The Brooklyn Rail

Here at the press preview for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Vertigo of Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of Fauvism, a lot of the men are wearing suits, more than I expected. Some do so effortlessly, as if the fabrics have become inextricable from their bodies over decades of daily use. Two such men stand, almost leaning, as they contemplate Derain’s Collioure (1905), named for the French town in which Derain and Matisse spent a historic summer in 1905. They do not notice the fact that they are wearing suits, but I do. The man closer to me is perhaps in his forties, his age belied by his archaic turns of phrase, which I take delight in overhearing. “Nor I,” he responds casually at one point to the man next to him. A few minutes later I hear him say “it seems that the end is nigh!” followed by what seems to be intended as a reassuring laugh, perhaps a tactful insertion of levity. I wrote that down because I liked the way he said it, but since then I can’t stop wondering what he meant. Maybe it was just an internal professional mini-crisis, one potentially solved by the right amount of perfectly-worded emails. Maybe it was a detachedly witty way of addressing something more calamitous. “The end is nigh” seems like a meaningful phrase, but the more I examine it the more it seems like a verbal Rorschach test. The meaning we draw out of it says more about us and our internal worlds than anything else, but card-carrying postmodernists might argue that this is true of nearly everything. Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-British sociologist and cultural theorist, seemed titillated by the idea that there is no such thing as “true meaning.” Each of us, as products of this exact place and time, of the people around us, create the meaning. A painting doesn’t just hang there, constantly meaning something. It means nothing until someone looks at it, then goes back to meaning nothing until someone looks at it again.

The work of the curator can be a shot in the dark, trying to turn the variables of many different works into a cumulative sensation for the viewer. Here, the sensation is irresistibly vivid: that summer in that idyllic nowhere Mediterranean coastal town. In those ephemeral weeks, Matisse and Derain created a singular and astounding body of work—seeing them in person, one after another, knocks you out! Their thick and often entirely discrete brushstrokes, in electrifying colors sometimes straight from the tube, feel like a winking half-joke that we’re all in on. They’re dead serious in making these gorgeous paintings, but it’s like they’re holding a big middle finger up to propriety of classicism, the subtleties of Impressionism. The painting I keep coming back to is Matisse’s Open Window, Collioure (La fenêtre ouverte) (1905), which beams at you in what feels like every imaginable color. I find myself zeroing in on these fat blobby strokes of paint Matisse uses throughout the painting. They compose clouds, sailboats, water, leaves, while existing as their own three-dimensional objects, squirming and alive. I can’t stop imagining that summer, which these two painters spent spurring each other on, diving into the deep end from increasingly higher jumping off points. They fed off of each other, and off of that specific air, wind, light against those ancient stone buildings and linen sails.

This exhibition invites viewers to lose themselves in that world, but the experience of going to see it is inescapably part of going to the Met, something the museum will always have to its advantage. I find comforting familiarity in every detail of this act: the walk out from the mosaic-encrusted subway station that has its own entrance to the Museum of Natural History, the walk across the eternal park, laden in autumnal hues, trying to step on a leaf that will really crunch underfoot, entering the museum through the side entrance, up the stairs, through the Greek statues and into the cavernous Great Hall. Today, an extra layer to notice is the behind-the-scenes-ness, a man in white overalls on a step ladder rolling white paint onto a gallery wall. A giant audio mixing board has been rolled in as engineers in red lanyards work on a new multimedia installation, A Metta Prayer by Jacolby Satterwhite. I need to get to the press preview, so there’s not much time to take it in, but as I walk by there’s a practice concert being rehearsed with a young violinist who arpeggiates four perfect notes that make the whole scene feel cinematic.

Everything lingers as I enter the exhibition. I stare at Mountains at Collioure (Les montagnes à Collioure) (1905), my eyes drawn to the dark blue lines which mark the winding slopes of the mountains, the point at which the orange sunset is cut off, leaving a vacant blue on the mountains’ shadowed faces. There’s a white-haired woman here who, one can tell, is a master of her craft, writing notes in shorthand into a small spiral notebook. She’s standing next to me in front of the mountains and I have to ask her what she thinks. “I like the amoebic forms,” she says matter of factly. I don’t think she’s being curt here, but trusting that I’ll understand what she means. I think I do. I think she’s talking about the way that Derain feels free to take liberties with the gestures that outline these mountains, letting them be immediate and softly malleable even as the mountains are distant and monolithic.

A tour has begun, led by two elegant and knowledgeable curators, each formed to some degree in the image of Rosamond Bernier. I’m thankful for the freedom to step away at my discretion, far enough that their voices and laughter become abstract intonations, and then to come back and listen intently for a few minutes. “Marvelous little gem of a painting,” says one of the curators as she points to Matisse’s Woman with a Shawl, Madame Matisse in a Kimono (La femme au chale, Madame Matisse en kimono) (1905). Matisse paints the skin of his Madame with a confident precision, but her shawl hangs on her figure much more ambiguously. The shawl’s ornamental patterns of blue and green seem to float, not entirely adhering to the shape of the corresponding fabric underneath. Later, the curator directs us to a drawing, Matisse and His Wife at Collioure (1905), that Derain made of Matisse while he was painting his wife in that same shawl by the ocean. Here, the shawl feels affixed to her body, but Derain’s gestures convey an oceanic airiness. The drawing and painting together simulate the cinematic effect of continuity editing, like they are two shots from some beachy period piece.

And now the tour is over, which means this whole thing will soon be over. I take one more moment to look at Open Window. I take a photo, although, as it turns out, there’s a perfectly high-resolution one in the digital press packet. But it won’t be able to reproduce the feeling of looking at it in person, the Zap! of meaning created as the impossibility of its palette and the immediacy of its subject matter hit me in tandem. I’ll have to come back. The Metropolitan staff is kindly directing me through this familiar labyrinth to the exit, and I’m thankful that they do because I truly would not be able to find my way out of here, not for a while anyway. But I hope they don’t mind that I’m walking pretty slowly, stopping to look at objects like Statuette of the Personification of a City (300–500), copper alloy, Byzantine, said to have been found in Rome.

Back in the Great Hall, the practice concert is now accompanied by massive projections of digitally-rendered people, running, dancing, falling. They inhabit impossible, colorful landscapes, some apocalyptic, some surreal, some neoclassical. It’s A Metta Prayer, getting closer to its fully realized form. Superimposed over the maximalist digital imagery are a series of repeated phrases which feel like twenty-first-century mantras, like “come together, come together,” and “this is a new world order.” In their digital-ness, they seem to have transcended even cliché. The meaning created here seems a world away from the paintings of Matisse and Derain, perhaps in another universe. The Fauvism of Matisse and Derain felt like an early splash of modernity, lavishly disobeying aesthetic laws and conventions, beastly in the eyes of certain critics at those Paris salons. Since then, modernism ran its course, leaving a murky postmodernism in its wake. But that was maybe forty years ago. What does Satterwhite mean by “this is a new world order”? The prospect of a post-postmodernity feels infinitely ominous to me in this moment. I look back down to take comfort in what's immediately in front of me, the realness of it, a man behind the giant mixing board, an elegant employee in an immaculate white sweater returning from the brightly sunlit iconic front steps with a small paper bag of lunch. I look back up at the giant projection. “I know all this but I still love,” it says. Love, like these phrases, can be as full of meaning and truth or bereft of them as you want.