair stylist -- all right, all of those. Byatt never makes reductive analysis easy. She puts us in her characters' heads, and they are people, with the complexities of real and interesting people. The stylist has a complicated love life and ambivalent feelings toward the profession at which he is so good.
In that story, the protagonist has her moment of truth when she looks in the mirror at the redecorated salon and realizes that she looks like a middle-aged woman who has just had her hair done. Her reaction to that, and the events that follow, are satisfying without being pat.
This story also diverges from what I think of as Byatt's great theme (based on this book, The Game, and The Virgin in the Garden, all of her work that I've read): the thorny relationships between art, the artist, and the world. The other two stories come back to that. "Art Work" focuses on three people with very different relationships to their art. One of them, in fact, works in secret, her day job being to clean the home of the other two. That couple met in art school and followed different paths; he paints in the attic of the house, reworking the same subjects and solving different technical problems in each painting, and she has become a design editor for a slick magazine. It is perhaps unsubtle to have their Caribbean housekeeper (spoiler coming up) turn out to be the best artist of them all, but part of the story is about the difficulties of maintaining an artistic vision and commitment, and the commitment that is not a subject of discussion is certainly one that deserves respect and consideration. Not discussing it can be a way of preserving it.
The last story, "Chinese Lobster," puts Matisse and his work squarely at the center. A student accuses her advisor, a famous critic and scholar, of sexual harrassment. The dean in charge meets the advisor over dinner to learn his side of the story. (Nothing improper here; they just have dinner. It's an informal inquiry.) He's a Matisse expert, and her work is a reaction to Matisse and his ideas about women. The conversation ranges freely, but what the two participants have in common (until one of them discovers an additional commonality, which they share with the student, and which gives the story a sudden extra layer of depth) is love of Matisse and Chinese food and concern for balancing the encouragement of possibly revolutionary artists with maintaining some artistic standards. (Not all new ideas are good ones; the student's work consists mostly of smearing Matisse prints with her own feces.) It's an uncomfortable story, not least because we come away from it -- or I came away from it, at least -- with a clear sympathy for the accused professor. We don't want to dismiss the accuser as delusional, or as overreacting to an innocent word or gesture, because that generalizes to all such accusations. But this woman may actually be delusional. And, in fact, Byatt never made me lose my sympathy for the student, even though I ended by disbelieving her.
Well, that's a sign of good art. Now if only I can get to the point where Matisse makes me uncomfortable.
dmh
Now that I'm much older, I do see that, but it's a mature appreciation without that memory of excitement that I still get when I look at, say, a great Turner. I never had that moment that Gully Jimson had (in the novel; it didn't get into the film of The Horse's Mouth) where he looked at a Matisse and it "skinned [his] eyes." I suspect that A. S. Byatt did have that moment.
Matisse is not at the center of each of the three stories in The Matisse Stories -- his work is clearly near the focus of only one of them -- but the author's love of his work comes through, even where it does not inform.
In the first story, "Medusa's Ankles," Matisse is the painter of a nude, a print of which hangs (for much, but not all, of the story) in a beauty salon where the protagonist has her hair done every week. The story is really about the relationship between this middle-aged, donnish woman and her hair; no, between her and her self-image; no, between her and her hair stylist -- all right, all of those. Byatt never makes reductive analysis easy. She puts us in her characters' heads, and they are people, with the complexities of real and interesting people. The stylist has a complicated love life and ambivalent feelings toward the profession at which he is so good.
In that story, the protagonist has her moment of truth when she looks in the mirror at the redecorated salon and realizes that she looks like a middle-aged woman who has just had her hair done. Her reaction to that, and the events that follow, are satisfying without being pat.
This story also diverges from what I think of as Byatt's great theme (based on this book, The Game, and The Virgin in the Garden, all of her work that I've read): the thorny relationships between art, the artist, and the world. The other two stories come back to that. "Art Work" focuses on three people with very different relationships to their art. One of them, in fact, works in secret, her day job being to clean the home of the other two. That couple met in art school and followed different paths; he paints in the attic of the house, reworking the same subjects and solving different technical problems in each painting, and she has become a design editor for a slick magazine. It is perhaps unsubtle to have their Caribbean housekeeper (spoiler coming up) turn out to be the best artist of them all, but part of the story is about the difficulties of maintaining an artistic vision and commitment, and the commitment that is not a subject of discussion is certainly one that deserves respect and consideration. Not discussing it can be a way of preserving it.
The last story, "Chinese Lobster," puts Matisse and his work squarely at the center. A student accuses her advisor, a famous critic and scholar, of sexual harrassment. The dean in charge meets the advisor over dinner to learn his side of the story. (Nothing improper here; they just have dinner. It's an informal inquiry.) He's a Matisse expert, and her work is a reaction to Matisse and his ideas about women. The conversation ranges freely, but what the two participants have in common (until one of them discovers an additional commonality, which they share with the student, and which gives the story a sudden extra layer of depth) is love of Matisse and Chinese food and concern for balancing the encouragement of possibly revolutionary artists with maintaining some artistic standards. (Not all new ideas are good ones; the student's work consists mostly of smearing Matisse prints with her own feces.) It's an uncomfortable story, not least because we come away from it -- or I came away from it, at least -- with a clear sympathy for the accused professor. We don't want to dismiss the accuser as delusional, or as overreacting to an innocent word or gesture, because that generalizes to all such accusations. But this woman may actually be delusional. And, in fact, Byatt never made me lose my sympathy for the student, even though I ended by disbelieving her.
Well, that's a sign of good art. Now if only I can get to the point where Matisse makes me uncomfortable.
dmh
