Block that quote!

In today's LAT, Leah Ollman uses an art critic's oldest stand-by, Henri Matisse's quote about the allegedly soothing nature of his work:

If, as Matisse famously suggested, his art aspired to the condition of a good armchair, visually soothing and emotionally transcendent, photographer Candida Hofer's compares to those handsome and severe Rietveld chairs, all straight lines and smooth planes -- a gift to the eye, hell on the rest of the body.

The misapplication of that quote by writers has been long-discussed by Matisse biographers. From Notes of a Painter (1908), Here's the full quote:

What I dream of, is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from fatigue.

That paragraph is often divorced from the paragraph Matisse wrote just before it, a paragraph that changes its meaning (Ollman ignores it):

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 [Ed: Matisse had just seen them, on a 1907 trip to Italy with Leo Stein] I do not trouble myself to recognize which secene of the life of Christ I have before me, but I immediately understand the feeling that emerges from it, for it is in the lines, the composition, the color. The title will only serve to confirm my impression.

That's only part of the context. Matisse wrote those paragraphs in 1908, after his work had been attacked at Salons and by anyone in Paris who cared about art. Matisse had become something of a well-known name in Paris -- but principally as an object of derision. Around Paris' artsier neighborhoods, rivals defaced government health posters to read "Matisse is more dangerous than alcohol!" or "Matisse has done more harm than war!"

Matisse was tired of the ridicule.

Finally, in late 1907 and in 1908, Matisse began to have some commercial success. A small number of collectors -- fewer than half a dozen -- began to support his wildest visions. Sergei Shchukin, a Russian textile magnate, was one of Matisse's strongest supporters. But even he wavered as the Russian elite ruthlessly made fun of him for owning and hanging Matisse paintings.

About the time Matisse wrote Notes of a Painter, a Fr20,000 commission for Shchukin was hanging by a thread. Matisse wanted to paint dancing nudes. Shchukin initially blanched at the ridicule to which that would expose him, and wrote Matisse to kill the idea. Again, Matisse's vision was attacked -- and this time so was his pocketbook. Shchukin quickly realized he'd goofed and commissioned Dance after all. Still, it was almost certainly with Shchukin (and other collectors) in mind that Matisse tried to soothe their fears. My paintings aren't that radical, he was saying in Notes.

And lest we think that Matisse was a big ol' luxurious, decorative softie, he also said this:

I reckon I've made progress when I recognise more and more clearly in my work a detachment from the support offered by the model (the presence of the model, who is there not so much to provide possible information about her physical constitution as to keep me in a state of emotion, a sort of flirtation which ends by turning into a rape. Whose rape? A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic object). 

Sources: Jack Flam's Matisse & Picasso, Flam-edited Matisse on Art, Hilary Spurling's The Unknown Matisse, Spurling's Matisse the Master. (Or buy the UK version of MtM, available now, here.)