pia mller-tamm

Henri Matisse
Figure, Color, Space

I
Figure and space are the fundamental phenomena of objective painting.The con-
nection to reality in the two-dimensional arts of the modern European tradition
is articulated in the relationship of these elements. Modernism defined a cate-
gorically new pictorial constellation of figure and space. No other painter in the
twentieth century played a greater role in this process than Henri Matisse.
Within his polyphonic artistic oeuvre, the artist dovetailed figure and space by
means of color to form complex structures and used these new constellations to
formulate his view of the modern painting.The lasting significance of his poet-
ics of figure and space is revealed in both objective and abstract trends in art into
the present day.1
Figure and space are encountered in Matisses work primarily in terms of
the female figure and interior space: as a reading woman turned away from the
viewer in a dimly lit interior corner, as the female protagonist of domestic life
carrying out her chores at a richly covered table, as a posing nude model in the
artists studio, as sleeping or dreaming odalisques amid a mise-en-scne with
Oriental decorations. The female figure in an interior is the main motif of
Matisses art, something he held on to through all the phases of his career and all
his innovationsfrom the small, dark, powerful easel paintings of his early pe-
riod to the luminously bright and floatingly light paper cutouts of his late work.
This rigorous fidelity to the motif structure of an interior with a woman inte-
grates other genresespecially the portrait and the still lifeand stands in a
tension-filled relationship to Matisses assessment of arts prerequisites in terms
of objects and motifs, to which he attributed less importance. For example, in
his programmatic text of 1908, Notes of a Painter, Matisse asserts that a work
of art must carry within itself its complete significance and impose that upon the
beholder even before he recognizes the subject matter. When I see the Giotto
frescoes at Padua I do not trouble myself to recognize which scene of the life of
Christ I have before me, but I immediately understand the sentiment which
emerges from it, for it is in the lines, the composition, the colour.2 Matisses
emphasis on the artistic means of line and color and on the compositional

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