The Stuff Of Genius

Matisse filled his studio with objects to serve as props and inspiration. Tanya Harrod is thrilled to see them reunited with his paintings.

- Tanya Harrod

A 1946 black and white photograph, taken by Hélène Adant, shows an array of vessels, but also a small sculpture and an octagonal Moorish table. Henri Matisse annotated the photograph on the reverse – ‘Objects that have been of use to me nearly all my life.’

They are grouped casually, as you can see in the photo (facing page), but it is easy to pick out prime objects, familiar from his paintings and drawings. There is a two-handled green glass vase, 17th century blue and white Delftware, a lidded, fluted pewter jug, a silver jug, with a turned, wooden side handle, for making hot chocolate, and a celadon Qing dynasty vase with a flared base and top held together by a reassuring central knop.

Adant’s photograph is central to Matisse in the Studio, a show that complements and develops the Royal Academy’s dazzling 2005 Matisse, His Art and His Textiles: The Fabric of Dreams.

That exhibition was informed by the brilliant biographical researches of Hilary Spurling, in which she demonstrated the centrality of textiles to Matisse’s creative life. He grew up with them in the northern weaving town of Bohain-en-Vermandois, and used the flat areas of colour and abstract tendencies of textiles as a defence against the sterility of academic art training.

‘I built up my own little museum of swatches,’ he recalled of his student days. Matisse in the Studio inevitably includes what Matisse called his ‘noble rags’, the catholic range of textiles from his collection. But it also takes in his informal museum of ceramics, glass, metal ware, furniture, and African figures and masks; much loved things, taken from studio to studio, from home to home.