2.
Matisse was in St Tropez. He owed this much needed retreat from Paris to Paul Signac, who owned a big house and garden there and had found Matisse a small fisherman’s cottage just large enough to house him, Amélie and their son, Pierre. During the past few years, Matisse had had increasingly more to do with Signac, who by now was vice-president of the Société des Artistes Indépendants. Signac clearly saw Matisse as something of a protégé; he had made him a member of the hanging committee and recently appointed him as one of his deputies. The assumption of these public roles, however, had had no impact at all on the way Matisse’s work was received. Though he had shown work at the Salon des Indépendants, only two minor purchases had resulted. His sole substantial sale that spring was to André Level, who regularly patronized the small dealers of Montmartre before founding the Peau d’Ours, a society to enable young collectors to acquire the works of their contempor-aries. When Level paid him four hundred francs, it seemed like a fortune.
In 1904, Matisse was still wrestling with Signac’s divisionist techniques and broadly anarchist agenda, which he related to his own thoughts on the fundamental question of the social purpose of art. He had begun to reflect that, if painting could come closer to a form of decoration, it could surely be introduced into the lives and homes of ordinary working people. Painting would thus be liberated from the realms of academic art, becoming artisanal. In a subtle paradox, art might thus become decorative in its most intrinsic, expressive sense, and useful rather than ornamental. When Matisse looked at Signac’s work, he saw ‘canvases which restore light to the walls of our urban apartments, which enclose pure colour within rhythmic lines, which share the charm of oriental carpets, mosaics and tapestries’, and asked himself, ‘are they not also decorations?’
However, Signac in person was another matter. There was a controlling side to his personality, which had begun to grate on Matisse. One problem was that Signac regarded his theories of divisionism as inflexible rules, whereas Matisse would have liked to see them simply as a way of moving beyond Impressionism which opened up new possibilities for improvisation – the beginning, not the end, of true freedom of expression. St Tropez might have been liberating, as Corsica had once been, but Matisse was stymied by Signac, since as soon as he began to improvise on Signac’s rules, Signac criticized his work, making him so angry that only Amélie could calm him down. Nevertheless, he continued to admire Signac’s painting, particularly his major work of art, The Age of Anarchy, which showed beautiful, half-naked people in an Arcadian idyll – his vision of freedom from the tyrannies of industrial exploitation. Matisse had almost certainly seen this work in St Tropez when he began to paint his own vision of Arcadia, La Joie de vivre.
It had been not Matisse but Vlaminck who had made the greater impact at the 1904 Salon des Indépendants, where he had been accepted for the first time, with four of his works showing. This was only the second time he had ever shown his work, the first, earlier that spring, in a group exhibition at Berthe Weill’s gallery, where his paintings had seemed to make the walls explode with colour. Although Vlaminck himself was completely indifferent to the business of exhibiting his work, Matisse took the opportunity of introducing him to Vollard, who had already noticed him in the rue Laffitte, ‘a tall, powerful fellow whose red scarf, knotted round his neck, might have suggested some militant anarchist, if, from the way in which he was carrying a canvas, I had not immediately recognized him for an artist’. As for the picture, a sunset, it seemed to have been ‘squeezed out of tubes of paint in a fit of rage’ – a description not inconsistent with Vlaminck’s own explanation of his methods. As for Vollard’s first impressions of Vlaminck, he thought the man’s eyes looked kind, but also that, if crossed, he would probably put up a strenuous fight.
Vlaminck had received Matisse and Vollard in his studio, Vlaminck this time somewhat bizarrely wearing ‘a wooden tie of his own invention, the colours of which he changed to suit his fancy’. In his memoirs, Vollard adds that he bought all his pieces, but he is conflating two occasions; his purchase of Vlaminck’s work was still to come. After effecting the introduction, Matisse continued to frequent Vollard’s gallery, despite having little respect for the dealer, who saw him (or so he assumed) as a potential money-spinner rather than a cutting-edge artist of the future, like Vlaminck or Derain. Matisse’s patience was eventually rewarded when Vollard promised to give him an exhibition in June. Meanwhile, in St Tropez, he wilted in the heat, enervated by the sun and the change of location, irritated by Signac and feeling uncomfortable and isolated, since, apart from Signac, there seemed to be nobody in the place but wine-growers and fishermen.
In June, as promised, Vollard exhibited Matisse’s work. No one could have guessed from the exhibition the new directions his work had begun to move in, since the show consisted entirely of old, unsold work from the mid-1890s. Matisse had included a few early experimental works painted in Corsica but, otherwise, Vollard was showcasing only work painted in the shades of grey he still believed his clients preferred. In the event, neither style seemed to appeal; there were no purchases. After the close of the show (for his usual sum of two hundred francs), Vollard contrarily purchased The Dinner Table, Matisse’s first strongly experimental work, which had scandalized his appreciative viewers and ruined his reputation; the dealer promptly sold it on to a German collector. From every point of view, Matisse’s prospects still seemed wildly unpredictable.