Matisse and Byzantium, or, Mechanization Takes Command

It is well-known that nearly all modern painters relied upon non-Western sources to invent and renew their paintings and themselves. It has also been well-established that such borrowings could only have taken place within a structure of Western domination and exploitation. Strangely, however, the meanings of the "imported" forms, as forms, remain fairly constant, although chastened by current suspicions about power and advantage. Little attention has been paid to the manner in which such attempts to escape or overcome modernity were always betrayed specifically by their "imported" sources—even when this negativity was obviously registered, or intriguingly rejected, by those involved.

Take the case of Byzantium in the eyes of modernists, for example. A whole formalist history of modern painting, identified for a half century with Clement Greenberg but in fact much earlier in origin, invoked Byzantium as a model of formal splendor and spiritual wholeness. In "Byzantine Parallels," published in 1958, Greenberg directly linked Byzantine art to the broad movement of modern painting and sculpture, citing Newman, Rothko, and Still as pertinent examples.1 Greenberg, however, was even then only rearticulating principles that had been established in the first years of the century, and at that crucial point the modernist most closely allied to Byzantium had been Henri Matisse, whose reverence for Byzantine art culminated in his 1911 trip to Russia:

Yesterday I saw a collection of old Russian icons. They are really great art. I am in love with their moving simplicity, which, to me, is closer and dearer than Fra Angelico. In these icons the soul of the artists who painted them opens out like a mystical flower. And from that we ought to learn how to understand art.²

He no doubt saw formal as well as spiritual affinities, such as a shared lack of Albertian space and an abiding interest in the picture as a vessel or even generator of light. Such kinships were noted especially by critics: Roger Fry, for example, made of Byzantine art a paradigm of formalism—"we may perhaps be allowed to use Byzantium as a term generally expressive of the recovery of the objet d'art from the representative side of pictorial art"—and championed Matisse in just such terms.³ So confident was Fry of the connection that he began a 1930 article on Matisse with a lengthy discussion of Byzantine art, after which he wrote, "I trust my reader will see by now that I have never once lost sight of M. Matisse."⁴ Similarly, Matthew Prichard—Bergsonian, friend to Matisse, and dedicated Byzantinist—commonly contrasted what he called the "Byzantine-Matisse" style favorably to the "Greek-Renaissance-Academic" stance, even as collectors like Serge Shchukin and Albert Clinton Landsberg were independently comparing pictures like The Conversation (1911) and Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg (1914) to Byzantine icons.⁵ And even in the absence of such direct links, Byzantium was always present for Matisse via his friends, such as the acclaimed American Byzantinist Thomas Whittemore (rediscoverer of the Hagia Sophia mosaics) and especially family, notably his son-in-law Georges Duthuit, a scholar of Byzantine art who in 1949 published an essay called "Matisse and Byzantine Space."⁶

Byzantium therefore occupies a central position in the imagination of Matisse, while, conversely, Matisse assumed a dominant position in the imaginations of many prominent early-twentieth-century critics, scholars, and dealers of Byzantine art. Because this connection was articulated on both sides in terms of shared formalist and spiritual interests, it is celebratory. Its best-known art-historical account was offered by Pierre Schneider in his 1975 article "The Striped Pajama Icon." Schneider traces Byzantine formal elements in Matisse's The Conversation; these in turn suggest an underlying spiritual connection, so that the power of The Conversation is, according to Schneider, a purely religious power, despite its mundane subject matter.⁷ By rearticulating this formalist-spiritual ideal, his argument follows the modernist path first trod by artists and critics around 1900, which until recently stood as the canonical understanding of Matisse. Here, for instance, is Frank Stella in 1975:

I think that Matisse reaches the...