The Matisse Stories by AS Byatt

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=18172&date=2017-04-23&pageid=1

Did Matisse Paint Stories ?

Art is a take from life or does life take from art - is a question Byatt deliberates and then answers copiously through her work of art ‘The Matisse Stories’. She draws upon her strengths of storytelling and art to paint evocative canvases of three women, caught at a certain juncture in their lives. Henry Matisse paintings superimpose the entire frame of the book nourishing the narrative with colour, texture and form. Each story begins with a vignette of a Matisse painting, linked to the essence of the story in a subtle and yet profound way. 

Byatt’s paintbrush etches beautiful verbal sketches of her characters and situates them in a milieu of their own making. Just as in her Booker Prize winning novel ‘Possession: A Romance’, duality pulls at the heartstrings of men and women caught between values, comfort zones and situations. Should Lucian go with his girlfriend to the Greek isles or stay with his wife?  Do the two professors let anorexics, namely self-loathing Peggi Nollett obtain her doctorate on Matisse or stay the course of events? 

The veneer sparkles and shines with suffused colour and artistic word-play but the core of each story is the corrugated grey colour of pain, white emptiness of loss and shards of splintered glass.  Humdrum sequences and inconsequential happenings acquire darker tones, climaxing to an undoing, exposure or a confrontation of hidden secrets in vitrines of human souls. The conclusive note is hopeful and liberating, like the light in Matisse paintings, visiting and dispersing the darkness, that idea of comfort in an armchair.

Byatt writes that Matisse shocked people by saying that art was like an armchair. “ What I dream of,  is an art of balance, of purity, of quietness, without any disturbing subjects, without worry, which maybe, something soothing, something to calm the brain, something analogous to a good armchair which relaxes him from his bodily weariness....”

 She continues the dialogue between the two characters expounding Matisse’s quote, unravelling it through words, giving it a lucid silvery silhouette - 


“Who is it that understands pleasure, Dr. Himmelblau?  Old men like me who can just understand their bones not hurting, who remember walking up a hill with a spring in their step like the red of the Red Studio. Pleasure is life, Dr. Himmelblau, and most of us don’t have it, or not much, or mess it up, and when we see it in those blues, those roses , those oranges, that vermilion, we should fall down and worship - for it is the thing itself. Who knows a good armchair? A man who has bone cancer, or a man who has been tortured, he can recognize a good armchair....”

Susannah, a middle-aged woman, in the first story ‘Medusa’s Ankles’, had come to trust Lucian (a hairstylist) with her disintegration. She had lost the desire to be seen and to be looked at. She had been awarded as a linguist and had to appear on television.

 “The cameras searched jowl and eye-pocket, expose brush-stroke and cracks in shadow and gloss. So interesting are their revelations that words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists”. 

She wanted Lucian to make her look young and glowing (Suzie of the past). Lucian‘s soothing and softening touch parodies Matisse’s brushwork – the hairdresser induces relaxation and reverie. But Lucian tells her that he has finally decided to leave his wife (who has let herself go, with fat swollen ankles) as he wanted beauty, a must in life. Susannah, a mature composed woman aware of her own fat ankles and loss of flush rosy skin, comes undone and smashes his saloon to pieces.  

Here Byatt paints a sensuous portrait of the battle hoarded saloon “...puddles of venous-blue and fuchsia-red unguents, scissors dancing on a hook its frenzy diminishing, uneven spasmodic falls of glass, a susurration of hairpins on paper, and odd intense spills of orange henna or cobalt and copper”.  The destruction of the old transforms and creates room for the new in life.

‘Art Work’ is about the Dennisons’, an artistic family and their potential housekeeper Mrs Brown.  A generous designer artist wife and a self-absorbed neoclassical artist husband with two children, pave way for the growing artistic sensibilities of Mrs Brown. Her instincts for shocking effects and juxtapositions of colour get fine-tuned to a different artistic creation and she surprises the family with an exhibition of her work at a gallery.  This ‘untoward event’ for the artistic family unleashes the savage energy of the husband-wife artistic pair to newer realms in their own exploits of art.

The last story is the study of the self-loathing of an anorexic woman student Peggi consumed by bodily horrors with Matisse’s nude women, the play of colour and light in his works. The visiting professor Perry Diss, who holds Matisse sacred, has been accused of sexual assault by the student. In conversation with the dean of Women’s Studies, Dr Gerda Himmelblau, the professors while trying to decide about the outcome of the charge, experiences the cathartic planes of Matisse’s art.  Tiny unbalances in their own make-up trip into place and they part on a note wishfully hoping that journeying with art, Peggy too would find a release.

Juxtaposition of art and human life is what makes this triptych of fascinating short stories a must read.