What Matisse Can Teach Us About Art and Life
October 28, 2024
I recently read a short quote that stopped me in my tracks:
“A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful.”
Like all good aphorisms, it contains a hint of both poetry and paradox.
It was reputedly uttered by the French artist Henri Matisse, and it quickly had me speculating on its meaning. I think what Matisse had in mind is that sometimes a smaller dose is more powerful than a bigger one, and that too much of one thing can dilute an experience.
One thing it certainly was not was a call for painterly restraint: Matisse never shied away from brightness, and his images dazzle with untrammelled colours — like a pomegranate that has just been cut open.
I think it was more of an invitation that Matisse was offering, to appreciate the smaller details. The idea that a thimble of red might be more intense than a bucketful is a deliberate shift of attention to the subtle accents that are easily overlooked. If we can relish the piquant morsel, or savour the fugitive moment, then our encounter with the world might be all the richer.
We tend to forget these important insights when so much of our modern lives are focused on bigger, better and more.
Reality and truth
Another statement from Matisse arrives at a similar point, but from a completely different direction:
“Exactitude is not truth.”
The words capture the strange dilemma that all paintings grapple with: how do you represent the infinite detail of the world through the imprecise medium of dabs and daubs of paint?
For Matisse, the answer was not through scrupulousness but a search for a more intuitive form of truth — which emerged for him through his psychological response to the subject:
“I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.”
To further prove his point, he once drew four instances of his face, noting that in some versions his jaw was bigger, whilst in others his glasses were smaller. Each of them was different, but none of them were incompatible with what he saw as the inherent reality of his own features. The “truth” was not to be found in rigorous replication but in something more inscrutable.
The idea that “exactitude is not truth” reminds me of the wonderful Jorge Luis Borges short story that tells of the foolish cartographers who attempted to draw a map so detailed and accurate that it contained every blade of grass and every square inch of soil. Such a map was so enormous — being the exact size of the territory it was attempting to chart — that its accuracy made it simply superficial.
Depictions, if they have any meaning, must be selective in the reality they show, as it is abstraction that furnishes them with a more revealing insight.
Hard work to master
The more I’ve read about Matisse the more I’ve understood that his approach to art was an all-encompassing thing, undifferentiated from his approach to being in the world, including his view of himself:
“We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.”
His attitude to both art and life was one of careful consideration, blended with wonder. It was precisely this accrual of knowledge that allowed him to experiment so liberally.
“An artist must possess Nature. He must identify himself with her rhythms by efforts that will prepare the mastery which later will enable him to express himself in his own language.”
The above quote is taken from a letter he wrote in preparation for an exhibition of his work to be held in Philadelphia in the late 1940s. In the same correspondence he expressed his concern about the effect on young artists when they saw his work and detected apparent “negligence” in his swift and loose execution:
“I have always tried to hide my own efforts and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost.”
His worry was that young painters might excuse themselves from the necessary years of artistic development, wrongly imagining they were painting “from the heart” and that becoming an artist is an easily accomplished destination. He summed up concisely:
“This slow and painful work is indispensable.”
Harmonies
Matisse had much to say about the expressive power of the painted image, and he treated as his life’s work the exploration of that descriptive potential.
“A work of art should be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.”
It was precisely this balancing act that captivated so many artists from the 19th century onwards, most notably the Impressionist painters. Their willingness to foster the art of overall unity at the expense of detail liberated so many artists who came after them — with Matisse among them.
Colour was his most significant tool. One quote indicates perfectly how he felt about colour:
“From the moment I held the box of colours in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.”
For an equally compelling statement about colour, consider:
“One tone alone is only one colour, two tones are a chord, that’s life.”
Here, not only does Matisse draw a parallel between non-representational painting and music — as so many artists of his time also did — but in two brief words he also expanded the idea of colour harmonies to a philosophy of existence (“that’s life”).
Most of all, though, I think this statement about colour tells us much about his approach to art. For Matisse, the expressive power of painting lay in his capacity to construct a panorama of tonal flavours — a polyphony of colour impressions. Crucially for Matisse, there was another important side to painting, and indeed life, namely the ability to find beauty in all that we come across. He put it rather more poetically:
“There are always flowers for those that seek them.”
If this quote begins to hint at a spiritual aspect of Matisse’s outlook, then the next quote clarifies it.
“I don’t know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I’m some kind of a Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.”
I find myself enamoured by thoughts like this. I think it is consistent with Matisse’s approach to find that an exact definition of his spiritual position was of no interest to him. Rather, he was looking for feeling, the imponderable aspects of being that might give rise to a truth that simply felt right.
For this, it takes not intellectual rigour but a type of creative fearlessness, as expressed in his most memorable aphorism:
“Another word for creativity is courage.”
My new book Great Paintings Uncovered, is out now.
Would you like to get…
A free guide to the Essential Styles in Western Art History, plus updates and exclusive news about me and my writing? Download for free here.
Join me…
On Instagram for more great paintings on the go!