Galleries: In Paris, the superb new Matisse show astonishes Richard Cork with its revelatory scope.
Dour, driven and professorial in bearing, Matisse peers out sternly from the darkness at the start of his great Paris exhibition. Impeccably displayed at the Pompidou Centre, this revelatory show differs from its acclaimed New York predecessor by focusing on his exceptional achievement between 1904 and 1917. They were his finest years, the period when he irradiated modern painting with a revolutionary vision of colour at its most blazing and sensuous. But in this early self-portrait he looks earnest, almost puritanical " a man encircled by shadows and beset with anxiety.
Part of the strain conveyed by Matisse's frowning features may have stemmed from a suspicion that time was against him. At the beginning of 1904 he was little-known, already approaching his 35th birthday and short of money. The allowance from his father had ended three years before, forcing his wife to open a millinery shop. But Vollard, one of the most respected avant-garde dealers in Paris, was about to give Matisse his first one-man show. He probably hoped that success was at last within reach, and the paintings produced at St Tropez in the summer sound a new note of unalloyed rapture.
Outstanding among them is Luxe, calrne et volupté, an idyllic canvas entitled after a line from Baudelaire. Female nudes recline and dry themselves on a seashore speckled with dabs of high-keyed colour. The debt to the optical dazzle of Pointillism is clear. And Signac, who had a villa at St Tropez, liked the painting sufficiently to buy it for 500 francs. All the same, the particles of pigment in Luxe, calrne et volupté were larger and more outspoken than anything Signac himself would have dared to produce.
By 1905, Matisse had become notorious. Along with younger friends like Vlaminck and Derain, he provoked a furore at the Salon d'Automne with canvases so vehement in feeling that the group was nicknamed "les fauves".
