Henri Matisse – La Nappe rose (The Pink Tablecloth)

Henri Matisse, The Pink Tablecloth, 1924-25, oil on canvas, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

The tabletop in this painting, covered by a patterned pink cloth, appears to renounce the normal ‘rules’ of perspective, as the artist imposes an uprightness on its aspect. Its square shape recedes but the pattern motif doesn’t, at least not consistently. More than half of the painting is covered by the soft, pastel, cherry blossom colour of this napery, and, with its magenta arabesque pattern, its Greek key design border and its jauntily obtruding rear fringed edge, it is this, even more than the objects that sit on it, which creates the work’s joyful ambience. The lemons and the anemones in the vase suggest that outside it is Spring and some of that season’s sense of light-filled hopefulness has found itself inside the artist’s Nice apartment where it is thought this painting was most likely to have been made.

The uprearing plane of the table has the effect of flattening it against the stripey wallpaper and adjacent wood panelling and vies for attention on the same terms as theirs – as decorative ornament. In other words, Matisse deliberately wants to promote the clothed table from its humbler horizontal bearing to stand foursquare in harmonic comparison with their verticality. This means that the Chinese porcelain vase and the ceramic platter beside it can themselves not ‘sit’ on the table conventionally. At the same time, we can see their orthodox roundedness, their volume, their depth in space, so a cognitive conflict is established in our minds as to the rightness of what we are looking at but it is not a conflict that displeases or annoys. Rather, it is like a contention that is resolved by our relinquishment of the traditional protocols that govern representations of the real world. We give ourselves over to Matisse-world ways of seeing and the surrender brings only delight to the eye.

So, the painting is less like a meditative Chardin still life and more like an examination of the pleasingly vibrant relationships between colours and shapes and prompts us to question the notion or meaning of flatness. Where Chardin bestows reverence on humble objects and foodstuffs so that they attain a quasi-transcendental condition, Matisse gives us a more celebratory glee in two-dimensional surface and shallow domestic tranquillity. By shallow I don’t mean to suggest superficiality. On the contrary, I mean that the artist has stripped away some of the preoccupation of accepted trompe l’oeil illusionism that had inhered artistic practice for centuries, back to Chardin’s eighteenth century and before, and puts in its place an acknowledgement of the canvas’ planar reality - the honesty of representing things, stuff, people, even interior space itself, in a way that doesn’t run away from this fact. This repudiation of volume is actually very profound and radical, but not intellectual. I always feel that Matisse’s work betrays an impish rather than a highbrow sensibility, a rule-breaking impudence that dares you to impugn its exultant heterodoxy.

This is not to say that any playfulness equates to haphazardness, or the brio that might be inferred from the looseness of the mark-making and the distinct lack of finish to the work. In fact, the composition is highly organized and counterpoints pattern and object shapes, angularity versus curviness, as well as colour heterogeneity. I love how the complimentary green leaves and yellow bodies of the lemons are energised by the pink cloth, while it absorbs the three plums congenially. Similarly, the flowers ‘belong’ to the cloth while the decorated vase has a separateness that distinguishes it from the gold edged but plain fruit stand. There is deliberation in this that is distinct from what an interior designer might arrange for a space. It is as if the drive to eliminate depth in the painting has conferred on these objects an individuality that would be denied them in the recessional structure of a realist work. These things on the table have a right to their place in this painting and are not undermined by the inevitable hierarchy by which the language of orthogonal convergence privileges one thing over another. We are presented here with motif adjacencies that actively revoke the laws of spatial layering.

At first sight, the linear pattern of the brown, yellow and green rayure large wallpaper is so strong that it isn’t immediately recognisable (to me at least). The stripes also appear to have been painted up to the top right picture frame rather than behind it. Again, there is a deliberate intention to avoid any relegation of this patterning to mere background. Aside from the fact that the table sits in front of it, it isn’t easy to distinguish where this piece of decoration sits in space. Its colours and stylised motifs create a forceful and insistently unidirectional contrast to the delicacy and luminescence of the tablecloth’s randomised design while the panelling’s horizontal upper rectangles, more muted in colour, counterbalance the domineering pressure of the wallcovering. In other words, background ornamentation enjoys equal billing. All these elements are entirely bourgeois in terms of taste and the whole composition speaks of domestic comfort, security, and peace while the execution of the work is left field, offbeat.

The painting conveys a revelry in relative colour intensity, in tonal character. The room is suffused with an ambient light so that the objects on the table cast little in the way of shadow. But this also means that the harmonies and dissonances between colours are unmodulated by darkness and can sing uninhibitedly. The pink is mellifluously cooler than the throb of the red cloth patterning and evokes a psychologically lighter pulse. Meanwhile the yellow of the lemons and the wallpaper, is like a percussive accompaniment the main melody. As in the introduction of ‘off notes’ in jazz music – it introduces tension that resolves with the eye’s return to the satisfyingly stable harmonic synthesis of the pink and its companion shades.

Light, colour, and shadowlessness clearly gesture at mood. I perceive this is as a profoundly happy painting, and the artist as at ease with himself and his home environment. Although this one appears to be unencumbered by chairs, a table signifies more than anything else, commensality – that is, the act of eating and drinking together. It is a place where friends and families gather, where differences can be set aside. Its is a place where food and drink are shared. For some it was once even a place where a prayer might be heard. Its pinkness here I think signifies a psychological shift away from the monochromatic immersion of his earlier work, his celebrated The Red Studio.

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio (L’Atelier rouge), 1911, oil on canvas, Museum of modern Art, New York

The sweetness of the pink of this table speaks of a move to accommodate and welcome and is so different from the all-enveloping and radically narcotic intensity of the earlier work. In short, it speaks a different emotional language. The fragility that the colour represents is consistent with the art historical symbolism that inhered 17^th century Dutch vanitas paintings, the idea that the combination of fruit and flowers simultaneously signified both abundance and impermanence. But here, I think the mood is one of the simple indulgence of sensory pleasure in a benign atmosphere. A final observation: I can’t help noticing that art, as represented by a corner of a painting at top right of this painting, is shifted but not lost from this résumé of gladness-bringing things.