Radical Reinvention: Matisse in New York

this is a review of MOMA’s ongoing Matisse exhibition I wrote for the China Daily’s Sunday edition

Most people know Henri Matisse (1869-1954) for his elegant, simple shapes in bright, optimistic colors. However, the exhibition Matisse: Radical Reinvention, a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, reveals a very different Matisse: This is Matisse at his boldest and darkest.

The exhibition’s premise is that between his return from Morocco in 1913 and his departure for Nice in 1917, Matisse took his art in an assertive new direction. His paintings from this period are experimental, increasingly concerned about the act of art-making itself, as opposed to art as representation of its subject.

This casts Matisse as a proto-expressionist, anticipating the work of the likes of 20th-century great Jackson Pollock.

The more than 100 works on display feature scratched-out paint, leftover pencil marks, and blatant signs of reworking which Matisse made no effort to conceal. Perhaps the best way to understand what he was doing is to compare these experimental canvases to his sculpture.

The curators have cleverly juxtaposed these with his canvases. Matisse frequently worked on several pieces simultaneously.

In the first gallery, Blue Nude (1907) hangs beside Reclining Nude (1) (1907) – both works feature women in repose, with the painting clearly modeled on the sculpture.

In Blue Nude, the numerous layers of paint indicate Matisse’s fervent reworking of the figure. The effect is that of a bold display of the process of painting. You can see where Matisse corrected himself, where he has decided to shift the figure, sculpting the paint as he would the clay.

Reinvention also reveals a darker Matisse than the one in popular imagination – the self-doubt and perfectionism which drives the constant reworking is evident everywhere, and the gray and black tones echo the difficulties he grappled with in this turbulent period – the dark cloud of World War I was approaching, and his art was often poorly received.

Portrait of Olga Merson (1911) is a deeply ambiguous painting of a woman with whom the artist was obsessed. Merson kneels on the ground in what seems to be a perfectly pleasant, placid figure. However, a closer look reveals that the left half of her face has been scraped off, leaving a skittering of lines, as though the artist was simultaneously creating and un-creating. Two large black arcs cross her torso and hip. Are they lines of definition or cancellation?

The remarkable Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914) is even stronger in its use of radiating arcs, which seem to trace the energy of the subject rather than her form. Here Matisse has scratched out the arcs, and this lends the painting an energy and urgency – the result is powerful and textural.

One senses that Matisse was working with paint in a new way, layering it on, scraping it off, leaving the edges rough rather than polished.

To further underline the point, Matisse’s four monumental bronzes – Back I, Back II, Back III and Back IV – all female figures in more and more abstract form, range across the galleries, representing his move away from representation towards abstraction in this period.

Each of the Back sculptures was, in fact, a reworking of the plaster cast of the previous one, so here we can catch Matisse literally in the act of re-creation. A fascinating multimedia feature reconstructs this process, showing how the fleshy, realistic figure of Back I morphs into the monumental, almost architectural lines of Back IV.

If his Back series dominate the sculpture of the exhibition, then Bathers by a River (1909-10, 1913, 1916-17), hanging in pride of place in the final gallery, is its canvas counterpart.

This canvas was worked and reworked incessantly over nearly a decade, and serves as the focal point for the whole exhibition.

An informative video again reconstructs Matisse’s process – unearthed by an amazing slew of technological developments, including a delightful reconstruction of the 1913 state of the painting from photographs of Matisse’s studio by American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn.

The new insights into Matisse’s process support the exhibition’s thesis, and the parallel observation in the Back sculptures: the naturalistic scene of 1909 gives way to four sharply divided panels, transforming the canvas from idyllic, Eden-like scene to something more modern and isolating.

However, it is The Piano Lesson (1916), also in the final gallery, that may be most intriguing.

In this large canvas, the painter’s son is depicted on the lower right at the piano. A female figure looks on from behind him. The whole left half of the canvas is a window, blocked out in gray, green and blue. The shaft of light that cuts through this piece is implied, and yet undeniable.

Matisse has captured a moment in time, and turned it into a monument.

What is perhaps Matisse’s most famous work, Danse I (1909), conveniently hangs just one floor below at the Modern.

Its five rhythmic female forms, gracefully dancing in a circle, have become an icon of 20th-century art. However, it is important to remember that when it was first exhibited, it drew lashings of critical vitriol.

Some may find the curiously clumpy, unfinished hand of the figure on the left crude. However, in the light of the Modern’s latest exhibition, this choice makes more sense.

Even in his masterpiece, Matisse has displayed a willingness to reveal his sleight of hand, to lay bare his process in a frank and telling gesture. It is refreshing, and yes, surprisingly postmodern.

published at China Daily,  26th Sept 2010, Sunday.

Chasing the “I”

Dear Memoir

By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Published on August 6, 2010

I met your kind in college.  It was in Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. Your pages were musty, your spine well-broken.  Your words engulfed me, lassoed me in the undertow of Jamison’s death-thoughts and hallucinations.  You suited her telling just right.  When I closed the cover I knew Jamison, could feel the tumult of living bipolar and discovering it so late in life.

What happened next?  I did not seek another incarnation of you. Instead, I met your cousins, the Personal Essays.  They were enchanting, always touching my arm and pulling me aside to confide some story well worth my time through its hilarity or gravity.  My favorite of these cousins?  Bernard Cooper‘s “Winner Taking Nothing,” Adam Gopnik‘s “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” James Baldwin‘s “Notes of a Native Son,” Joan Didion‘s “Goodbye to All That,” and E.B. White‘s “Once More to the Lake.”

Then your sedate, worldly wise, and pondering cousins came to dinner.  These were the books of Literary Journalism.  How I liked meeting Tracy Kidder‘s Mountains Beyond Mountains and Old Friends, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, the nonfiction sections of Joseph Mitchell‘s Up in the Old Hotel, and Anne Fadiman‘s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.

Next to these sat their children, sun-burnt and bespectacled.  The Researched Essays.  They brought bug jars, binoculars, and yellowed biographies to the dinner table, and whatever our conversation topic, they had some trivia to toss us, or excused themselves and consulted Britannica.  They were brilliant and conversational; still, I chose favorites–Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small, David Foster Wallace‘s “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” Gay Talese‘s “New York is a City of Things Unnoticed,” and John McPhee‘s “The Search for Marvin Gardens.”

Halfway through dinner, in flowed your niece, the Lyric Essay, with emerald rings on her fingers and hair down to her waist.  I loved Lia Purpura‘s “Glaciology,” John D’Agata‘s “Notes Toward the Making of a Whole Human Being,” and Albert Goldbarth‘s “After Yitzl.”  After dinner, we sat in the guest room and I tried on her rings.

Your relatives were such good company that I forgot about you.  And when I turned back to you, I found we’d grown apart.

Full article at The Curator

Tribute to the Cosmopolitan

Masters of the modern universe search for authenticity

By Judith Huang

image from Ethos Books

The Proper Care of Foxes
Wena Poon
Ethos Books (2009) / 200 pages / SGD20

In an age in where “I friend you” has morphed from Singlish schoolgirl olive branch to globally recognized verb phrase, where young executives are whipped from one metropolis to another in the space of a week, and where the geeks inherit the earth, Wena Poon’s luminous prose provides a voice that helps us make sense of it all.

Her concerns are timeless – love, death, kindness, cruelty, friendship, family and loss. But her voice is distinctive: defiant, confident, quirky and devastatingly, relentlessly hip. In her latest collection of short stories, The Proper Care of Foxes, she seems to be self-consciously transnational – an intention immediately obvious from the shopping list of the world’s major cities on the contents page. If her debut collection, the well-received Lions in Winter, was a tribute to the Singapore “heartlander”, then Foxes is its natural companion: a tribute to the “cosmopolitan”.

Here is a writer who is fluent in the feel and thought of an impressively broad range of worldviews – the dim cynicism of the expatriate photojournalist, the despairing decadence of the scion of New England Brahmins, the frenetic workaholism of the high-flying Hong Kong accountant, the cosy antiquarianism of the middle-class English retiree. Despite their closeness to stereotype, her characters defy easy classification. They have the weight of authenticity – instantly recognizable from cursory experience, and yet infused with depth and compassion.

Poon’s narrators are most often on the winning side of history – they are the savvy survivors in a world where the illiterate, the old, the unconnected, the unmoneyed, are left in the dust, as it were, of a frenetic, furious new world order. Hers is unmistakably a voice of the new: a Mrs Dalloway on speed, Ecstasy and a host of as-yet-unmixed drug cocktails, fingers flying on three keypads to contact 20 social networks to all corners of the pulsing ecosystem of humanity. But her allegiances are far more complicated. Her title, after all, invokes care – and “proper care” – a kind of embrace offered gingerly to something swift, dark and subtle. Her cosmopolitan empathy is also catholic: although her project in this volume is not to narrate for the dispossessed, her self-assured characters identify with them, however briefly.

In “Vanilla Five”, a bored, privileged housewife with literary ambitions and a larger-than-life philandering novelist husband momentarily superimposes on her Japanese shopkeeper neighbour the Japanese soldiers who “killed women by jamming Chinese fireworks up their cunts and lighting them”. She does this not because she has anything against her mild-mannered neighbour, who has an unexplained white son, but because “she knew so little about Japanese people and Asia” that it was the first thing that flitted into her mind when she saw him.

And she is unflinching when she writes about evil.

Prostitutes have more freedom. At least you’re not bonded to the client for years. You don’t live in his house. He hits you, you leave. But the Filipina maid. She can’t leave. Some of them are practically under house arrest, and nobody checks on them. Nobody. Think about the possibilities. I’d like to have power over someone like that. In my house. What’d I do to them. I wouldn’t trust myself.

rants MacGregor, the jaded British photojournalist, on the Filipina maids in Hong Kong and Singapore, comparing maid abuse in the comfortable apartments of middle-class Asians to the Senegalese supermodel he photographed at a Hermes show, who spoke of her experience with female circumcision. Where the outrage of war had ceased to move him, the “horror lurking in boring places” is what draws his lens, and the author’s pen.

Poon seems determined to write a different kind of story – fully confident in itself, but poised defiantly against the kinds of writing the mainstream offers about Asia. Worshipful Orientalism, embodied in the prancing tranny New Hampshire billionaire Siegfried, is continually brought down to earth by his no-nonsense nose-to-the-grind Hong Kong university roommate Regina: the classic odd-couple story updated into a 21st-century strange dorm room encounter with the third kind. MacGregor, who laconically describes his job as “photographing scenic poverty”, and who, tellingly, flees the banality of developed Asia, still finds himself galvanized in defense of abused Filipina maids when he finds cruelty lurking unexpectedly in the pristine lives of upper- middle class Singaporeans.

And yet, Poon’s stories never tip over into the territory of the angry young Asian woman of the “empire writes back” variety. Her frustrated divorcee, Alison, says of her successful novelist husband, “I’m sick of Langley and I’m going to write a story that Langley and other stupid male authors like him, who have first names which were really last names, can never write. I am going to write Langley and his Men’s Club out of my life”. But the revenge that Poon has planned for her is far more subtle, and far more exquisite – Alison gets to run away with a sweet, confused white Japanese punk-rocker neighbour who could pass for a 22-year-old, in defiance of her social pack of “upstate Radcliffe-educated women who no longer worked”.

And, where there has been misunderstanding, she is careful to unwrap, quite deliciously, the appreciative core at the heart of the misunderstanding – for example, watch what she does with Orientalism in this particularly sublime moment in “Siegfried & Regina”. Siegfried, naked, long-haired and illegal, stands rapturous in the middle of an empty French theatre in Hanoi:

Despite the architecture there was no way she would have believed she was anywhere but in Southeast Asia. Every molecule of air was bursting with the scent of the jungle…

He turned to [Regina]. ‘The flowers in the air smell like Chanel No. 5. You think this is a replica of the Opera Garnier and of Paris, but perhaps the Opera Garnier and Paris are but a replica of this. The flowers for their perfumes came from here. This is the real thing, Reg. Not France.

And so, Siegfried and Regina, archetypes of the Decadent West and the Industrious East, somehow ventriloquise something essential about authenticity – that it is found where beauty is, that there is, really, nothing new under the sun, and to have seen it once is to have seen it all, but that it does not preclude the need to keep on seeing.

To keep on seeing seems to be Poon’s ultimate project: though unflinchingly honest, she is, at heart, optimistic that through the thicket of BlackBerry chatter, real connection – real love, real friendship, can and does come through. Poon herself elucidates this phenomenon best – in the title story, a lonely English executive wonders at the bittersweet one-night-stand he had with his Malaysian Cambridge tutorial mate:

Edward marveled again at the random connectivity of life, the enormous consequences of tiny blips of electronic mail pulsing, faster than the speed of light, through the wide world. For the past few weeks he had felt intermittently, the terror of the void. And yet the void had sent him back something: her smell, her flesh. Out of eternity he had redeemed an hour; out of the unknown he had experienced a sudden consummation in which for a few seconds the universe contracted into the smallest possible ball of anguished joy.

And so once again, the oldest questions still have the oldest answers.

published at  QLRS Vol. 9 No. 3 Jul 2010