Anyone who has had to clear out a loved one’s home after a death knows how complicated objects can become. Tables carry the watermarks from glasses set down at animated family dinners or the light indentations from pencils bearing down on homework papers. A piano is more than an instrument; it’s the door to all those afternoons hammering out incomprehensible chords until they suddenly came together into music.
As soon as any object has a story — Oh, that’s the hand-carved butter paddle Grandma’s family brought with them from Sweden — it takes on the weight of association and meaning, making it hard to get rid of. Objects become imbued with importance through our interactions with them, elevating what could just be a houseful of stuff into our inheritance.
“Matisse in the Studio,” a show on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston now through July 9, explores French painter and sculptor Henri Matisse’s relationship with the objects he portrayed in his drawings and paintings. Roughly forty of those objects — such as a green glass vase, two silver chocolate pots, a marquetry table, African sculptures, Turkish fabrics — are displayed along with works in which they appear. This could have been a really bad idea. It could have felt hackneyed or overwrought. But it works, partly because many of these objects are so iconic in Matisse’s work that they have become almost like celebrities. Thus, the show satisfies a kind of voyeurism.
There’s a simple delight in seeing the “real thing” standing near the paintings that made it famous. There’s also something wonderful about seeing a hot chocolate pot or a pewter jug displayed with the seriousness and intent of a work of art. And the juxtaposition of “real thing” and “art” gives us a glimpse into the creative process. Somewhere in the space between object and drawn line or painted brush stroke, lies the reverberation of the artist’s mind. This space in which I stood as I looked from object to painting was the space in which Matisse had stood, charcoal or brush in hand.
The first object you encounter as you enter the exhibit is a green glass vase that stands on its pedestal with an amazing amount of attitude. It made me laugh to see it standing there, its two handles firmly placed like two arms on its hips, giving the impression of a woman who is comfortable, even pleased, with her ample body. Two paintings nearby, “Sofrano Roses at the Window, 1925” and “Vase of Flowers, 1924,” place the vase in sunny rooms with fruit on the table and the sea not far outside.
“The object is an actor,” Matisse wrote to a friend in 1951. “A good actor can have a part in ten different plays; an object can play a role in ten different pictures.”
Indeed, the silver hot chocolate pot (also referred to as a coffee pot in some titling), squats comically in “Still Life with Chocolate Pot, 1900,” an ink brush painting, yet stands with noble stillness in “The Coffee Pot, 1902.”
And many of the objects in Matisse’s paintings seem engaged with each other, as if he had caught them in an unguarded moment. The spout of a pitcher reaches as if to touch the thigh of a bronze sculpture of a reclining woman. A seashell seems poised on its sharp points like a crab about to crawl over to devour one of the green apples nearby. In “Purple Robe and Anemones, 1937,” a pewter jug seems to twist toward the woman who sits behind it, offering its flowers to her.
In a letter to writer Louis Aragon, Matisse recalled his student days, writing, “I was afraid I would never do figures. Then I put figures in my still lifes.”
This interplay of human form and object can be seen in many of the paintings. While many of Matisse’s works are busy with color and detail, the draperies and rugs, tables, vases, chairs and flowers that fill them are never mere decoration. They are worlds.
The exhibit is divided in five sections: “The Object Is an Actor,” “The Nude,” “The Face,” “Studio as Theatre,” and “Essential Forms.” It includes drawings and paintings from the early 1900s through the later, irrepressibly energetic paper cuts and ink brush paintings done in the 1950s. Matisse lived from 1869 until 1954, and worked during a time that saw immense change in European art. He collected African sculpture and masks, some of which are included in the exhibit, and brought the elongated lines and forms of these works into his own sculpture and painting.
Some of the later works in the last gallery, “Essential Forms,” were made from bed while Matisse was recovering from surgery for stomach cancer. Unwilling to stop working, he drew on paper tacked to the walls, using an ink brush attached to a long pole, or cut shapes from paper, covering the blankets with the snipped away bits. Some of these last, simplified forms — both human and botanical shapes — hold the most energy, for me. It feels as if, stripped down to the most basic tools —scissors and single ink brush — Matisse was forced to set aside his more decorative impulses and channel the life force of his subjects.
The Museum of Fine Arts is located at 465 Huntington Ave., Boston. For more information including hours: www.mfa.org; 617-267-9300.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for writers with recent publications or interesting projects to interview for her column. She can be reached at tcrapo@me.com.