Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse

In 1913, when Henri Matisse exhibited 17 works at the famous Armory Show in New York, critics and spectators ridiculed his sumptuous still lifes and languorous female nudes as degenerate and aesthetically aberrant. Yet by 1927, Matisse's work had become the most expensive of any living modern artist. How did this transformation occur? In an incisive reappraisal of the making of Matisse's American reputation, art historian O'Brian (Degas to Matisse) argues that leading institutions, notably New York's Museum of Modern Art, and influential critics, such as Clement Greenberg, canonized Matisse as a paradigmatic modern artist by ignoring certain aspects of his work. In embracing Matisse's oeuvre and its rejection of political concerns, its strong decorative appeal and its affirmation of pleasure and optimism, the art establishment and a receptive public ignored its abrasive disharmonies, its facility and artificiality, its ""cool hedonism,"" which manipulated the viewer's responses to provide visual gratification on its own terms. According to O'Brian, Matisse abetted this process by promoting his image as a solidly bourgeois avant-gardist, devoted husband and father of three children, and by assiduously cultivating good relations with the press, collectors, museums and dealers. The iconoclastic claim that Matisse's influence on Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell, Milton Avery, Clyfford Still and others has been overestimated is startling. In the end, however, O'Brian's contention that Matisse's popularity depended on his style's congruence with postwar America's ethos of mass consumption and sensual pleasure, and its expanding economy, seems too pat to account for this ""modernist old master's"" abiding appeal. 30 color and 75 b&w reproductions and photographs. (May)