Océanie, la mer

‘Memories of my trip to Tahiti are only now coming back to me, fifteen years later, as obsessive images: madrepores, coral, fish, birds, jellyfish, sponges,’ Henri Matisse wrote in 1946, explaining the inspiration that lay behind his latest, dynamic artistic project (quoted in Brassaï, Conversations with Picasso, trans. J.M. Todd, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 292). Drawing upon the rich trove of impressions and recollections that remained rooted in his imagination following his trip to the tropical island in the South Seas in 1930, the artist created a pair of intricately composed, screenprinted wall hangings based on cut paper maquettes – Océanie, la mer, and its pendant composition, Océanie, le ciel. These works occupy a pivotal position in Matisse’s late oeuvre, marking the arrival of an iconography that would underpin his most famous works through the final years of his career, and push the artist down a new creative path.

As the artist’s studio assistant Lydia Delectorskaya recalled, it was in Paris that Matisse first embarked upon the sequence of cut-out shapes and designs that formed the foundation of the project. ‘Matisse had cut out a swallow from a sheet of writing paper and, as it distressed him to tear up this beautiful shape and throw it away, he said, he put it up on his wall, also using it to cover up a stain, the sight of which disturbed him. Over the following weeks other shapes were cut out and put up on the same wall. Little by little all this ended up becoming an entire composition that decorated the whole wall panel’ (note from L. Delectorskaya to the Musée Matisse, Le Cateau-Cambresis, October 1997; quoted in P. Deparpe, ed., Matisse: La couleur découpée: Une donation relevatrice/Cutting into Color: A Revealing Donation, exh. cat., Musée Matisse, Nice, 2013, p. 65, n. 22).

Channelling his memories of the extraordinary environment of Tahiti, Matisse worked intuitively with his scissors, creating a series of simple paper cut-outs that ranged from birds captured in mid-flight, to exotic plants, fish and oceanic mammals, which were then pinned directly onto two adjacent walls in his apartment. For Matisse, the impromptu mural was initially an enjoyable diversion, with no specific goal or product in mind – ‘I am cutting out all these elements and putting them up on the walls temporarily,’ he explained to the photographer Brassaï in December 1946. ‘I don’t know yet what I’ll come up with. Perhaps panels, wall hangings’ (quoted in op. cit., 1999, p. 293). However, a visit from the London-based entrepreneur and textile designer Zika Ascher, solidified this idea, resulting in the paper cut-outs being transformed into two fabric wall panels, the array of sponges, corals, seaweeds, fish and birds replicated in an intriguingly minimalist decorative scheme.

As art historian John Klein has noted, Océanie, la mer was intended to be ‘a decidedly modern decoration, not tapestry, but taking its place, referring to, but completely revising, one of the great French decorative traditions for contemporary consumers’ (Matisse and Decoration, New Haven and London, 2018, p. 115). Working with this lofty goal in mind, Ascher and Matisse faced several challenges in translating these ephemeral compositions of cut-paper into the more durable medium of silkscreened linen. First the weight and texture of the cloth had to be just right – Matisse worried that the initial samples Ascher had sent were too fine and would lose their substance, suggesting instead a stiffer linen from the Breton town of Uzel. Then, they spent an extended period of time searching for an exact match to the colour of the artist’s apartment walls, a pale beige papier d’apprêt that reportedly reminded Matisse of the golden sands of the Pacific.

They also tried several different methods of translating the cut-out shapes onto the linen support, including making large-format photographic enlargements of the decorative patterns, before deciding that tracing each element within the composition directly from the wall would be most effective process. The two panel designs were printed in 1948 at the Belfast Silk and Rayon Company under Ascher’s supervision, with thirty examples of each composition produced, all of which Ascher sent to Matisse in Nice to check and sign. The artist was delighted with the final silkscreens, which he described in one of his notebooks as his ‘very successful white and beige wall-hanging’ and encouraged Jean Cassou, curator at the Musée national d’Art Moderne, to include the panels in an exhibition he was organising (quoted in J. Klein, ‘Matisse after Tahiti: The Domestication of Exotic Memory,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, 1997, p. 55).

Océanie, la mer focuses on the underwater environment of Tahiti’s oceans, exploring a range of intriguing forms across the stretch of subtly hued, golden-beige linen, the abstracted silhouettes of coral, vegetation, and marine life arranged in a dynamic pattern so that they appear to float across the support. Along the edges, bands of fluid, meandering lines weave across the panel like seaweed, while elsewhere short, dash-like horizontal lines suggest the surface of the water, the boundary between one world and the next. During his time in Tahiti, Matisse regularly swam in the crystal clear waters and pristine coral lagoons of nearby atolls, drawing humorous sketches of himself diving underwater in a pair of rudementary goggles, or viewing the thriving flora and fauna from above through a glass-bottomed viewing box. As Hilary Spurling noted, these experiments allowed him to explore new conceptions of ‘focus, depth and angle, staring down from above into the green floor of the lagoon, looking up from below at a watery ceiling opaque and wavery as medieval glass, plunging repeatedly between the two, schooling the retina to compare the different luminosities of sky and sea’ (Matisse, The Life, London, 2009, p. 400).

In an article published in Labyrinthe in 1946, Matisse described how the project allowed him to revisit and explore his memories of his time in the South Seas: ‘This panel, printed on linen – white for the motifs and beige for the background – forms, together with a second panel, a wall tapestry composed during reveries which came fifteen years after a voyage to Oceania. From the first, the enchantments of the sky there, the sea, the fish, and the coral in the lagoons, plunged me into the inaction of total ecstasy. The local tones of things hadn’t changed, but their effect in the light of the Pacific gave me the same feeling as I had when I looked into a large golden chalice. With my eyes wide open I absorbed everything as a sponge absorbs liquid. It is only now that these wonders have returned to me, with tenderness and clarity, and have permitted me, with protracted pleasure, to execute these two panels’ (quoted in Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, exh. cat., Saint Louis Museum of Art, 1977, p. 125). Over the ensuing years his memories of the flora and fauna of Tahiti would continue to provide key creative inspiration for Matisse’s work, filling his compositions with bold, colourful forms.