The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Henri Matisse · Le Bonheur de vivre · oil on canvas, about 176.5 by 240.7 cm · one object: the single canvas as it now stands, its oil sketches and drawings and the later Dance context only · painted in Paris from the autumn of 1905 into the early months of 1906 · shown at the Salon des Indépendants, spring 1906, the painter’s one entry · bought by Leo Stein and hung in the Steins’ rooms in the rue de Fleurus · acquired by Albert C. Barnes in the early 1920s · the Barnes Foundation since then, at Merion until 2012 and in Philadelphia since · not lent
Mode
The large pastoral composition of nudes, recast in flat colour and continuous contour; decoration as the bearer of feeling
Mythos
The Golden Age, Arcadia, the bacchanal without Bacchus: the earthly paradise before labour, shame or time
Phase
Painted in Paris from the autumn of 1905 into early 1906, after the Fauve summer and the scandal of the autumn before; shown in the spring of 1906
Presentation
Oil on one canvas about 176.5 by 240.7 cm; flat zones of yellow, orange, pink, violet, green and blue, unmodelled, with no consistent light source and figures at incompatible scales
Register
One register, warm and bright: contentment and release, without grandeur and without dread
Scale
A glade, a meadow, a band of sea; bodies at ease, lovers, music and one small dance
Governing Proposition
Under trees that lean in from both sides like the wings of a stage, a glade opens on a yellow meadow, a shallow valley and a band of sea. Nude women recline, lovers embrace, a youth plays a double pipe, a woman garlands another, and in the middle distance a small ring of dancers turns. The colour is laid in flat zones, the contours run unbroken, there is no single light and no single scale. The wager of the canvas is that the oldest dream in European painting, the Golden Age, can be held without story, gods or moral, and that colour and line can carry its joy directly, at the size of a public picture, without imitating light or volume at all.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas hangs in the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. It is oil on one canvas, about 176.5 centimetres high and 240.7 wide, a little over a third again as wide as it is high, some four square metres of paint. Trees lean in from both sides like the wings of a stage, and between them a glade opens on a shallow valley and, at the horizon, a band of sea. The ground is a yellow meadow. The colour is laid in flat zones, yellow, orange, pink, violet, green and blue, unmodelled, with no consistent source of light, and the contours run long and unbroken round every form.
The figures are gathered in groups across the glade. In the foreground at the centre two nude women recline, one with her arms raised behind her head. To the right a couple embraces. At the left a woman stands among flowers and another crowns or garlands her. Low in the centre a youth plays a double pipe. In the middle distance a ring of dancers turns, small, against the yellow of the meadow, and beyond it a herdsman stands with his animals. Nothing in the picture is doing anything that has a purpose beyond itself. No one works, no one is watched, no one is required to be anywhere.
The figures are at incompatible scales. The dancers are too small for where they stand and the couple too large for theirs; the recliners belong to one space and the garlanders to another, and no single ground or light holds them all. The picture shows its assembly and means to. It was put together from studies, and the joins are left where the eye can find them. What binds it is not a measured space but a rhythm: the same flat colour and the same continuous line in every figure and every tree, so that the field reads first as one surface and only afterwards as a place.
Movement II
In the summer of 1905 Matisse had painted small landscapes in pure colour laid in patches, and in the autumn of that year the Fauve canvases had made a scandal in Paris. From the autumn of 1905 into the early months of 1906 he painted this canvas, and in the spring of 1906 he sent it to the Salon des Indépendants as his one entry. His reputation and his income were both uncertain. He did not send a small canvas in the new manner. He sent a picture at the scale of the Salon, on the most academic of subjects, the large pastoral composition of nudes, and painted it in a way the Salon’s subject had never been painted.
The method of the Fauve summer was turned into something else. The patches became flat zones; the broken touch became an unbroken contour; colour was set free from the thing it named, so that tree trunks change from pink to violet to orange without reason; modelling and a single light were given up; and consistent scale and perspective were refused on purpose. All of it was placed on the subject of Titian, Poussin and Ingres, the Golden Age held in a landscape, as if to show that the new manner could carry the oldest theme in the tradition rather than only a sketch of a harbour or a road.
The turn was made in public and at full size, and it was paid for, in ridicule and in friends. It is usually said that the canvas answered the Golden Age of Signac, Matisse’s ally of the year before, and that Signac turned against it; that history is reported rather than settled here. What is settled is the size of the stake. The swerve is held below the very top for two reasons: the subject was inherited whole, its figures and its paradise taken over as they stood, and Gauguin and Cézanne had already laid much of the road that the canvas walked at speed.
Movement III
Some parts of the picture cannot go. The arch of trees makes the glade a stage and gives the field its two curtains. The reclining woman with her arms raised is the picture’s axis and its pose of ease. The ring of dancers, small and far, is the one figure of community and of motion in the whole field. The rest is an anthology: the couple, the garlanders, the piper, the herdsman and his animals are drawn from different sources at different scales, and two or three of them could be removed and the picture would still say what it says. Its necessity lies in the structure and the scale, a large public canvas for a large wager, not in its population.
The form is the instrument of what the canvas knows. Paint this subject in modelled bodies under one light and it becomes the Golden Age as Ingres or Puvis painted it, a scene seen through a window. Here it is a surface, and the joy is in the surface. The flatness of the colour is the ease of the bodies; the unbroken contour is their freedom from effort; the incompatible scales are the logic of a dream, in which near and far count for less than rhythm. The line is the great instrument: the contour of the central recliner runs from raised elbow to foot in one movement, and the dancers and the trunks are drawn with the same authority.
The command is uneven, and some of the unevenness is chosen. The flat fields hold together at a distance without modelling, a hard thing to do at this size. But the surface is thin and scrubbed in places, the garlanders and the couple are drawn more weakly than the central nude, and the passage from one zone of colour to the next is not always resolved. In places the canvas reads as a large sketch carried to completion by will. The law of the field is real in colour and contour, which run through every figure and tree alike, and incomplete in scale and space, where the joins show and the range from the near-academic garlanders to the schematic ring is wide.
Movement IV
The myth here is the subject, not an allusion. The whole field is the Golden Age, Arcadia, the bacchanal without Bacchus, the earthly paradise before labour, shame or time, and every figure belongs to it: the piper is Pan’s music, the ring is the oldest dance, the couple is love without consequence, the recliner is the nymph asleep. Nothing in the picture stands outside the myth. But the canvas holds it as given, in its traditional parts, and does not make it bear a new weight. No one here is anyone, the place is nowhere, and bodies simplified to contour have given up the particular life an archetype needs if it is to keep its hold.
Two things can be stated from the canvas and hold. The first is that the Golden Age can be painted without story, gods or moral, as a condition of bodies at ease, music, love and dance in one landscape where nothing is required of anyone. The second is a claim about painting, made visible to anyone who looks: colour and line can carry feeling directly, without the imitation of light or volume, so that the yellow of the meadow is the joy it names. That second claim is disclosed through image alone, and fully. But what the canvas mostly gives is a state, contentment and release, and its human proposition is the pastoral’s own, inherited rather than uncovered.
The orders of the world held here are held in one field and one rhythm: the natural order of glade and trees and sea; eros in the couple and the recliners; music in the piper; community and festival in the ring; pastoral labour, lightly, in the herdsman; and the ages of man by implication, since the Golden Age is a figure of time. Work as it is lived, the state, history, the city and death are absent by design, and the sacred is present only as nature. A pastoral holds the world by leaving most of it out. In the middle of all this the small ring of dancers, a closed curve made of bodies, is the form of the whole compressed into one motif, and the seed of what came after.
Movement V
Soon after the Salon the canvas was bought by Leo Stein and hung in the Steins’ rooms in the rue de Fleurus. Picasso saw it there, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, painted in 1907, is widely read, with good grounds, as his answer to it: five women where this canvas has a glade of figures at ease. Derain’s Golden Age and the bathers of the Fauve painters followed. The ring of dancers became Dance, painted for Sergei Shchukin in 1909 and 1910, one of the central images of the century, and the decorative ideal the canvas set out, colour, contour and flat ground, runs through Matisse’s own work to the cut-outs and through much of the painting after him.
In the early 1920s Albert C. Barnes acquired the canvas, and it went to his foundation at Merion. The foundation did not lend it. For some ninety years it stayed there, present to scholarship and to those who went to see it, while its reach ran more through Dance and the rest of Matisse’s work than through itself. In 2012 the foundation moved to its building in Philadelphia, and the canvas has been more fully in view since. Its presence has still been narrower than that of a museum canvas of its fame, and the force it exerted on the century was exerted largely in its first years in Paris and afterwards at second hand.
The composition is whole and legible: no part is lost and no later hand is in it, after about 120 years. The fabric is another matter, and matters more than usual, because the work is its colour; the yellows are reported to have degraded in places, and how far the meadow and the figures still hold the pitch they were painted at is not settled here. The canvas has been studied for more than a century, its sources, its politics and its consequences, and much of what has been found concerns what it did and what it drew on. On the canvas itself the scales still do not settle, and the eye still goes round the glade by the trees, from the recliners to the small, turning ring.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the composition, since the canvas has no words. The subtractive test gives more here than on most large canvases of its rank. The arch of trees cannot go: it makes the glade a stage and gives the field its two curtains. The reclining woman with raised arms at the centre cannot go; she is the picture’s axis and its pose of ease. The small ring of dancers cannot go, the one figure of community and motion. But the rest is an anthology. The embracing couple, the garlanders at the left, the piper and the herdsman are drawn at different scales from different sources, and two or three could be removed without loss to what the picture says. Necessity is in the structure and the scale, not in the population.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Two things can be stated. The Golden Age can be held without story, gods or moral, as a condition of bodies at ease, music, love and dance in one landscape where nothing is required of anyone. And colour and line can carry feeling directly, without imitating light or volume, so that the yellow of the meadow is the joy it names. The second is disclosed fully through the image, and an image’s disclosure is credited as fully as words. But what the canvas mostly gives is a state, contentment and release, and its human proposition is the pastoral’s own, inherited rather than uncovered. It shows nothing of the life its viewers lived and asks nothing of it. A mood made programme ranks below a meaning.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is warm and of one kind: joy, the spirits lifted by a field of high colour. It comes at first sight, from across a room, when the yellow ground and the pink and violet trees declare themselves before any figure is read. It returns in the long contour of the reclining woman at the centre, one line from raised elbow to foot; in the ring of dancers, small and fast against the meadow, the one place where the picture moves; in the leaning trunks whose colours change from tree to tree without reason and seem right. It does not climb further. The register never deepens into grandeur or dread, and between its summits, at the garlanders and the herdsman, the canvas is pleasant rather than lifted.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Here the myth is the subject, not an allusion: the whole field is the Golden Age, Arcadia, the bacchanal without Bacchus, the earthly paradise before labour, shame or time. It is built, in that every figure belongs to it and nothing stands outside it: the piper is Pan’s music, the ring the oldest dance, the couple love without consequence, the recliner the nymph asleep. What holds the axis below the gate is that the archetype is not made to bear a new weight. The canvas holds the myth as given, in its traditional parts, and its particular is thin: no one here is anyone, the place is nowhere, and bodies reduced to contour have given up the particularity the archetype needs to keep.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The departure is large and the stake real. Matisse took the Fauve method of the summer of 1905, pure colour laid in patches on small landscapes, and made it something else at the scale of the Salon: flat zones, unbroken contour, arbitrary colour, no modelling, no consistent light, and a deliberate refusal of consistent scale and perspective, all laid on the most academic of subjects, the large pastoral composition of nudes. He showed it as his one entry in 1906, after the scandal of the autumn before, with his reputation and his income uncertain, and the turn was paid for in ridicule and in friends. Held below the top because the subject is inherited whole, and because Gauguin and Cézanne had laid much of the road.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Substitute another form and the work stops knowing what it knows. Paint this subject in modelled bodies under one light and it becomes the Golden Age as Ingres or Puvis painted it, a scene seen through a window; here it is a surface, and the joy is in the surface. The flatness of the colour is the ease of the bodies; the unbroken contour is their freedom from effort; the incompatible scales are the dream’s own logic, in which near and far matter less than rhythm. The ring of dancers is the form compressed into one motif, a closed curve made of bodies. The axis stops short of the top because what the form knows is chiefly about form, and much of the human content would survive in another manner.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The canvas has been re-examined for more than a century without being exhausted, but under a constraint. Its sources have been traced and argued, its relation to Picasso argued at length, and its place in the politics of the Golden Age around 1905, utopia and harmony, read and reread. Formal depth holds on return: the scales never settle, and the eye goes round the glade without a fixed route, from the recliners to the ring and back by the trees. What limits the axis is that the yield is more historical than inward. Much of what has been found in the canvas concerns what it did and what it drew on, and the image itself, once its strangeness is seen, gives less on the hundredth look than the deepest canvases.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility. The canvas made Fauve colour a means for large, composed, figurative painting, not only a method for sketches, and set out the decorative ideal of colour, contour and flat ground that runs through Matisse’s career to the cut-outs and through much of the century’s painting after him. The discount is for hiddenness: from the 1920s the canvas was at Merion, in a foundation that did not lend, and its later reach ran more through Dance and his other work than through itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the ring of dancers became Dance for Shchukin; Picasso saw the canvas in the Steins’ rooms, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is widely read as his answer; Derain’s Golden Age and the Fauve bathers followed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the composition is whole and legible, no part lost and no later hand in it, and the span is about 120 years. Presence is charged. For some ninety years the canvas was held by a private foundation at Merion that did not lend; it stayed present to scholarship and to those who went there, and since the move to Philadelphia in 2012 it has been more fully in view, but its presence has been narrower than that of a museum canvas of its fame. Fabric is charged too, and more than lightly, because the work is its colour: the yellows are reported to have degraded in places, and how far is not settled here.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium is high and uneven by intention, and is still judged against the anchors. The line is the great instrument: long, continuous contours that close a body in one movement, at the reclining woman, the dancers and the leaning trunks, drawn with an authority few painters of the time had. The colour is placed in large flat fields that hold together at a distance without modelling, a hard thing at this size. Against this, the surface is thin and scrubbed in places, some figures, the garlanders and the couple, are drawn more weakly than the central nude, and the passage from zone to zone is not always resolved. In places the canvas reads as a large sketch carried to completion by will.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the large, slow recliners in the foreground and the small, fast ring in the distance. In colour and contour they obey one law: both are made of the same flat zones and the same continuous line, and the arabesque of the trees runs through the bodies and the dance alike, so that one rhythm governs the field. In scale and space they do not: the figures share no ground, light or measure, the dancers are too small for their distance and the couple too large, and the picture holds several spaces at once. Read as dream logic, that is a law; read on the canvas, the joins show, and the range from the near-academic garlanders to the schematic ring is wide.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The lowest of the twelve, and the form holds it there. The orders held: the natural order, in the glade, the trees and the sea; eros, in the couple and the recliners; music, in the piper; community and festival, in the ring; pastoral labour, lightly, in the herdsman; and by implication the ages of man, since the Golden Age is a figure of time. They are held in one field and one rhythm, integrated rather than listed. Absent by design: work as it is lived, the state, history, the city, death, and the sacred except as nature. A pastoral holds the world by leaving most of it out, and this one does so on principle; the range of activity in the glade sets it a little above the single motif.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.1, then The Living Form and The Imperishable at 8.8. The Fauve method of 1905 turned into flat zones, unbroken contour and refused scale at the size of the Salon, on the most academic of subjects, shown in public at real cost; a canvas whose ring of dancers became Dance, which Picasso answered from the Steins’ rooms, and which set out the decorative ideal of the century; and a form in which the flatness of the colour is itself the ease of the bodies.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: a pastoral holds nature, eros, music, festival and light labour in one field and leaves out work as lived, the state, history, the city and death by design, and the figure describes the form. Below the rest, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.9: the population of the glade is an anthology, two or three of whose groups could go without loss, and the disclosure is mainly a state of contentment, its human proposition the pastoral’s own, inherited rather than uncovered.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two of five: The Swerve at 9.1, Pressure on Tradition at 9.1 and The Imperishable at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.9 falls short by six tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 by two. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. The twelve sum to 100.5, an average of 8.375 that displays as 8.4, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the placement in Tier IV is settled on the aggregate and on the gate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as an image and as a document of its moment, its sources, its reception and its consequences, and less closely of its present surface, which is why The Made and The Imperishable are held with wider margins than the other axes. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is one object: Le Bonheur de vivre, oil on canvas, about 176.5 by 240.7 cm, painted in Paris from the autumn of 1905 into the early months of 1906, as it now stands in the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the oil sketches and drawings for it, and Dance (1909 to 1910), which are context. No words are quoted but the title. Facts and claims that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them how the canvas was hung and shown at Merion and any limits on its reproduction there, the extent and the study of the degraded yellows, the particular prints and paintings proposed as its sources, its relation to Signac’s Golden Age and to Matisse’s own canvas of 1904, Signac’s response, the exact number of the figures, the kind of the herdsman’s animals, and the full extent of the literature on it.