Arendt, Matisse, and Stripping Away the Face

09-22-2014

(Featured image: "No Face" by Dylan Ralph")

“Matisse Show in Chicago: The five sculptured heads of Jeanette (1910-1913): the first—her appearance, and then as though layer upon layer were ripped off, one uglier than the former, the last like a monstrosity makes the first look as though our face were nothing but a precarious façade. Plato’s naked soul piercing into naked soul. As though our clothes were only to hide the ugliness of the body. The whole of modern psychology. The soul-body problem = appearance versus being.”

—Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch XXV, 10

Arendt’s notes on the exhibition “The Magic of Matisse” first splashed onto the pages of her Denktagebuch in April 1966. By then, she had written elsewhere about the role of the artist and the existential significance of artwork. But we nonetheless catch her in the very act of responding viscerally, irritably, powerfully to a particular work, and she’s not holding back. The heads of Jeanette provoke her. They set the train of thought in motion, but Matisse turns out not to be the final destination. Her thoughts ultimately take her all the way to Freud and “the fallacy of all modern psychology.”

We can assume that Arendt visited the exhibition in Chicago that month in 1966. She may have known of it from newspaper or magazine articles—it started its tour at the University of California, Los Angeles and was written up at the time, including in that month’s Apollo: the Magazine of the Arts. However limiting they might have been, any photographs of the artwork likely got Arendt’s attention. This was in large part due to the nature of Matisse’s work. The first and second sculpted heads, both of which Matisse modeled from life in 1910, are recognizable as portraits, though in Jeanette II the artist begins shifting attention from the depiction of his model’s features to the shapes that together form the head. A few years earlier, Matisse commented that his portraits were not meant to be precise renditions of likenesses but were focused, rather, on revealing the essential qualities of the model in ways that physical images could not do. The third, fourth and fifth heads were modeled on the first two, and in them he moves further and further away from the surface of the face.

[caption id="attachment_14410" align="aligncenter" width="552"] Jeanette I, II, III, IV, V (Source: The Art Institute of Chicago)[/caption]

On the one hand, this might be a process of abstraction, as though the artist drew back, squinting, letting the details of Jeanette’s face blur until what remained was a set of shapes that together made up a head, only to reveal something deeper in that arrangement of shapes. On the other hand, we can experience the work, as Arendt did, as stripping away, tearing off the surface and exposing the flesh and bones that were never supposed to see the light of day. Here Matisse saw his process as revealing essential personal qualities, whereas Arendt viewed it as unearthing ugliness and monstrosity. “Inside organs are never pleasing to the eye,” she writes in The Life of the Mind. “Once forced into view they look as if they had been thrown together piecemeal…[Besides], if this inside were to appear, we would all look alike.” The abyss for her is not the crevasse in the mountains or the depths of space but the sheer hideousness of indistinguishable viscerae exposed to the light of day. Who cares about the life of the guts?

This shouldn’t surprise us. Even though she acknowledges the pleasure one can derive from a life made up of bodily labor and consumption, it’s a life where no-one distinguishes oneself; one set of limbs is more or less as good as another, one back or one womb can function much as another. We labor with our bodies and work with our hands, but action requires a face—the plane on which we individuate ourselves. This is the personal appearance that counts. Stripping away the face does reveal something essential, but it turns out to be an utterly impersonal, natural essence; the banal, inexpressive essence of life.

[caption id="attachment_14412" align="alignleft" width="300"] Bodies Exhibition (Source: Rant Lifestyle)[/caption]

The inexpressive essence of life is of no interest to Arendt. Who would want to look at a flayed body? (Who indeed? We can only imagine Arendt’s response to “Bodies: the Exhibition,” which recently closed in New York, or its successor “Body Worlds: Pulse” now at Discovery Times Square, New York.) We only properly appear to each other when we show our faces, when we stand face-to-face and look at one another in mutual recognition. Some things are meant be seen, such as the face, whereas other things, including our faceless selves, are not meant to appear at all. If gazing at our innards is indeed looking at abysmal life, then Arendt never wanted the experience of this abyss looking back.

It is a common fear of psychology and psychoanalysis in particular—that it will shine light onto what should be hidden and open to scrutiny, what we would do better to leave obscure and mysterious. The response provoked in Arendt by the Matisse heads adds a twist. She writes in the same note:

The Freudian fallacy, and the fallacy of all modern psychology, not only that they pretend to know what they most certainly don’t, not only the nonsense of the "unconscious." But the oldest prejudice: What is hidden, non-visible, is what I am ashamed of, hence what it bad. Since my thoughts and feelings can’t be seen except through bodily display they must be bad.

It is as though psychoanalysis proceeded on the model in which the face/ego covers the disgusting inner body/id. Reaching truth requires removing the skin, then the musculature, all the way down to the mass of vital organs in all its uncontained unpleasantness. Her own writing on the body—for instance, the passage from the Life of the Mind just quoted—succumbs to the same prejudice, identifying the interior as ugly if not bad. What she resists in psychoanalysis is the application of that model to the understanding of inner psychic life. It collapses the life of the mind and the life of the guts. What if, she urges, the invisibility of her thoughts and emotions is the condition for the possibility of thinking, good or bad, for better or worse?

[caption id="attachment_14413" align="alignright" width="300"] Henri Matisse: "The Cut-Outs" (Source: The Art Fund)[/caption]

Now, almost fifty years on, a new major Matisse exhibit is on tour. “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs” began at the Tate in London in the spring of this year and opens at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 12^th. The cut-outs are famously the result of a last long surge of creative energy, produced while Matisse was physically confined and ailing. It has been described as an emotional show. Perhaps what moves us is having thought and feeling brought before our eyes, beautifully.

-- Anne O’Byrne