Long Poem
MATISSE’S GREAT-GRANDDAUGHTER by Jennifer Habel
A simplistic description of her work would be to say that she makes impressively accurate replicas of famous paintings, but with one noteworthy alteration: she removes all living figures – people and animals – leaving the viewer to ponder the resultant effect.
– Press Release for “Sophie Matisse,” Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, 2002
1.
I start with Sophie’s painting Goldfish, an exact replica
of her great-grandfather’s Goldfish but without the fish.
I write “cyclamen” and “emerald.”
“[F]ocal points.”
I misremember the number of fish Sophie has removed (four, not three).
I contemplate absent presences and present absences.
Perhaps I just think about them.
Matisse said he wouldn’t mind turning into a vermillion goldfish, which I quote.
Picasso said Matisse had the sun in his gut, which I don’t.
“Why are goldfish orange?” I ask the search engine.
If left in the dark, they can become almost gray.
1.
I start where Sophie did, with the Mona Lisa.
“What if,” Sophie thought, looking at a book of variations on da Vinci’s painting – nude Mona Lisa, fat Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa with a mustache – “she just got up and left?”
Sophie hadn’t painted for years; her daughter was four.
In parentheses I quote Matisse on the work/life balance.
No, I won’t quote Matisse on the work/life balance.
(Will I ever get to quote Matisse on the work/life balance?)
1.
I start where Sophie did, with a book of variations on the Mona Lisa.
Blonde Mona Lisa, zombie Mona Lisa, llama Mona Lisa. “Poor woman,” Sophie thought. “She’s had enough done to her.”
Having not painted for years, Sophie resumed: the balustrade, the landscape behind Mona Lisa.
Is there a behind Mona Lisa? Was there?
A Renaissance sky, bluffs, a river . . .
“One could suppose that the landscape doesn’t exist,” said the chief curator of European paintings at the Louvre, “that it is the young woman’s own dream world.”
Da Vinci made that young woman a da Vinci. What did Sophie do to her? Or for her.
I write her name, check the spelling.
1.
I start in the “wonderful old French farmhouse in Villiers-sous-Grez.” In the living room, where the Matisse family has gathered.
I can’t stand the idea of an artist named Sophie Matisse, says Sophie’s step-grandmother. If it doesn’t work, she can always try a new name later, says her grandfather. She’ll be happier without people always comparing her to Matisse, says her father.
Sophie, engaged to be married, listens. Beautiful Sophie, whose neckline is, I imagine, generous; Dyslexic Sophie, who failed out of the art school where her great-grandfather studied.
Beautiful Dyslexic Sophie, about to marry a man twice her age.
As did Mona Lisa, I recall.
Married Sophie will later claim that, as she listened to her family decide whether or not she would change her name, she “seemed to have no opinion of [her] own” (emphasis mine).
Matisse: a hissing iamb.
(Reader, she kept it.)
1.
What does a descendent of Matisse who paints paint?
Pronounced statements of absence, said the critic.
Conceptual art, with lots of frosting, said Sophie.
1.
I try chronology: Sophie drops out of college and moves to France and enrolls in L’École des Beaux-Arts where her great-grandfather studied and has an open account at Lefebvre-Foinet and the other students are jealous and Sophie withdraws to her room and dresses in tatters and is committed to painting but doesn’t dare say so and is slow to learn French because she is dyslexic and is asked to leave the Beaux-Arts but by that time has met her future husband. . . .
1.
What can a descendent of Matisse who paints paint?
I could start in the corner of an exhibit in Baltimore where Matisse’s daughter’s paintings hang – one landscape, one still life. Worried that her signature would be mistaken for his, she destroyed most others. But I don’t want to write about Marguerite Matisse’s devotion to her father and I don’t have to.
I was like his wife, she said.
1.
Matisse with panic attacks, Matisse with insomnia, Matisse at work from morning to dusk
Matisse with palpitations, with a constant drumming in his ears
Matisse ordering oysters to paint, not eat
Matisse in a suit, Matisse in a long white coat
Matisse’s reminder that the foot is a bridge
Matisse in his aviary, Matisse with his violin
Matisse on a ladder, Matisse holding scissors
Matisse’s routine, his simple supper
That photograph of Matisse clutching a white pigeon
Matisse swearing under his breath as he worked
Matisse drawing on the ceiling with a piece of charcoal affixed to a stick of bamboo
Matisse staring at a nude model
searching for the door that he must break down
to reach the garden
in which he is so alone
and so happy
Matisse as black hole, Matisse as sun
The gravity of Matisse
I don’t start
1.
After Sophie painted Goldfish without the fish, she painted Matisse’s The Conversation without the conversing couple: Matisse and his wife.
I start there. With the empty chair that held Madame Matisse in her long black gown, Madame Matisse who said, As for me, I’m in my element when the house burns down.
Who married the person who told her, I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.
Who felt indispensable. (Matisse knew how to make people feel that way, said the woman who replaced her.)
1.
I start in the Louvre where Matisse copied the old masters.
Raphael, Poussin, Chardin . . .
Only the cowardly would avoid them.
For six years he painted Chardin’s The Skate. Magisterial, said a fellow student. At once a Chardin and a Matisse.
No – I start in the Louvre because it’s there the female relations of the museum guards painted replicas to sell to the Purchasing Commission.
It had to be a servile copy, said Matisse, not an intelligent one.
The mothers, wives, and daughters of the museum guards –
they didn’t use a magnifying glass;
they didn’t obsess over texture and glaze;
they didn’t lose days in the study of blue.
Matisse was broke but he couldn’t be as literal as the women.
They copied best, he said.
1.
I start with that edition of Jazz beneath young Sophie’s pillow.
She liked the sword swallower best. She thought it was a rabbit with three ears.
I’m staring at it when my twelve-year-old comes in. What do you need, I ask. What’s that, she says.
Lately she’s been painting. Always solitary girls, always from behind because she can’t do faces.
They wear dresses, stand before seas and fields, beneath big skies. Their hair hangs long,
concealing and revealing their need to reveal and conceal.
What does it look like to you? I ask.
A person puking stuff into the air, she says.
1.
I start with what’s there.
I start with what was already there.
I start with what was never there.
The balustrade in Mona Lisa.
The porch in American Gothic.
The indented bedding in The Bather.
That southwestern portion of the map of the Low Countries in The Art of Painting.
Shadows, mirrors, and walls.
I’m squinting at my screen, trying to read the poster in Sophie’s The Dance Lesson, when a bird flies into my window.
It lies dying for five minutes then flies away.
1.
I wish Sophie hadn’t subtitled her Mona Lisa “Be Back in 5 Minutes.”
I wish she hadn’t thought it would be funny to show the painting in a bank vault.
I wish she hadn’t worn a “sexy, scoop-neck green top” to the interview.
I wish she didn’t design limited edition luxury items like perfume bottles or appear in fashion magazines.
I wish she didn’t say “fun” so often.
That was the most fun. Life is too short not to have some fun. Learning a new language is fun. It was fun to do, a quick painting. . . .
I wish that Sophie and her art didn’t make me wish so much.
What does a descendant of Matisse who paints paint?
It was Sophie’s husband’s idea that she paint the Mona Lisa without Mona Lisa, and I wish it weren’t.
They sat looking at the book of variations: Mona Lisa with a pipe; in a bowler; on a dollar. She should just get up and leave, said Sophie.
You could paint that, said her husband.
1.
And I wish the art critic didn’t write that Sophie “had just stepped out of a Renoir.”
Sophie sat beside him in a garden swing at her dealer’s Yorktown Heights estate over Memorial Day weekend looking at a catalog of her Tokyo show, pointing out the fineness of her own brushstrokes.
She was trapped, he decided. A beautiful trapped woman, whom he would, he wrote, liberate through interpretation.
Men act, says John Berger. Women appear.
On her website Sophie appears nineteen times: as a child, as a bride, with the Prince of Monaco, on a terrace in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat wearing pearls. . . .
That garden swing, that terrace, those photo shoots with Vogue, Madame, Style St Barth – what if she just got up and left?
1.
I start at the Beaux-Arts where Sophie, a gifted copyist, learns she can’t draw. A Matisse would instinctively know how, she’d thought.
She sits in life drawing class, as exposed as the model.
She nods, pretending to understand French.
If he could bring the model inside him, Matisse said, he could improvise, let his hand run free. Only by identifying with his subjects could he get free of his emotions.
Sophie says she felt free – “completely free” – when she erased the subjects of famous paintings.
In life drawing class a beautiful young woman sits before a beautiful young woman.
I discourse upon freedom, authority, transcendence, and female subjectivity.
I quote John Berger.
Nevertheless, it remains that Sophie was a Matisse who didn’t know French and couldn’t draw.
1.
But what, really, is Sophie supposed to wear?
1.
Though I know better I start with Sophie’s self-portrait.
Asked to depict herself, she paints the ghost of a headless nude: the white bedsheet in Courbet’s The Origin of the World. Her sheet retains, or rather becomes, the infamous form in Courbet’s painting:
Breast with erect nipple
Smooth stomach
Spread thighs
Labial folds
Self-portrait as copy. Self-portrait as copy of male painter’s provocative female nude. Self-portrait as copy of a male painter’s provocative female nude that lacks head, arms, hands, and lower legs. But a copy of a nude in which the nude is removed. But a copy in which the removed nude is evoked in the bright bedsheet. Self-portrait as bedsheet.
I don’t know what to say about this. Neither does my husband.
We stare at the painting, looking for Sophie.
Asked to comment, Sophie says, I feel like in this career I’ve chosen, with the name and the situation that I have, I can’t make anything up. I just have to show myself.
She’s 38. She can speak French now, and draw.
1.
I make a list of the paintings that Sophie altered: The Valpinçon Bather, The Dance Class, Woman with a Pearl Necklace, The Lacemaker. . . .
She chose paintings so iconic that viewers would attempt to conjure the original, and thus preoccupied, or so she reasoned, they would not immediately compare her work to her great-grandfather’s.
Sophie made a point – I double check – never to alter a work by a female painter.
Then again it occurs to me that there may not be a sufficiently iconic painting by a woman. In the history of art.
I google “iconic paintings by women.”
The engine gently corrects my preposition to “of,” and provides a list of what it calls Famous Classic Paintings of Women.
Searches related to my search for iconic paintings by women:
famous paintings of women’s faces
paintings of women’s bodies
famous paintings of women’s backs
beautiful woman oil painting
famous painting of woman sitting in chair
beautiful woman painting images
famous paintings of women’s bodies
painting of beautiful Indian woman
1.
A page of fragments, each beginning with a subordinating conjunction
A fairy tale called The Princess and the Great Master
Another stab at chronology
Forty footnotes – but at the foot of what?
1.
I walk to work like Wallace Stevens. He would have agreed with Matisse that the only real light is that in the artist’s mind. Matisse would have agreed with Stevens that description is revelation.
I’m not thinking about that. I’m not thinking about the opulent eye, the lavish imagination.
About blossoms and cockatoos and dishes of peaches.
I’m thinking about Sophie.
Stevens handed slips of paper to his secretary, but I try the dictation function on my phone. (I’ve seen Britty do this at my daughter’s basketball games.)
I don’t know how loudly to speak. I don’t know I have to speak my punctuation.
Later, I’ll see the phone composed its own dolorous stanza:
Having that pain and for years so if she
painted he was there and she ran in there
and she left the house and imagined
Pain? Where did “pain” come from?
Then I realize: it came from “paint.”
1.
I start at Bookland in Sarasota. Home from college with a nascent sense of self and art history, I buy a matted reproduction of Matisse’s Goldfish.
I don’t call my high school friends.
I am, as John Berger says, almost continually accompanied by an image of myself.
My self sees herself stash the print in her closet, like money in an account.
Back at college, I funnel beer. I dress for a formal called Old South, for a party called Pimp and Whore. I stare out the window as my professor recites a sonnet, and look down when he calls the dirty pun “delicious.” I survey my own femininity. I like Intro to Art History, its dim auditorium. I like learning in the dark.
1.
I start at midnight in the old French farmhouse in Villiers-sous-Grez. Everyone is asleep except Sophie and her grandmother Teeny. They’ve been playing backgammon; now they talk and eat dark chocolate. There’s the sound of wind, or the sound of rain, or the sound of an owl, or the sound of a train.
That Teeny is the ex-wife of Pierre Matisse (son of Henri) and the widow of Marcel Duchamp;
that a visiting gallerist snores lightly in the guestroom;
that earlier he had been permitted to bathe in the blue polyester resin hippopotamus that François-Xavier Lalanne made for Teeny and Marcel;
that it’s been said that Teeny “accommodated and complimented Duchamp’s genius;”
that as a teenager she aspired to be an artist and went to Paris for that purpose;
that she convinced famous male artists to let her make prints of their palms –
Picasso, Miró, Matisse, Chagall, Matta –
that Pierre left Teeny for Matta’s young wife;
that in response to this news, Matisse wrote to Pierre, “Watch out! A young woman has young claws, well sharpened;”
(this despite his contemporaneous advertisement for a night nurse stipulating that she be “young and pretty”) –
it doesn’t belong here.
Teeny is the one who tells Sophie she’s talented. With Teeny, Sophie said, I knew I would be fine.
The sound of an owl, the sound of a train. The sound of their laughter.
A clock strikes one.
1.
If I start with the death of Teeny Duchamp – or, rather, with the “small but elegant homage” to her held at the Jeu de Paume at which was displayed the prints she made of famous men’s palms – can I get to Sophie’s hands?
She stares at them, noting how much they resemble her great-grandfather’s.
Square fingers, thick and long, with flat nails.
She keeps the nails blue. “Matisse blue,” she says.
I see them flit like minnows in her daughter’s bubble bath.
1.
A salad bowl, porcelain, white. A bowl “decorated with great charm and delicacy in a severely simple pattern of dark blue dots and lines.”
Painted by Anna Matisse, Henri’s mother. She worked in gouache on porcelain, a respectable hobby. She ran the housepaints section of the family store.
In their drab mill town in the cold, gray North, her glass bottles of color stood like envoys. Cadmium, cobalt, ultramarine . . .
She bought Matisse his first box of art supplies. He was 20; he’d passed the bar exam; he was ill and confined to bed.
That box of color – I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves, he said.
Naturally, his stern father was disappointed.
Not Anna: she loved everything Henri did.
She had, he said, a face with generous features.
Anna kept her big stove permanently lit. She painted porcelain. Drank lime blossom tea.
In the shop, Henri watched her weigh birdseed and fish food on tiny brass scales.
Everything she painted could break, and did.
This bowl, with which I start, is her last remaining piece.
1.
I could start with Sophie’s ambition: to be an artist, to see her name on a museum wall. To squeeze, as she put it, into art history somehow.
As though art history were a crowded elevator or a sleek gown.
As though her art were her body and her body were wrong.
It’s true, women have dimensions, like paintings.
Their big ambitions require small frames.
Somehow.
As for Matisse, he aspired “to invent a new language for painting,” said his biographer, speaking from her home in North London.
1.
Where did the Mona Lisa go?
Or the lacemaker, the woman with a pearl necklace, the bather.
The dancers, I imagine, went home to wash out their tights and hang them on radiators to dry.
Until I learn they didn’t have radiators. Or, in many cases, running water.
They had second jobs.
They had widowed mothers and younger siblings.
They had the attentions of wealthy elderly aboneés.
They had a sobriquet: les petit rats.
They had, as one Parisian diarist put it, a world of pink and white.
They had gilded walls and torn costumes.
They had Degas, his fascination and disgust.
They had class the next morning.
1.
Maybe we shouldn’t have skipped the Louvre, I think, staring at The Lacemaker.
Like a painter, she is absorbed in her work. Or, as Sir Lawrence Gowing, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, puts it, she is “enclosed in her own lacy world.”
Sir Gowing, I recall, organized a major Matisse exhibition.
I lose an hour reading a pdf of the catalog.
I learn that the art is the artist. That Matisse, when asked to nurse the ill, would loan them his paintings before leaving to paint.
Also that his “systematic and deliberate self-engrossment” constituted a profound innovation in twentieth-century painting.
Self as gateway to the sublime.
To his “solitary, epoch-making destination.”
I blow an eyelash from my keyboard.
1.
We shouldn’t have skipped the Louvre.
There on Vermeer’s smallest canvas the lacemaker leans like a surgeon over her work.
You can look.
Millions each year do. Peering as through a keyhole
they get close to the painting
but not to her.
Look at that, they whisper.
Pointing to her hands, the impossible thread.
The privacy she makes.
1.
I start by trying to ignore my daughter’s piano scales.
Whole whole half whole whole whole half
The scales are loud, and pretty.
I should listen to these pretty scales
that she doesn’t want to be playing
on a Saturday.
Matisse made his son rise early to practice scales alone in the salon.
When the boy fell asleep on the piano bench, the father in his bed upstairs rapped on the floor with a stick.
Pierre was forbidden to play rough games. He wore overly long sleeves to protect his hands.
There he is in The Piano Lesson, trapped between a stern teacher and a metronome. His face is abstract but his sadness is not.
A lit candle keeps time on the lid of the miniature grand.
Outside is the garden and beyond that the muddy trenches of Verdun.
I love my family, truly, dearly, and profoundly, but from a distance, said Matisse.
1.
I start in another thicket:
That woman behind the boy is, as it turns out, not the piano teacher but the subject of Matisse’s painting Woman on a High Stool. That is, in The Piano Lesson, Matisse painted one of his own paintings. (Sir Gowing is instructive on the increasingly private and self-referential world of Matisse’s work.) He did not however reproduce the entire painting; he removed the image of a bird on the wall behind the seated woman. That image of the bird was, it turns out, a drawing by young Pierre. That is, Matisse erased his reproduction of his son’s work (sketch of bird) from a reproduction of his own work (Woman on a High Stool) in a painting ostensibly about his son (The Piano Lesson). Pierre: “He suppressed everything that he did not need – no more drawing by me.”
Of The Piano Lesson, Pierre said, Well, I wouldn’t mind having it.
1.
I start in a hotel room in Paris. A renowned art dealer turns the pages of Sophie’s sketchbook while Sophie watches.
He doesn’t speak.
A clock tocks like a metronome.
The dealer, whose eponymous gallery exhibits some of the most important artists of the century, whose inventory of art will be sold upon his death for 160 million dollars, who for his meticulous stewardship is regarded by some as an artist himself, is Pierre Matisse, Sophie’s grandfather.
Pierre’s father never approved of his profession; his father approved, it’s true, of little. When, as a boy, Pierre rushed to him with a color he had discovered, Henri looked down and said, You haven’t discovered
anything.
In the hotel room, Pierre closes the sketchbook. C’est tout? he says.
1.
I start with the problem of verbs.
In her Missing Persons series, Sophie Matisse _____________
erased
liberated
exploited
revealed
Sophie says she felt invisible at the time in her life when she did whatever she did.
nothing
Nobody
why?
she wrote on her calendar – July 11, 1992, a Saturday – in the year before she disappears from the photographic timeline on her website.
Beautiful dyslexic female, age 28, last seen walking through a French village with infant daughter, grandmother Teeny, and a dog named Gauguin.
Eight years later that might be her in the snowy mist near the summit of Machu Picchu.
Meanwhile she’s been blanking figures from the frames of great masters.
Leaving, as she says, her invisible mark.
In a studio, a stairwell, a boudoir, a boat . . .
Conceptual art as self-portrait.
Leaving no trace is the trace she leaves.
1.
I try to remember where I first encountered Sophie’s paintings.
I fill out a medical form for summer camp.
The neighbor’s dog walks past with a looped leash in its mouth.
I stare at a piece of paper on which I’ve written lacy world.
1.
I start in the haunted stillness of a child’s room without a child in it.
Her strewn clothes look like the victims at Pompeii. A stuffed tiger stares at the wall.
I came in here for something.
Now time is visible.
I hover and blink.
1.
I start with a simple question.
Where did who go, my husband says.
Who indeed?
Mona Lisa, I say.
He shrugs. How would he know?
Magic Mona Lisa, Missing Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa absent without leave.
Mona Lisa on the lam.
With a bunch of dancers.
And a lacemaker.
A woman with a pearl necklace.
And a bather.
In her robe.
With a pitchfork.
And a bag of fish.
Four, not three.
Don’t forget the headless nude.
Or her copy of Ways of Seeing.
Sophie’s driving.
Is she?
There’s a pack of cigarettes on the dash.
Gauloises. No – Virginia Slims.
Virginia Slims.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
I end by quoting a man.
Jennifer Habel is the author of the poetry collection Good Reason (NFSPS Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The Believer, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Sewanee Review.