Two weeks ago I went on a long planned art-outing with A., to see Matisse‘s cut-outs at Tate Modern. The two Tates are good places for me to visit as I can whizz about on one of their electro-scooters (why don’t other museums and galleries offer these?) and don’t have to rely on someone pushing me in a wheelchair. The exhibition is an absolute happy-maker, a lush spirit-lifting feast of form&colour and I wish I could pop in for a daily dose of undiluted pleasure.
Matisse made his cut-outs during and after the war, and you won’t be surprised I had an inner window open to the time. I mentioned to my startled friend that both Matisse’s wife Amélie (from whom he was separated) and daughter Marguerite had been active in the French Resistance and were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. Amélie was jailed in Fresnes until Paris was liberated, Marguerite was tortured and finally put on a train to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women (and their children), with male and female guards. When Allied bombing stopped the train at the German border she was able to escape. That I felt compelled to tell my friend, at that moment, reminded me of my father: during the last years of his life he often would – during a meal or an unrelated conversation – suddenly make a remark about the war. And then stop… Of course where he was at times befallen by memories I have chosen to dig, to try to unearth. I have to admit though that my project has me tightly in its grips, and I take it wherever I go. My vision is both sharpened and blunted by this.
In a lovely twitter exchange with @SoniaBoue a while ago I wondered if memories ‘live in in-between spaces, bounded by nothing more than thin skin&tailspins’. On a day when fatigue fells me the formulation of a tweet may be my one creative act and I enjoy the challenge of whittling phrases down to just the right handful of words. Walk in truth and beauty, even when supine… Thinking of my dad and his often abrupt transfers to another place&time, makes me consider traumatic memory, which is even less bounded, bare of protective skins. I have nothing to remember, only to call up from what I’ve gleaned over the years, but my dad did and in the end couldn’t help it.
I told my friend about Amélie and Marguerite Matisse because these things hover at the edge of perception and because I’m learning more about how things connect, how the unseen/unknown touches the seen/known, how we teeter on brinks, borders, thresholds.
The German-Jewish painter Otto Freundlich, whose work was classified as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, lived and worked in Paris after 1925. At the beginning of the war he was interned as an enemy-alien by the French; released; arrested again by the Gestapo in 1943 and deported to Majdanek, where he was murdered. All these facts exist skin to skin, cheek by jowl. Matisse, who was cut into in 1941 and delights in his second life, lets form and colour fly; my 17year-old dad is happy to see the sites during his three days in occupied Paris (post#115) and brings home the picture postcards I found in his photo-album; Amélie types intelligence-reports for the resistance; Otto Freundlich is deported.
Terror and delight. The plethora of possible realities during war, and of responses, astounds me. Think of Jean Fautrier, whose sculpture Head of a Hostage has haunted me since I saw it years ago at Tate Modern. Because of his affiliation with a resistance group he too was arrested by the Gestapo (1943) and after he was freed stowed away at a mental hospital in the suburbs of Paris, where the screams of prisoners tortured and executed by the Nazis in a nearby forest could be heard. He made himself, his art, a witness.
I’m still electrified by having seen Matisse’s cut-outs – the corners of my mouth remain upwardly mobile! The work is both concentrated and unconstrained – his shapes may have spilled over from memories of healthier, saner and happier times, but it’s life-experience and sustained art-practice that allow his elderly hands to conjure such simple and sophisticated exuberance. The threads I spin from there have many hues. Nothing is innocent. Everything is connected.
