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Gagosian Quarterly

Winter 2020 Issue

T. S. Eliot meetsHenri Matisse

John Elderfield asks: Is it possible that the paths of these two great modernists crossed? An essay by T. S. Eliot of 1919 on a playwright of the seventeenth century surprisingly raises that question; and an investigation of primary materials reveals an unexpected answer.

Henri Matisse, The Painter’s Family, 1911, oil on canvas, 56 ¼ × 76 ⅜ inches (143 × 194 cm), The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin © The State Hermitage Museum

Henri Matisse, The Painter’s Family, 1911, oil on canvas, 56 ¼ × 76 ⅜ inches (143 × 194 cm), The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. Photo: Vladimir Terebenin © The State Hermitage Museum

John Elderfield

John Elderfield is chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was formerly the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum. He joined Gagosian in 2012 as a senior curator for special exhibitions.

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The speculation—and it is a speculation—that follows on the intersecting interests of a literary and a visual artist was the result of a response from a literary critic, Christopher Ricks, to an essay of mine on a contemporary artist, Brice Marden. I had quoted Marden having said in 2003, “Modernist painting has been about how the color comes up to the surface and how that affects the viewer. The whole evolution of modernism is about getting up, up, up to the surface, tightening the surface to the plane.”1 And I had asked myself, “Up, up, up from where?” Ricks’s reply was: “Have you read T. S. Eliot’s essay on Ben Jonson?”2

—J.E.


Eliot in 1919

Eliot’s “Ben Jonson,” a roughly 5,000-word essay on the early-seventeenth-century playwright, was first published as his inaugural contribution to London’s Times Literary Supplement (TLS) on November 13, 1919, shortly after the poet’s thirty-first birthday. It was followed the next day by a complementary text on Jonson of about half that length in The Athenaeum. A year afterward, Eliot inserted excerpts of the latter into the former for his first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood; then, a dozen years later, he revised that version for his Selected Essays 1917–1932, but in both instances left unaltered the substance and most—though not all—of the words of the TLS text, which I will discuss here.3 Eliot was forever revising and reworking his critical essays, as well as his poems, to get them precisely where he wanted them, and he expected no less from the writers, and I think painters, he valued.4 It is not unexpected, then, that he lauded the precision of Jonson’s writing. What is surprising is how he characterized the playwright’s originality: as an art of the surface, precisely opposite to the depth of feeling that is commonly thought desirable in great literature.

Eliot well knew that “superficial” means “of or pertaining to the surface”; it is only in the fifth definition of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) that it becomes “shallow” and only in the seventh and final one “not real or genuine.” But he did not want to be misunderstood. This is why Eliot says that Jonson’s work “is ‘of the surface’; carefully avoiding the word ‘superficial’”—while knowing that he had to defend his praising an art that lacks “a depth, a third dimension.”5

Modernist painting does not require such a defense; to the contrary. In Clement Greenberg’s often quoted 1961 summary,

From Giotto to Courbet, the painter’s first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. One looked through this surface as through a proscenium onto a stage. Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain, which has now become all that the painter has left to work on.6

It may be justly objected that Eliot’s “depth” and “third dimension” are not spatial descriptions but metaphors, other ways of saying “depth of character” and “well-rounded.” Nonetheless, leaving aside for later Greenberg’s own use of metaphor—his turn to the theater to explain what produced modernist painting—let us notice how, at critical moments of Eliot’s essay on Jonson, he turns to language associable with the description of painting to explain what is distinctive about the playwright’s work and should make it attractive to present-day taste at the time of his writing in 1919. Because Eliot was writing about an art of theater, it may be expected that he would think of its visual effect, but not necessarily of effects of contemporary art.

T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse

T. S. Eliot, c. 1910–11. Photo: © Henry Ware Eliot Jr., by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University MS Am. 2560 (179a)

Eliot wrote elsewhere that a work of history “tells more—or what it tells is more authentic—about the age in which it is written than about the past.”7 Of Jonson he says “that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary.”8 It seems fair to suggest that, however authentically his words on Jonson speak about the age in which the playwright wrote, his essay also speaks authentically of his own age—including, at moments, of characteristics of early modernist painting. Such painting, especially French, had been well known, and controversial, in England ever since critic Roger Fry’s famous Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition of the winter of 1910–11, of which Virginia Woolf famously said, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.”9 Here are five properties Eliot finds in Jonson’s work that unequivocally apply to some of the painting of his own time:10

Strong, simple outlines: Of a speech in one of Jonson’s plays, it “is not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow the outline.”

Simplification and flatness: “The simplification consists largely in reduction of detail. . . . This stripping [of detail] is essential to the art, to which is also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of caricature, of great caricature. . . . He did not get the third dimension, but he was not trying to get it.”

Solidity and wholeness of surface: “The verse of [Jonson’s contemporaries] Beaumont and Fletcher is hollow. It is superficial with a vacuum behind it; [but] the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part.”

Before proceeding with the final two components of this list, let us pause with “superficies,” Eliot’s way of avoiding the term “superficiality.” The OED tells us that “superficies” is a term in geometry that means “a magnitude of two dimensions, having only length and breadth; that which forms the boundary or one of the boundaries of a solid, or separates one part of space from another; a surface.” In two fascinating instances in the original TLS and then Sacred Wood versions of his text, not retained in the 1932 revision, Eliot contemporized this meaning.11 First, he said, “It is a world like Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists [interesting that he said “artists,” not “writers”] like Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry.” Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky was an early-nineteenth-century Russian mathematician and geometer, sometimes described as the “Copernicus of Geometry” for his revolutionary conception of “hyperbolic geometry.” Put simply, he postulated that nominally parallel lines extending in a two-dimensional plane in fact curve away from each other, effectively replacing the “flat plane” of Euclidean geometry with the model of a plane surface that variably bends and warps along its length and across its breadth. Eliot is thinking again of “flat distortion” of the solid superficies.

There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three thousand people in London and elsewhere.

T. S. Eliot on the playwright Ben Jonson

Eliot goes on to invoke modern geometry a second time in the 1919 and 1920 versions of his essay, but apparently one reference to Lobatchevsky was enough; this time he says that from Jonson “we can derive not only instruction in non-Euclidean humanity—but enjoyment.” And then in 1932, having removed Lobatchevsky altogether, he also removed “non-Euclidean,” altering the sentence to read, “not only instruction in two-dimensional life—but enjoyment.” He is thinking of the pleasure afforded by activity brought up, up, up to the plane of the surface in fluctuating ways. Hence, a passage solely in The Athenaeum text reports of an authority on Jonson, G. Gregory Smith: “His strictures, so far as they go, and from his point of view, are just, as well as traditional: he says that the characters tend to become ‘too simple’ . . . that they have no existence apart from their setting; that Jonson makes them explain themselves by posing them in different positions; that they lack depth; that Jonson worked from the outside.”12 Again, the emphasis is on surface design—and, here, varied figural design. Two further passages of the TLS text speak of its effect.

Indifference to plausible narration: Jonson’s effect is of “bold, even shocking and terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what produces this simple and single effect. . . . Jonson employs immense dramatic constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing without a plot.”

Great contemporaneity: “Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the present age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three thousand people in London and elsewhere.”

These statements could well apply to many early-twentieth-century paintings, but most patently to Henri Matisse’s; and the final sentence of the last statement reads like the description of an exhibition of such works. The question then is: what conclusion should we draw from the fact that Matisse arrived in London on November 13, 1919—the same day Eliot’s Jonson essay was published in the TLS—to install his first solo exhibition in England, which would open two days later?


And Matisse in 1919

The simple answer is: obviously Eliot could not have seen Matisse’s exhibition before writing the TLS essay or for that matter the Athenaeum one, published the next day. We know he wrote them in rapid succession after delivering the lecture “Modern Tendencies in Poetry,” on October 23; The Athenaeum one probably first, since he is known to have begun the TLS text by November 5 and to have completed it at 3am on November 10.13 He had been publishing in The Athenaeum for a while, but had been invited to write for the more prestigious TLS at the end of September 1919; it is possible that his prominent allusions to painting in the TLS text reflected his awareness of the supplement’s audience, larger and wider than The Athenaeum’s, and his reference to attracting about 3,000 people an optimistic reference to its circulation. (By contrast, The Athenaeum was losing readers and would merge with The Nation in 1921.) In any case, though, it is very possible that Eliot was thinking of Matisse while writing about Jonson—or not thinking of him but, while writing not about him, finding himself evoking interpretations that drew upon his experience of Matisse’s art elsewhere.14

Since settling in London in 1915, Eliot had become close to members of the Bloomsbury Group. In a 1918 review of a book by Clive Bell, he observed, “Mr. Bell is right with the rightness of a period, a group. . . . He is interested in the people one is interested in, from Matisse to the last show at the Mansard Gallery.”15 Members of Bell’s “group”—the Bloomsbury Group—had been attracted to this gallery of new art and design since its opening two years earlier in Heal’s department store on Tottenham Court Road, not far from Bloomsbury. Fry had organized an exhibition of English and French painters there shortly after it had opened; and in August–September of 1919, four of Matisse’s works had appeared there in a group show, Exhibition of Modern French Art, 1914–17, organized by Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell and the poet and art dealer Léopold Zborowski, with a catalogue preface by Arnold Bennett and favorable reviews from the Bloomsbury art critics Bell and Fry.16

Eliot knew all of these people. It was Bell who had given him entrée to the Bloomsbury Group by distributing copies of his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations of 1917, at a party for members of the set at the country house of Lady Ottoline Morell. There, the novelist Katherine Mansfield read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” aloud to the admiring avant-garde audience.17 The following year, Virginia and Leonard Woolf offered to publish Eliot’s second volume of poetry through their private printing press, the Hogarth Press; and in March 1919 they indeed published his Poems, a slim volume bound in a design by Fry.18 Eliot was in France from early August of that year until the first week of September, but given who had organized the group exhibition at the Mansard Gallery, he would likely have made a point of seeing it upon his return. He began writing about Jonson the following month.

The four Matisses in this exhibition, though, were slight, recent works, very different from the kind of painting that Eliot’s Jonson essay brings to mind.19 It is difficult to imagine that Eliot was impressed; he had come a long way since 1915, when he had had to ask Ezra Pound, “(please tell me who Kandinsky is).”20 By now he had seen a lot of art far more radical than these Matisses, including works by Futurist-influenced Vorticist artists introduced to him by Wyndham Lewis, and he had published a review of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s Vingt-cinq poèmes.21 Perhaps he thought the exhibited paintings were atypical, asked himself what qualities they lacked, and, like some of his Bloomsbury friends, looked forward to more exciting works in the solo exhibition.22 In any event, the Bloomsbury set, and Eliot, would naturally have been interested when Matisse came to London for a short stay, arriving on October 22, some three weeks before the opening of this exhibition—and just before Eliot began writing on Jonson. He had come to work on his designs for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le Chant du rossignol, commissioned from him by Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes some four months earlier.23

T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse at work on Nature morte à “La Danse” in his studio at Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, c. 1909. In the background is the completed La Danse (1) (1909). The Pierre Matisse Gallery Archives, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MA 5020. Photo: Morgan Library & Museum, New York/Art Resource, NY

Matisse had been excited by the commission. On arriving in London, though, he immediately realized it was a mistake, not least because his would not be the first Ballets Russes ballet of the season: that was to be Picasso’s Parade. Matisse would have seen it in Paris in May 1917, where it had created a scandal when first presented, during dark days of the war, with separate sections of seats reserved for socialites and war victims. It fared very much better when premiered on November 14, 1919, at the Empire Theatre on London’s Leicester Square—across from the Leicester Galleries, where the Matisse exhibition opened two days later. Of the Bloomsbury circle, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant were certainly in the audience. So was an unhappy Matisse.24

While Matisse was worrying about how his own ballet designs would stand up against Parade, visitors to both the performance and the exhibition would have seen the striking contrast between Picasso’s radical stagecraft and Matisse’s far more conservative paintings—for the works in the Leicester Galleries were of a similar kind to those shown in the Mansard Gallery over the summer. Both exhibitions focused on recent small canvases painted in Nice, including landscapes, still lifes, and studies of the artist’s models and his daughter, Marguerite. And the Leicester Galleries showed a lot more of them.

We do not know whether Eliot saw either Parade or Le Chant du rossignol, or whether he was one of the, according to Matisse, 3,000 people who attended the vernissage of the exhibition—an uncanny match of the 3,000 that Eliot had just said Jonson’s work ought to attract in London.25 It seems likely, though, that Eliot would have wanted to get tickets for the two ballets and, more easily, would have gone to see Matisse’s exhibition. If he did, he may well have found it as disappointing as did Vanessa Bell, writing to Fry,

The Matisses are lovely, but for the most part slight sketches. We have induced Maynard [Keynes] to buy one of the best, a small seated figure with bare arms, very sober in colour, for 175 gns. All are sold. He’s evidently a great success nowadays. These are not important works and so attractive in colour I suppose no one can help liking them. I hope he’s doing bigger things too. [Parisian poet and dealer, Charles] Vildrac has now come over with some more.26

We may assume that Eliot read not only the many laudatory reviews of the exhibition, including those in the Times and The Burlington Magazine (which delighted Matisse and compensated for his vexation with Diaghilev), but also the response to it, even more disappointed than Bell’s, that appeared in The Athenaeum on November 21, 1919. This review, by the populist critic R. H. Wilenski, decried Matisse’s lack of finish, indecision, and poor drawing—his failings, in other words, in the very qualities for which Eliot had praised Jonson in the same journal precisely a week earlier.27 One of the portraits, Wilenski observed, was “only saved from prettiness by the squint,” and it would take “only about ten minutes to convert it into a typical cover for Vogue.”28 It is tempting to wonder whether, reading these words, Eliot recalled his own just-published contrast of solid superficies and shallow superficiality. For if his account of Jonson’s work does appear to reflect a familiarity with paintings by Matisse, clearly it is not to such paintings as those seen in London in 1919.

This leads to the conclusion that Eliot was drawing upon earlier experiences of Matisse’s art. In 1918, the English museologist, aesthetician, and Byzantinist Matthew Stewart Prichard came to live in London and reconnected with Eliot, whom he had known when the young poet was in Paris in 1910–11. In those years Prichard had also known Matisse, his contemporary, with whom he also reconnected when Matisse visited London in 1919.29 We therefore need to consider whether it was meeting Prichard again that reminded Eliot of paintings by the prewar Matisse, then a “poet of the surface,” that he had seen in Paris, some in Prichard’s company, and whether these memories influenced his Jonson essay.

Eliot and Matisse in 1910–11

Eliot had arrived in Paris in mid-to-late October 1910, after a short stopover in London, to attend the Sorbonne on a Harvard Traveling Fellowship.30 But for a two-week vacation in London from April 11 through 25, 1911, he stayed in Paris through the late spring of 1911; left in July to spend the summer traveling in northern Italy and Germany; then briefly visited Paris again in early September before returning to Harvard in the fall. In Paris he attended Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Sorbonne, but also spent a lot of time scouting and scouring the city’s culture, visiting museums and galleries and enjoying the metropolis. He seems to have been most interested in classical and Renaissance art, but also took note of very recent developments; and accounts of the relationship of his poetry to avant-garde visual art quite properly emphasize the importance of his awareness of Cubist fragmentation, urban imagery, and collage for, notably, “The Waste Land” of 1921–22.31 If his interests lay in that direction, however, what of Matisse?

When Eliot first arrived in Paris, that year’s Salon d’Automne had been open for a few weeks. On view from October 1 to November 8, it had the particular focus of “decorative” painting, and there was a lot of it; both large canvases and small ones bold enough to carry at a distance were well represented. Of everything on view, Matisse’s two very large panels, Dance and Music (1909–10), were by far too much for the Salon audience. “On this occasion simplification has reached its extreme limits,” wrote the critic for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.32 Another, that “the provocative, poisonous colors create an impression of diabolical cacophony; the drawing is simplified almost to the point of nonexistence.” Reports speak of them evoking “constant outbursts of indignation, rage, and ridicule.” The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was almost alone in defending the paintings. Prichard was puzzled: “they were quite strange to me; they looked like posters.”33

Eliot simply had to have been aware of the scandal these works produced, and he more than likely saw the exhibition before it closed. It is conceivable that he saw it with Prichard, whom he could have known in 1906–07 during his years at Harvard, when Prichard was a curator at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts; who had been enrolled at the Sorbonne since 1908; and who had met Matisse the following year.34 Had Eliot seen nothing more of Matisse’s work, Dance and Music alone could well have been enough to represent the kind of paintings suggested by his account of Jonson, written in London nine years later. But there was more.

Reminiscing in 1934 on his less-than-a-year in Paris, Eliot began by speaking of having read “the Évocations: Souvenirs 1905–1911 of our friend Henri Massis.”35 Not Henri Matisse, but a contemporary of Eliot’s who had been a severe critic of Bergson and had written “an interesting and valuable document upon a period . . . [that] includes the time of my own brief residence in Paris.” Eliot remembered “the appearance of M. Massis’s first conspicuous piece of writing,” an attack on the Sorbonne’s teaching methods in 1911;36 and Massis appears five times in the opening dozen lines of the first paragraph of his reminiscence. At the end of the second paragraph, the turn is from “Massis” to “Matisse.” It comes preceded and followed by striking associations:

[At the Sorbonne] over all swung the spider-like figure of Bergson. His metaphysic was said to throw light upon the new ways of painting, and discussion of Bergson was apt to be involved with discussion of Matisse and Picasso.

I am willing to admit that my own retrospect is touched by a sentimental sunset, the memory of a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac, a friend who was later (so far as I could find out) to be mixed with the mud of Gallipoli.37

We may wonder whether the discussions of Bergson in which Eliot participated in 1911 included consideration of the strongly Bergsonian passages in Matisse’s influential 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter.”38 We know that Eliot’s friend was a French medical student, Jean Verdenal, some twenty months younger than he, whom he had met and befriended at the Pension Casaubon on rue Saint-Jacques, where both were staying. Verdenal was killed in combat in the Dardanelles in 1915, just shy of his twenty-fifth birthday.39 The question is, what associates Bergson, Matisse, Picasso, and Verdenal—memories coming up, up, up to the surface as Eliot was writing of events that had occurred almost a quarter century earlier?40

T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse

Letter from Matthew Stewart Prichard to Henri Matisse, March 12, 1911 (back). Courtesy Archives Matisse

T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse

Letter from Matthew Stewart Prichard to Henri Matisse, March 12, 1911 (front). Courtesy Archives Matisse

It was when I had reached roughly this point in my essay that Ricks alerted me to a mention of a Mr. Okakura in Eliot’s letters of 1915. A brief editorial note in The Letters of T. S. Eliot identifies him as Okakura Kakuzō, a Japanese scholar celebrated as the author of The Book of Tea (1906), and adds, but without offering any evidence, “In 1910 he had taken TSE to meet Matisse.”41

Kakuzō had been a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since 1904, and became the first head of its Asian division in 1910, while Eliot was living nearby—he studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1910, before going to Paris. However, if Kakuzō played a role in introducing Eliot to Matisse, it is likely to have been through his knowing Prichard, who had been his colleague at the Museum of Fine Arts. In fact, it seems that it was Prichard who had introduced Kakuzō to Matisse;42 which suggests that he may well have done the same for Eliot. This issue was resolved for me by an email to the Archives Matisse, which generously shared with me a letter from Prichard to Matisse of Sunday, March 12, 1911. The superscription tells us that Prichard was living at the Hôtel St. Pierre on the rue de l’École-de-Médecine, not far from the rue Saint-Jacques, where Eliot and Verdenal were, both addresses being between the Sorbonne and the Jardin du Luxembourg, to which Eliot referred in his memory of his friend. Prichard asks Matisse,

If it is convenient for you, I would like to propose visiting you next Tuesday afternoon. I will bring with me my friend M. Eliot and the young Frenchman M. Verdinal [Verdenal] whom I introduced to you last Sunday.43

In addition to telling us that Eliot did indeed meet Matisse, and about the kinds of things that Eliot and Verdenal did together, knowing the date of this visit—in 1911, not 1910—calls attention to a curious poem that Eliot wrote in the same month as the visit, whether before or after it is unknown. Titled “He said: this universe is very clever,” it features a spider, probably a reference to Bergson, and tells us that the universe “is a geometric net,” and one in which “we get / All tangled up and end ourselves inside her.”44 A twisting, reticulated surface—what in 1919 Eliot would call “a flat distortion in the drawing”—was already in his mind. And Prichard’s letter itself tells us that Verdenal had already met Matisse, which raises the question of whether Verdenal’s report of that meeting to Eliot led to the poet asking Prichard to arrange for his own meeting with Matisse as well. In any event, it is touching to imagine these two, both in their early twenties, visiting a controversial modernist painter, in his early forties, whose work in the Salon d’Automne had been almost universally condemned by the critics—an unquestionably memorable experience. And we may reasonably infer that Eliot did indeed remember it in 1917: he dedicated Prufrock and Other Observations to Verdenal that year. He had in fact begun to write “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when the two of them were together in Paris.

We work toward serenity through simplification of ideas and form. The ensemble is our only ideal. Details lessen the purity of the lines and harm the emotional intensity; we reject them. It is a question of learning—and perhaps relearning a linear script; then, probably after us, will come the literature.

Henri Matisse

There have been a number of contingent occurrences in this essay. A final one accounts for our knowing precisely what Eliot and Verdenal, along with Prichard, saw in Matisse’s studio in the Paris suburb of Issy-les-Moulineaux. Politeness required at least a week’s advance notice for Prichard’s request—on Sunday, March 12—for a visit “next Tuesday”; therefore, in all likelihood the visit took place on Tuesday, March 21. This was precisely one month before the opening of that year’s Salon des Indépendants, to which Matisse had submitted two portraits, only to replace one of them, after the vernissage, when most of the reviews had been written, with a much larger painting, The Pink Studio, which he had just completed.45 Since a month elapsed between the date of the trio’s studio visit and the opening of the Salon, it is possible that Matisse did not begin the thinly painted The Pink Studio until after their visit, but since it is a large canvas, roughly six by seven feet in size, it may well have been in process when they arrived.

We cannot of course know what Matisse and his visitors spoke about in the studio. However, while the artist began his “Notes of a Painter” by saying that painters do better not to talk about their ideas, he actually did a lot of talking about them to his studio visitors, and records exist of interviews he gave once a year from 1909 to 1913.46 The first of these announced an essential theme: “We work toward serenity through simplification of ideas and form. The ensemble is our only ideal. Details lessen the purity of the lines and harm the emotional intensity; we reject them. It is a question of learning—and perhaps relearning a linear script [une écriture qui est celle des lignes]; then, probably after us, will come the literature.”47 Very much to the point, we can see through the thin paint of The Pink Studio that it was begun with a precise but simplified line-drawing of the Issy studio laid out directly on a white-primed canvas, its upper part in particular like a geometric net twisted in space. Then the painting was composed—like a speech in one of Jonson’s plays, in Eliot’s account—from “the careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it overflow the outline.” While offering a plausible image of the studio interior, all has been brought up, up, up to the surface, and “essential to the art [is] a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of caricature, of great caricature. . . . He did not get the third dimension, but he was not trying to get it.”

In the event that Eliot did not see The Pink Studio in Matisse’s studio, he would have seen it at the Indépendants: his “friend and tutor” Henri Alban-Fournier, who was tutoring him in French and introducing him to the novels of Dostoevsky, had attended the vernissage and doubtless encouraged Eliot to go there after the poet’s return to Paris, on April 25, from his two-week break in London—not that he or Verdenal probably needed encouraging.48 They would also have seen there the debut of those of the Cubists, including Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger, whose work depicted urban and industrial imagery in fragmented, geometric forms; therefore, the polar opposite of what they had seen in Matisse’s studio.

T. S. Eliot Meets Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse, L'Atelier rose (The Pink Studio), 1911, oil on canvas, 70 ⅝ × 87 inches (179.5 × 221 cm), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

And whether or not they saw The Pink Studio on their visit to Matisse, they would have seen what it depicts—namely, the studio itself, and more important, its contents: some half-dozen works that Matisse had made over the past few years, the poetry of the surface in all of them. All of the works shown in The Pink Studio have been identified.49 Suffice it to say here that their panoramic arrangement stretches from Matisse’s 1907–08 second version of Le Luxe, prominent on the wall to the left; through, on the floor beneath it, The Girl with Green Eyes of 1908, its corner protectors showing that it had not been fully unpacked after returning from Fry’s exhibition in London; to the first, 1909 version of Dance, almost hidden at the right, next to the first of Matisse’s Back sculptures. In all of the paintings “there is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours.”

Prominent at the center of The Pink Studio is a patterned fabric draped over a patterned screen, with the studio wall and window seeming to rest upon it. The effect is of a stage with a painted backdrop brought up flat to the surface. As such, it constitutes a vivid illustration of Greenberg’s 1961 statement, quoted early in this essay, that modernism rendered the space of the proscenium stage of earlier painting “shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain.” Even shallower is the space of another canvas, The Painter’s Family, that Matisse made after Eliot’s visit, in late May.50 It was in progress on the twenty-second of that month when Fry, who had been struggling somewhat with how good Matisse was, wrote to a friend that now he “was quite convinced of his genius.”51 But it is unclear whether it was this work that converted him. And there is no record that Eliot returned to Issy before leaving Paris in July, and therefore of his having seen arguably the most Jonsonian of all Matisse’s early canvases.52 But we cannot dismiss the possibility.

While rightly thought to reflect the artist’s recent experience of Persian miniatures at an exhibition he had seen in Munich in October 1910, The Painter’s Family is also Jonsonian in that “the characters have no existence apart from their setting” and Matisse “makes them explain themselves by posing them in different positions.” Additionally, he “worked from the outside” in a radical manner at his “careful, precise, filling in of a strong and simple outline.” He painted the work on striped canvas, possibly mattress ticking, whose horizontal lines he followed in shaping the composition, getting the ground of the painting even further “up, up, up to the surface,” as Marden would put it, “tightening the surface to the plane.” It is wholly “of the surface”—but not “superficial with a vacuum behind it; the superficies . . . is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any part.”

Finally, a reminder of the chronology: these words of Eliot’s were written soon after Matisse’s arrival in London on October 22, 1919, and published on November 13, just short of some eight-and-a-half years after Eliot, with Prichard and Verdenal, had met Matisse in his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux.

1Brice Marden, in John Yau, “An Interview with Brice Marden,” in Eva Keller and Regula Malin, eds., Brice Marden: Drawings and Paintings, 1964–2002, exh. cat. (Zurich: Scalo and Daros Services, 2003), p. 51, discussed in my “Marden in Three Parts,” in Brice Marden. It reminds me of something and I don’t know what it is (New York: Gagosian, 2020), p. 16.

2I am deeply indebted to Christopher Ricks, the editor with Jim McCue of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), for his advice on Eliot and for his generous reviews of this essay as it advanced; also to two of his colleagues, Jennifer Formichelli and especially Archie Burnett, for their assistance in clarifying the sequence and dates of Eliot’s revisions of his Jonson essay. I am also indebted to Georges Matisse and Anne Théry at the Archives Matisse for answering my questions and for sharing and agreeing to the publication of the letter from Matthew Stewart Prichard to Matisse discussed and illustrated here (see note 43). And, as always, I am grateful for the editorial review of Jeanne Collins, in this case at several stages of the development of a complex text; and I thank David Frankel for his scrupulously careful review of the final version.

3Both “Ben Jonson,” Times Literary Supplement 930 (November 13, 1919), pp. 637–38, and “The Comedy of Humours,” The Athenaeum 4672 (November 14, 1919), pp. 1,180–81, were responses to a recent monograph on the playwright by an expert on Jonson, G. Gregory Smith, and a new edition of Jonson’s play Every Man in his Humour (1598). Eliot retained the title “Ben Jonson” when he revised the essay for The Sacred Wood, published on November 4, 1920 (London and New York: Methuen) and again, in unaltered form, in a second edition in March 1928; he revised the essay again for Selected Essays 1917–1932 of 1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), pp. 127–39, the edition I cite below in my references to passages that had appeared in the TLS text. See The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 2, The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber & Faber, 2014), pp. 150–64, for the 1932 text with annotation of variations in it from the earlier ones. Burnett’s forthcoming T. S. Eliot: Collected Prose (London: Faber & Faber, 2021) will print in its entirety the Athenaeum text together with the version in Selected Essays and the variants from the versions that preceded it.

4Particularly to the point is Eliot’s celebrated passage on the work of “critical labour” in “The Function of Criticism” (1923). See Selected Essays, p. 18.

5Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in Selected Essays, pp. 134–35.

6Clement Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational, and so forth,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 136.

7Eliot, “Of History and Truth,” in his Introduction to Charlotte Eliot (Eliot’s mother), Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (London: R. Cobden-Sanderson, 1926), ix. Cited in abbreviated form in The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, 1923–1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, general editor John Haffenden (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), p. 493 n. 3.

8Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in Selected Essays, p. 128.

9Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” a talk printed as “Character in Fiction” in The Criterion (a journal edited by Eliot), July 1924; quoted and discussed in “Commentary,” in Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, p. 357.

10Eliot, “Ben Jonson,” in Selected Essays, pp. 130, 138, 135, 134, 138.

11See Eliot, Complete Prose, vol. 2, p. 163 n. 35, n. 44.

12Ibid, p. 164, textual note 2.

13Details of the TLS essay’s composition, drawn from examination of Eliot’s correspondence, appear in Complete Prose, vol. 2, pp. 160–61 n. 1, where the essay itself as printed in Selected Essays appears: see note 3 above. See also Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, 1898–1922 (rev. ed. 2011), pp. 416–17, on the date and time of its completion on November 10, and three days later on his being tired from “writing three articles in rapid succession after the lecture,” mentioning the TLS and Athenaeum pieces and one on John Donne. I thank Burnett for drawing these letters to my attention.

14Eliot later acknowledged possibilities of this kind in a letter to I. A. Richards of November 11, 1931, quoted in Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 5.

15Eliot, untitled review of Clive Bell’s Pot-Boilers, 1918, The Egoist 5 (June/July 1918), p. 87. According to Donald Gallup, the review is “unsigned, but almost certainly by T. S. Eliot”; see The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 1., Apprentice Years, 1905–1918, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, and London: Faber & Faber, 2014), pp. 723–24.

16See Richard Shone, “Matisse in England and Two English Sitters,” The Burlington Magazine 35, no. 1,984 (July 1993), p. 479 n. 3. We owe most of our knowledge of Matisse in London in 1919 to Shone’s article. It is complemented by the more specialized study by Rémi Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London and his collaboration with the ‘Ballets Russes,’” The Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1,134 (September 1997), pp. 588–99, which, with the aid of the Archives Matisse, provided the specific dates of Matisse’s two-part visit that year.

17See Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, pp. 368, 459. Lady Ottoline Morrell had been taken to see Matisse at his Paris studio in October 1909; see Shone, “Matisse in England,” p. 480, n. 6, which also lists others of the Bloomsbury set who had visited Matisse. Morell’s visit may well have come about through her role as a member of the executive committee of Roger Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition.

18See Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, pp. 462–63.

19Shone gives the titles of these works as Lady with rings, Nude, Lady on a terrace, and Flowerpiece; “Matisse in England,” p. 479 n. 3. The exhibition title implies that they date from 1914–17. It may safely be said that they were not major works.

20Eliot, letter to Ezra Pound, February 2, 1915, in Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, p. 94.

21These contacts are mentioned in Nancy D. Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad, 1910–1911: The Visual Arts,” South Atlantic Review 71, no. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 119–20.

22It is clear from Vanessa Bell’s response to the solo show that she had expected more from it. See her letter to Fry, November 30, 1919, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” p. 481.

23See Shone, “Matisse in England,” and Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London.” Labrusse’s article details the difficulties of the commission, which ended in disaster.

24See Vanessa Bell, letter to Fry, November 15, 1919, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” p. 479 n. 4. Writing to his wife on November 21, Matisse nastily said of the performances, “Ils sont voués à la mort car le fond est dégoûtant” (They’re doomed to death because at bottom they’re disgusting). See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” p. 595.

25That is the number that Matisse gave in a letter of November 17 to his wife; see Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” p. 598 n. 53.

26Vanessa Bell, letter to Fry, November 30, 1919. The exhibition was indeed a great commercial success; Matisse’s letters to his wife of November 17 and 18 confirm that Bell was well-informed—everything had sold and the director of the gallery had asked Charles Vildrac for more paintings, adding that the important reviews had been excellent. See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” p. 598.

27See Shone, “Matisse in England,” p. 481 n. 14, n. 15.

28Ibid.

29See Labrusse, “Matisse’s second visit to London,” p. 588.

30Eliot therefore missed seeing Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists exhibition in London in the winter of 1910–11.

31Hargrove’s extensive survey “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad” is a most useful account, but must be read with some caution since it discusses a wider range of examples than Eliot likely could have seen. Would he have known, for example, to go to the Kahnweiler gallery to find works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, neither of whom showed at the Salons or, with rare, minor exceptions, in commercial galleries in Paris in this period?

32“Le Salon d’Automne,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, November 1910, p. 370; quoted at length in Natalya Semtonova, “The Story of an Encounter,” in Albert Kostenevich and Semtonova, Collecting Matisse (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), pp. 19–20, which also quotes the statements following. Kostenevich publishes other accounts of the reception of these works in his essay “Matisse in Russian Collections” in this same volume, pp. 115–17. They had been previously reviewed in Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 290–93. See also Stephanie D’Alessandro, “Opportunity and Invention,” in D’Alessandro and John Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 76–87.

33Prichard, quoted in Labrusse, “Esthétique décorative et expérience critique. Matisse, Byzance et la notion d’Orient,” doctoral thesis, Paris, 1996, p. 181. I am grateful to Anne Théry of the Archives Matisse for drawing this quote to my attention.

34Prichard had been fired from the Museum of Fine Arts in 1907 for introducing then revolutionary curatorial reforms; see Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1951), p. 534, n. 10 to p. 105, which drolly reports that “Prichard toward the end of his life in England became convinced that he could control the weather.” On Prichard in Paris, see Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), pp. 732–34. The notebook of William King, a disciple of Prichard’s, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in an entry for May 3, 1913–February 7, 1914, tells us that Prichard “went to Paris in Dec. 1908. [Thomas] Whittemore took him to see the Stein’s collection of Matisse, and he met Matisse at his studio in the Hotel Biron by the Invalides in c. Jan. 1909. Matisse had painted La Danse and was painting La Musique. ‘I won’t say a word. I will see them again, and then, I will tell you.’ ‘I accept them. At the first time, they were quite strange to me; they looked like posters, like anything. But I knew there must be a modern way of painting corresponding to the Byzantine expression.’” Quoted in Labrusse, “Matisse, Byzance et la notion d’Orient,” p. 181. King also recorded a fascinating, lengthy dialogue between Matisse and Prichard on January 10, 1914, which is reprinted in D’Alessandro and Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, p. 143.

35Eliot, “A Commentary,” The Criterion 13, no. 52 (April 1934), pp. 451–54, repr. in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, vol. 3, Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934–1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; London: Faber & Faber, 2017), p. 80.

36Eliot was referring to Agathon (pseudonym of Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde), L’Esprit de la nouvelle Sorbonne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1911), an attack on the Sorbonne for promoting German-style vocational training over the French classical tradition.

37Eliot, “A Commentary,” in Complete Prose, vol. 3, pp. 80–81.

38See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, pp. 30–43, for the essay “Notes of a Painter” itself and for an introduction to it that includes discussion of its Bergsonian aspects, pp. 33–34. These are addressed at greater length in Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 65–108, esp. 98, where Cronan agrees with Flam that Matisse had picked up broadly Bergsonian concepts in Paris while noting that he did not read Bergson himself before 1912.

39The basic facts about Jean Verdenal appear in Eliot, Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, pp. 370–71. There is an extensive literature on him, summarized in the eponymous Wikipedia article.

40Ricks has suggested to me that potentially influential upon these remembrances of Matisse and Verdenal were the two items preceding Eliot’s in the same April 1934 issue of The Criterion that he, being the journal’s editor, would have known to be forthcoming: Ralph S. Walker’s essay “Ben Jonson’s Lyric Poetry,” pp. 430–48, which says of Jonson, “As a dramatist he has at last received a measure of understanding appreciation from Mr. T. S. Eliot”; and, between the last page of Walker and the first of Eliot, a two-page poem by Edward Roditi, “Trafalgar Square,” on those who “fought and fell,” the “glorious/dead forefathers on the battlefields,” and “brave young flesh.”

41Eliot, Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, p. 101 n. 1.

42Schneider, Matisse, p. 773.

43The letter reads:

Cher Monsieur Matisse,

Si cela ne vous gêne pas je me propose d’aller vous visiter mardi prochain dans l’après-midi. Je vous amènerai mon ami M. Eliot et le jeune français, M. Verdinal [Jean Verdenal] lequel je vous ai présenté dimanche passé. En passant par Bernheim Jeune, j’ai cherché à trouver le dernier tableau: il n’était plus là. Alors je me suis récompensé en revoyant le grand nu, qui m’attire irrésistiblement toujours, avec sa force de chef-d’œuvre. . . .

Croyez-moi, avec beaucoup de respect et d’amitié, votre tout dévoué,

M. S. Prichard

The flattering “irrésistiblement” in the final sentence was added before the letter was sent. The “grand nu” is a painting that Matisse must later have retrieved from Bernheim Jeune since it is depicted in The Red Studio, which he painted in the fall of 1911; see Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, p. 313 fig. 310, p. 321 fig. 323. It was later destroyed at the direction of the artist.

44See Eliot, Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, pp. 259, 1,128.

45See Elderfield, “Construction by Means of Color,” in D’Alessandro and Elderfield, Matisse: Radical Invention, pp. 76–87, 108–19, esp. 111–12.

46See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, p. 37 for the comment in “Notes of a Painter,” pp. 52–73 for the yearly interviews.

47Ibid., p. 54.

48See Jacques Rivière and Alain-Fournier (the pen name of Henri Alban-Fournier), Correspondance 1905–1914 (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), vol. 2, pp. 383–84, cited in Hargrove, “T. S. Eliot’s Year Abroad,” p. 103. For Eliot’s own references to Alain-Fournier see Poems of T. S. Eliot, vol. 1, pp. 347, 458.

49See Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, pp. 300–01.

50Matisse made a sketch of it “well under way” in a postcard to Michael Stein of May 26, 1911: see Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, pp. 152–53.

51Desmond MacCarthy’s preface for the catalogue of Manet and the Post-Impressionists was written on the basis of notes made by Fry, and the comments on Matisse are surprisingly equivocal for a project intended to introduce London to new art. Matisse is praised for realizing that “there comes a point when the accumulations of an increasing skill in mere representation begin to destroy the expressiveness of the design,” so that he “begins to try to unload, to simplify the drawing and painting by which natural objects are evoked, in order to recover the lost expressiveness and life.” But not only is the public now against him, “what is more, his own self-consciousness hampers him as well.” Quoted in Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, p. 111. Fry’s later appreciation came in a letter to Simon Bussy, quoted in Shone, “Matisse in England,” p. 480 n. 6.

52Much later, Eliot would have been able to see the other contender for this description, The Red Studio, the companion to The Pink Studio that Matisse painted in the fall of 1911. It was acquired in 1927, with Prichard’s help, by David Tennant and installed the following year in his Gargoyle Club in London, frequented by the Bloomsbury set and many others, Eliot included.

Artworks by Henri Matisse © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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