Engendering Imaginary Modernism: Henri Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre By MARGARET WERTH Mais, bast! arcane tel élut pour confident Le jone vaste et jumeau dont sous |'azur on joue: Qui, détournant a soi /e trouble de la joue, Réve, dans un solo long, que nous amusions La beauté d’alentour par des confusions Fausses entre elle-méme et notre chant crédule; Et de faire aussi haut que l'amour se module Evanouir du songe ordinaire de dos Ou de flanc pur suivis avec mes regards clos, Une sonore, vaine et monotone ligne. {But enough! such a mystery chose for confident The vast and twin reed on which one plays under the azure: Which, turning to itself the trouble of the cheek, Dreams, in a long solo, that we were beguiling The surrounding beauty by false confusions Between itself and our credulous song; And to make as high as love modulates Vanish from the ordinary dream of a back Or @ pure flank followed with my closed look, A sonorous, vain and monotonous line.) —Siéphane. Mallarmé “L'Aprés-midi d'un faune” (trans. Robert Greer Cohn, The Poems of Mallarmé) Bonheur de vivre (Fig. 1) was presented as an ambitious work in the context of Henri Matisse's early career: the painting was Matisse’s only work exhibited at the 1906 Salon des Indépendants—a year after his neo-impressionist idyll Luxe, calme et volupté, six months following the scandalous cage au fauves at the 1905 Salon d’Automne, and concurrently with his 1906 retrospective Druet exhi- bition of about sixty works.’ Yet subsequent discussions of Matisse’s painting have fallen well short of a close reading of this odd, but nonetheless central, “masterpiece” of the modernist canon. There has been a tendency in the art historical fiterature to overvalue the identification of possible sources for Mat- isse's composition, in particular for the ring of dancers in the background. The sheer range of possible sources—from male dancing figures by Rodin, prehis- toric cave painting, Ingres’s L’Age d'or, Titian's Concert champétre, the engrav- GENDERS Number 9, Fall 1990 Copyright © 1990 by the University of Texas Press.“aenjAsuuad “UomeIs UOUeA ‘uotepunoy seuieg eu 0661 wBUAdoo @ ydelBoIONE WO Ez x FLL “SEALED UO HO “9O6) ‘S/H P sMeyUoE] 37 ‘BSS YEH 'FMARGARET WERTH PAGE 51 ing Recicipio Amore by Agostino Carracci, Puvis de Chavannes's version of pastoral landscape, Cézanne’s bathers, Gauguin's Tahitian idylls, to mention only some of the sources proposed*—is remarkable and certainly confirms the peculiarly heterogeneous character of Matisse’s picture. This profusion of cited sources has not, however, led to comprehensive interpretations of the picture itself nor to a study of the painting's early twentieth-century context. This paper is directed at filling the former lacuna, proposing a new reading of Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre, leaving aside, for now, its contextual field.? The Matisse literature to date has been largely celebratory, representing him as the modernist magician who conjures up our unconscious hedonistic im- pulses, his work “a powerful assertion of our right to happiness,” part of the “active quest for happiness that characterizes twentieth century man."* Oth- ers—Clement Greenberg for one—have argued that ‘Matisse's painting is hedo- nistic, but primarily by virtue of its embodiment of pleasure in medium, in “luscious color, rich surfaces, decoratively inflected design.”® Matisse’s art can be described, properly | think, in terms of an exploration of pictorial language that goes hand in hand with an exploration of the figure—preeminently the fe- male figure—and the eroticized body. The painter himself seems to have explic- ily organized his artistic practice around representations of the body, but in a complex relation to his concern for his canvas as a whole, which | hope my reading of Bonheur de vivre will help to illuminate. As he put it in a famous passage of the “Notes d'un peintre” of 1908: expression, pour moi, ne réside pas dans la passion qui éclatera sur un visage ou qui s‘affirmera par un mouvement violent. Elle est dans toute la disposition de mon tableau: la place qu’ocoupent les corps, les vides qui sont autour d'eux, [es proportions, tout cela y a sa part... Ce qui minteresse ie plus, ce n'est ni fa nalure morte, ni le paysage, c'est fa figure. C'est elle qui me permet le mieux d'exprimer le sentiment pour ainsi dire religieux que je posséde de la vie. [Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by a violent movement. It is in the whole disposition of my picture: the place occupied by the figures, the emply spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share... . What interests me the most is not still life nor landscape, but the human figure. It is that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life.® Yet Matisse’s restaging of the bonheur de vivre—the themes of the natural body, the body-in-nature, and pastoral landscape—has so far eluded its inter- preters. His vision seems to oscillate between stone age and golden age, be- tween garden of earthly delights and garden of love, between bacchanal and arcadian pastoral. My argument will be roughly this: that Matisse’s engagement with the heterogeneous tradition of the Western idyll” had less to do with a per- sonal “transcendence” or a “state of grace achieved through total harmony with nature’® than with an attempt to make a modern yet mythic image of idyll which ended in a de-realized yet disturbingly explicit map of desire’s origins, the ox- ploration of representational forms going hand in hand with the exploration of forms of sexuality and sexual difference, an exploration pursued preeminentlyPAGE 52 GENDERS through the image of the body. Most theories of the “pastoral” in literature have recognized the complex ways this mode incorporates within the representation of pastoral repose, erotic pleasure or harmony with nature the stresses and strains of reality, whether social, political, biological, or psychic.® In Matisse’s version of paradisal pastoral this complexity or tension seems to arise initially from at least three sources: the shifting boundaries and identities of the pastoral theme itself and the character of Matisse's appropriation of the pastoral tradi- tion; the figuration of sexuality and gender in the painting; and, finally, the con- sequent unsettling of the viewer's (gendered) relation to the image. La pastorale, I’idylle The happiness of being, living, and working in nature has traditionally been a prominent theme of “pastoral,” whether literary or pictorial. In Matisse’s painting the presence of the foreground figure with syrinx, or pipes of Pan, and the goat- herd with flute in the background introduce the image of pastoral song, another common feature. The presence of these two figures filling the landscape with their music is perhaps the most significant pastoral presence, yet as figures of the pastoral musician they are quite different. In the background the simple goatherd tends his animals, his herd fading out as it approaches the edge of the canvas—signs of the diminuendo of his song, or its diminishing echo in the landscape. Here the piper is an image of rustic innocence, adolescent sexual- ity, simple habitation of the idyllic landscape, and harmony with the animal world,"° The preparatory drawing for this figure depicts a standing female nude (Fig. 2), but in the final painting the goatherd is, importantly, the sole unambig- uously male presence, the male genitalia schematically but unmistakably ren- dered, The other musician, the lounging piper in the foreground, plays a more prominent role compositionally. The preliminary drawing for this figure also imagines a female figure, a reclining nude playing double pipes (Fig. 3). In the final version of the painting, however, the reclining position, pipes, and crossing of the legs are all that remain of the original conception. The figure is now long- haired, the left arm radically elongated for support and the torso reduced to an amorphous envelope with no sexual signifiers. While the length of hair suggests a feminine gendering, the occlusion of genitals—this pose allying it to the aé- hanché pose of the nude above—and the presence of the double pipes, which allude to the syrinx and thus the mythic pipes of Pan,'' suggest a more ambiv- alent gendering. These two musicians suspend the painting between two pas- toral songs, two visions of the pastoral world—rustic and mythic."? They also suspend the painting between two masculine presences in this predominantly feminine landscape—one unambiguously male, the other a more undecidable presence whose central position, scale, and particularized facial expression lend “him” a decidedly dominant role as pastoral poet. Bonheur clearly stages its pastoral as an erotic one: the painting teems with bodies on display, particularly the female body. From the draped reclining2. Henri Matisse, Two Sketches of a Nude Girl Playing a Flute, 1905-06. Graphite on white paper, 34 x 24 om. Courtesy of The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cam- bricige, Massachusetts; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Kerrigan.PAGE 54 GENDERS. 3, Henri Matisse, Reclining Nude Playing Pipes, 1905-06, Pen and ink on paper, 48 x 60 om. © 1990 Succession H. Matisse/ARS N.Y. giantess in the right foreground, to the seductive nymphs exhibiting themselves in the middleground, to the standing female nude on the left, Bonheur offers a repertoire of poses and types of the Nude. The pastoral shepherd is often a lover and his song one of desire, whether the story is that of a simple rustic mortal or some more legendary or mythological being such as Pan, Polyphe- mus, or Daphnis. There was a painterly tradition for the fatter in the nineteenth century. The depiction of Daphnis and Chloe, for example, had been taken up by Millet in a decorative panel in 1865 and by Puvis de Chavannes in 1872, and in 1902 Pierre Bonnard produced a series of lithographs for Vollard illustrat- ing Longus's version of the myth. Barr does suggest that Bonheur might be a “fantasia on the theme of Daphnis and Chloe,” but he takes this no further than noting the presence of lovers, nymphs, and shepherds in an arcadian setting."? Longus's version of Daphnis and Chloe, the version illustrated by Bonnard, identifies the two as orphans discovered by rustics and tells the tale of the ad- ventures of these two beautiful adolescents and their fate at the hands of Eros. When Daphnis bathes in the grotto of the nymphs Chloe is first struck by the I 1 1MARGARET WERTH PAGE 55, pleasure of looking at his beautiful body and begins to know love, Then Chloe’s kiss converts Daphnis: “It was as if he then first acquired eyes, having had none before." The myth’s focus on the relation between physical beauty, visual pleasure, and love and its setting within the context of bathing make it a sug- gestive model for painted pastorals.'* The imagery of bathing figures in the landscape is another current in the pas- toral tradition. Visual representations of “bathers” reproduced the myth of the natural body, the body-in-nature, with the shepherds and gods—the traditional pastoral and mythic components that lent pastorai its narrative structure— fillered out. This imagery of bathing nudes in the landscape has its origins in classical iconography. Bathing nude figures could be found in depictions of Diana or Pan in the company of nymphs, or in mythological motifs depicting various gatherings of gods, nymphs, and mortals (Marcantonio Raimondi’s Judgement of Paris is a famous example), or in classicizing landscapes such as Poussin’s Paysage avec Orphée et Eurydice in the Louvre, which includes bath- ing figures as part of the landscape background. Another important strain of bathing imagery appears with Christian imagery of the baptism of Christ or St. John baptizing, There was also a tradition, usually northern, which situated bathing in a secularized space of carnality and social exchange. The associa- tion of nude figure and water—whether grotto, sacred spring, riverbank, or sea- shore-—has thus been a consistent and central motif in the Western pictorial tradition. This leads me necessarily to the example of Cézanne, whose role in the con- struction of early twentieth-century “pastoral,” although too complex to explore fully here, cannot go unmentioned. Bathers are a recurrent and crucial motif in Cézanne's oeuvre. His “bather" paintings—like the one Matisse owned, Trois baigneuses (Fig. 4)—had their roots in his earlier imaginary figural works of classical, biblical, or literary inspiration of the late 1860s or early 1870s such as. Le Jugement de Paris, Satyres et nymphes, La Lutte d'amour, Tentation de St. Antoine, or Pastorale (Fig. 5).'® Cézanne’s example for Matisse in the represen- tation of the figure-in-landscape motif can hardly be overemphasized, consider- ing the importance Matisse himself accorded the Trois baigneuses he bought in 1899 and lent to the Cézanne retrospective of 1904 at the Salon d’Automne, In 1936 Matisse wrote of his Cézanne Baigneuses: Depuis trente-sept ans que je la posséde, je connals assez bien cette toile, pas entiere- ment, je 'espére; elle m’a soutenu moralement dans des moments critiques de mon aven- ture d'artiste; |'y ai puisé ma foi et ma persévérance . . . Elle est savoureuse de couleur et de rétier et par le recul elle met en évidence ia puissance de |'élan de ses lignes et la sobriété exceptionnelle de ses rapports [in the thirty-seven years | have owned this canvas, | have come to know it quite well, | hope, though not entirely; it has sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist; | have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance .... It is rich in color andPAGE 56 GENDERS 4, Paul Cézanne, Trois baigneuses, ca. 1879-82. Oil on canvas, 60 x 54 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. Photograph @ copyright 1990 Musées de la Ville de Paris by SPADEM. surface, and seen al a distance it is possible to appreciate the sweep of its lines and the exceptional sobriety of its relationships.]"” in addition, in the “Notes d'un peintre” of 1908 Matisse held Cézanne up as a model for the unity of the figure, in contrast to Rodin, whom he accused of fragmenting the body: Regardez au contraire un tableau de Cézanne: tout y est si bien combiné qu’a n’importe quelle distance, et quel que soit ‘e nombre des personnages, vous distinguerez nettement les corps et comprendrez auquel d'entre eux tel ou tel membre va se raccorder. Sil y a dans Ie tableau beaucoup d'ordre, beaucoup de clarté, c'est que, dés le début, cet ordre et cette clarté existaient dans I'esprit du peintre, ou que le peintre avait conscience de leur nécessité. Des membres peuvent se croiser, se mélanger, chacun cependant reste tou-MARGARET WERTH PAGE 57 8. Paul Cézanne, Pastorale, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas, 65 x 81 em. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Photograph © copyright 1990 Service photographique de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux. jours, pour le spectateur, rattaché au méme corps el participe a 'idée du corps: toute confusion @ disparu [Look at one of Cézanne’s pictures: all is so well arranged that no matter at what distance you stand or how many figures are represented you will always be able to distinguish each figure clearly and to know which limb belongs to which body. If there is order and clarity in ‘the picture, it means that from the outset this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter, or that the painter was conscious of their necessity. Limbs may cross and in- {ertwing, but in the eyes of the spectator they will nevertheless remain attached to and help 10 articulate the right body: all confusion has disappeared. ]"” Matisse's preoccupation with the figure-—the figure securing the unity as well as the value of the painting—shows through in his meditations on the meaning of Cézanne's exampie. On the one hand, Cézanne’s bather paintings offered a model of formal treatment of figure on ground, figure in landscape—a way of negotiating the unity of the figure with its field, but with the difficulties of delim- itation figured in. However, Cézanne's bathers proved a difficult example, and his notion of “man and nature” was often a weird one. There seems to havePAGE 58 GENDERS been a powerful tension between figurative explorations of the “body-in-nature” as bonheur, idyll, or utopia and the increasing fragmentation, illegibility, or dis- appearance of the painted figure into its field Bonheur de la figuration At first look, Matisse’s Bonheur de vivre surprises in its spatial construction (Fig. 1). The composition, as Flam points out, is both triangular and circular.’? The arch of trees enframes the figures®° and sets up a central triangular struc- ture within which the sloping triangle of the three foreground figures is wedged. But there is a fluid circular movement around the central nymphs, repeated by the circle of dancers in the background, that produces the pictorial space as one in which the eye is left free to circulate. Abrupt discontinuities of scale and levels of space create a sense of a bizarre mise en scéne. The two giant, hal lucinatory nymphs with their multiple rainbowed contours are the central focus around which the other figural incidents turn. The de-realized spatial structure of the painting, having only the barest relation to three-dimensional space in the tension between suggested foreground space—the left tree trunk and grassy slope—and distant horizon, offers a nearly cinematic scenography for a mobile, restless gaze. Who are these “strange characters," as Signac called them?*" Circulating around the oversized reclining female nudes are the young male goatherd with flute and herd, two lovers coupling in the right foreground, and the reclining figure with double pipes in center foreground. On the left are two pairs of fig- ures: a standing female nude juxtaposed with a kneeling figure and a pair of highly schematized female nudes embracing. In the background is the famous circle of dancers—La Danse in embryo. Figures cohabit this space, but with the disjunctive transitions characteristic of dream images or hallucination. Nineteenth-century precedents for this sort of multifigure, idyllic scene include Manet's scandalous Déjeuner sur /'herbe (1862-63), Signac’s somewhat stilted, anarchist Au temps d'‘harmonie (1894-95), Puvis de Chavannes's nostalgic classicizing works such as L'Eté (1873) (Fig. 6), Seurat’s La Grande Jatte,°? Gauguin’s Breton and Tahitian idylls, the neo-impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross’s mediterranean idylls such as La Plage ombragée (1902),?° and, of course, Cézanne’s idylis and bathers. Yet none of these precursors—-other than perhaps Cézanne’s most disturbing compositions such as Pastorale (Fig. 5)— prepares the viewer for the illogic of this pictorial space. Levels of space are laid out in brutal shorthand and disjunction: the goatherd is grounded by a fuchsia blotch; the three foreground figures occupy a triangular zone in the same foreground plane yet are rendered in two different scales; the left-hand grouping of figures is enfolded behind the curve of the deep green foreground tree trunk and the arch of trees beyond in what is the most consistent space; and the dancers—haloed like the two nymphs—leave their traces in an ex- ploded mosaic of dashes that establish their exuberant reiation to the shore,XNBUOLEN Sa9sN| Sep LOIUNEY B] op enbiydeiBoIoUd eo1nsag 0861 14Buxdoo @ YdeiBo}oUG ‘SUE AeSIO,P BASIN “WO LOG X SOE ‘SEAUED UO IID “ELEL ‘$13.7 ‘SAUUEAEYD OP SIAN O110I4 “9PAGE 60 GENDERS beyond which a band of sea modulates from deep biue to paste! blocks of color, mutating like a rainbow. All of the figures are paired, except the fore- ground musician, united with his/her instrument, and the goatherd, accompa- nied by his herd. These discontinuities of spatial structure are coupled with stylistic disparities in the rendering of the various figures. The pictorial space is peopled with fig- ures emptied of weight, volume, or mass and often without bodily closure. Vary- ing levels of legibility and completeness of figure coexist, with varying degrees of abstraction and irrealism. The body in Bonheur has become largely a con- tainer into whose perimeter the colors of the landscape background seep. With modelling nearly nonexistent, linear contour must do the work of identification, and the articulation of these contours ranges from continuous linear enclosures of great delicacy and refinement, to hyperbolic contouring that exceeds the fig- ures, to broken silhouettes and sheer erasure of the body’s anatomy and limits. These disparities in rendering the figures suggest the presence of different ar- tistic “hands” in the work, which the various hands of the figures in the painting mimic: from the hand of the round-headed nymph on the left who extends her arm, gesturing ambiguously while balancing a linear arabesque emanating from her palm; to the groping hand of the nearest dancer who reaches out to her more graceful sister (this break in the linkage of arms, at the epicenter of the composition, is the space that energizes the circle); to, finally, the foreground lovers’ total lack of hands. Perhaps the most telling instance of disparity of figuration is the couple on the left: the standing “Ingresque” nude with garland spilling down her torso juxta- posed to the amorphous kneeling figure at her feet.*4 This particular juxtaposi- tion epitomizes the degree of rupture Matisse was willing to authorize in the painting. The kneeling figure—pulling on a blue clump of grass, without benefit of even the normative pastoral gesture of plucking a flower to adorn its compan- ion—emerges from the earth it tries to uproot. This is “figure” returned to its origins: the expressive motion of the body becoming its painterly signification, a body without physiognomy, sexuality, gender, materiality, all that would give it identity, the kinesthetic experience of bodily motion signed by the trace of the painter's gesture. Here the artist plays with the appearance and disappearance of the figure, a willful display of the advice Matisse would give to his students several years later (“One must always search for the desire of the line, where it wishes to enter or where to die away")”° and directly contrary to the “desire of the line” of the figure with which it is paired. In the kneeling figure paint moves from continuous linear enclosure to thick, physical contour or external halo. Line encloses form, then pulls away to seep out into the background; a haloed exterior contour travels inward to become internal edge. The paint unexpectedly thickens, both inside the hips and in the obsessive work outside them, and adds a sense of weight to this disembodied body. Matisse’s contours flicker inside and outside the form, pulling away intoMARGARET WERTH PAGE 6t the surrounding field or migrating inside, turning the bodily envelope into a sur- face here inside and outside contest within a continuous and inseparable field. The standing female nude with garland is the sole figure in the painting with a surviving preparatory drawing that closely resembles the painted version (Fig. 7). With her hands wrapped behind her head and elbows raised she is a familiar version of the Nude, a “Source” figure of delicate grace, the youthful Chloe to the goatherd’s Daphnis opposite. (With her ivy garland she can also be associated with the bacchanal.) Of the four figures granted facial expression, however schematic or abbreviated (the others being the exotic slumbering nymph in the center, the goatherd, and the meditative foreground faun), only this nude potentially possesses a gaze directed out of the painting. She main- tains her eternal, frontal, upright pose while her companion is all kinesis. The standing nude retains her nearly obliterated yet legibly saccharine facial expres- sion, while the grasspicker's head is reduced to a bow! of color with a scarce intimation of profil perdu.?7 These figures are good illustrations of two nearly contradictory versions of what Matisse would later call in his “Notes d'un peintre” “condensation”: Je veux arriver & cet état de condensation des sensations qui fait le tableau... fai a pein- dre un corps de femme: d’abord, je lui donne de la grace, un charme, et il s‘agit de lui donner quelque chose de plus. Je vais condenser fa signification de ce corps, en recher- chant ses lignes essentielles... qui aura une signification plus large, plus pleinement humaine. [I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which makes a painting ... Sup- pose | want to paint a woman's body: frst of all | imbue it with grace and charm but | know that | must give it something more. I will condense the meaning of this body by seeking ite essential jines ... which will have a broader meaning, one more fully human. f The kneeling figure imagines the body on the verge of becoming transparent or inchoate, figured through a rapid and apparently spontaneous making, while the standing nude imagines the body as icon, a translation of a particular type via continuous linear enclosure. In the standing nude, drawing with line and painting with color are separate—Matisse “fills in” the linear container of the figure as he had hoped to do after his difficulties in Luxe, calme et volupté the previous year.*° In the kneeling figure the relation between color and line, be- tween painterly trace and descriptive notation, oscillates in an exaggerated re- working of Cézanne’s practice. In addition, the nude with ivy is a familiar rendition of the feminine body, an orderly representation with recognizable fea- tures and parts, legible, unified, with erogenous zones intact: a sensual but somewhat cloying vision of feminine Beauty. The second figure, on the other hand, has abandoned its sexual identity and bodily integrity, which slip through thick but broken contours into the obscurity of the painted landscape field. Contours role in delimiting the body is exorbitantly exaggerated in the multi- colored repetitions of the two nymphs’ curves, only to end in the abrupt dis-7. Henri Matisse, Girl With Ivy in Her Hair, 1905-08, Pen and ink on paper, 19 x 13 cm. © 1990 ‘Succession H. Matisse/ARS N.Y, |MARGARET WERTH PAGE 63 memberment of the leg of the nymph on the left, her limb disappearing into an invisible seam in the canvas marked by a vigorous tuft of orange grass—an abrupt end to the dream of a 'flanc pur suivis avec mes regards clos."°° Mat- isse's two nymphs provide the most direct and immediate source of visual wish- fulfillment in the picture, the spot where looking, painting, and pleasure come together most unproblematically it appears, their seductive, voluptuous bodies on obvious display for the viewer's satisfaction. The broad multiple contours that radiate out from the figures—converting from blue to green to orange—rein- force the nymphs’ status as hallucinatory dream-image within the dream, more imaginary than the imagined others, And thus they represent not only the body imagined for the viewer of the painting but imagined by the painting itself: two Beauties generated out of the twin reeds of the faun's instrument. Their multiple contours set them into the canvas like jewels in a case, pure candy for the scopic drive's sweet tooth, yet the viewer's voyeuristic relation is doubly dis- tanced to these dreaming fictions within fictions. This is enforced by the facial expression of the nymph on the right: eyes closed as if to dream a world more interior than that of the painting, her seductiveness increased by the contrast of exhibitionism and narcissistic retreat, her supposed voluptuous corporeal “beauty” withdrawing into pure Psyche Matisse retains some language of gesture, physiognomy, and the markers of gender in his figures, but these often remain ambiguous, ambivalent, or contra- dictory. The irrealism and variation of color increase these effects: there is a constant shifting of color with respect to contour, figure “fill,” and background, Lines change color and thickness, contours multiply or switch through yellow, orange, blue, green, or red. Grass can be orange here, blue there, green there. The lover's hair is green, one nymph’s blue, the other's orange. Flesh tones range from shades of green, in the case of the grasspicker and the two nymphs on the left, to bright purplish-pink in the case of the three foreground figures, to creamy pink in the case of the two central nymphs and the circle of dancers. The standing garlanded nude on the left and the goatherd on the right are paired by the singularity of their respective flesh coloration: the former pale acid yellow and the latter pale orange. The foreground faun’s instrument—his pipes divided into blue and lavender—inaugurates this process of the contrast and multiplication of color.$? Bonheur du corps. Despite interpreters’ repeated allusions to paradise, classical golden ages, he- donism, the historical unconscious, and such, Bonheur de vivre has most often left them complaining in the end—ot a tack of unity of style, tone, or figuration 22 These reactions are understandable, given the picture's strange pictorial and imaginary economy. But descriptions of Bonheur as a representation of some lost world of unity with nature and erotic freedom—the Zarathustran body “'be- yond good and evil"®*_have remained somewhat abstract in the absence of aPAGE 64 GENDERS: full description of Matisse’s complex vision of the “happiness of life.” One might begin with an inventory of the pleasures depicted. The kinesthetic pleasure of the dance is there: the dancers’ cooperative, communal, ecstatic energy con- trasted to the demure, mute, narcissistic self-display of the two nymphs. Affec- tionate play is invoked by the two women embracing on the left, their casual being-together-in-nature participating in the larger mise-en-scéne; one, appar- ently more mature, shepherds the other and gestures toward the various plea- sures beyond. The female nude is offered in three classic poses and attitudes for the voyeuristic gaze, three models of Beauty: the delicately luxuriant nude with ivy, erect and virginal; the curvaceous reclining nymph with her exotic, Gauguinesque, dreamy expression and knowing exposure and concealment of her gendered body;* and the voluptuous foreground nude, legs splayed but veiled by her classical drapery—the fabric that ties her to the base of the can- vas and firmly into the Western tradition, the only figure to be privileged with clothing in a landscape of nudity. Gender has already surfaced as a question in my description of the painting. Identifications are sometimes uncertain or impossible—as in the effaced gen- der of the kneeling figure—and marks of gender are seemingly carelessly elided—as in the token breast of the two embracing nudes on the left. The inclusion or exclusion of such details cannot be dismissed as accidental or as merely an effort to achieve spontaneity or simplification. The careful preparation that went into producing the canvas—landscape study, compositional drawing and oil sketch, and cartoon—as well as the importance Matisse himself ac- corded the picture contradict this interpretation. Certainly Matisse is working toward some “organized innocence,” but the distribution of the markers of gen- der, however incomplete, appears to be pointed. Reduction and simplification of the body are going on, but not evenly, and the circulatory structure of Matisse’s painting opens up a changing and varied dynamic of fantasmatic appro- priations One might describe the landscape of Bonheur as largely a “feminine” one, bul the “masculine” appears here in three guises: the lover in the foreground, the adoiescent goatherd, and the indeterminate faun-figure, the artist whose two pipes seem to generate the whole fantasmagoria of bodily experience, sex- ality, and figuration in the painting. Barr concentrates on the radical alteration of the faun-figure from the drawing to painting in formal terms only and assumes it to be a “she."* “She” does arrange her lower body in a way analogous to the nymph above, concealing certain markers of gender, but “she" is missing oth- ers that Matisse has been careful to include elsewhere, in however abbreviated a form. Is the ambivalence or bisexuality of this figure a fantasy of a complete sexual being, both masculine and feminine? Or is it a fantasy of the erasure of sexual difference, a neuter gender dominated by a primordial narcissism? |s he/she origin for the apparent heterogeneity, the multiplication of figures of de- sire in the painting? In the company of the adolescent goatherd, clearly male, and the lover in the right foreground this ambivalent pastoral musician partici-MARGARET WERTH PAGE 65, Pates in the picture's sexual economy as an undecidable element. “He,” through “his” sexual ambivalence, status as artist-musician, concentrated facial expression, and central positioning within the composition (lounging just below the outrageously and unmistakably gendered nymphs), is something of a cipher or open space for the viewer's projection into the painting. But this very open- ness could be unsettling to the viewer's attempt to stabilize his or her own rela- tion to this image of idyll Bonheur d’aimer The question of gender and sexuality in the painting is perhaps best ap- proached via the most radical figural condensation, the pair of lovers in the right foreground. Here Matisse leaves far behind him Signac's vision of leisurely an- archist futures, Puvis de Chavannes's antique familial gatherings, or even Cézanne's disturbing vision of the relations between the sexes or between the body and nature.%” In the oil sketch for Bonheur (Fig. 8) Matisse solves the problem of the right foreground reclining nude in the pencil study (Fig. 9) by reversing her, lifting her leg, and literally fusing her to another figure.°® Her part- ner is coiled into a fetal posture, his toe curled in some reflex of pleasure, his head effacing, replacing hers, her arms wrapped around his neck. This is a dramatic pictorial condensation and produces a disturbingly polysemic image that conjures up a host of primal fantasies.°° These coupling lovers complicate Matisse's image of pastoral unity, harmony, and well-being as well as the view- er’s imaginative appropriation of the body. The “two becoming one"—the found- ing myth of love—entails both a blissful (rejunion of male and female and a threatening loss of individuation. The fetal, infantilized posture of the male evokes the intrauterine body while his head issuing from her embrace, born of her body, evokes the newborn. He suckles like a child at the breast, all oral drive incorporating and annihilating its object. The primal scene is also imag- ined, with a measure of violence in the total effacement of the female figure's head by her partner (but her partner is also, it should be added, literally ef- faced). Child in the womb, emerging from it, or at the breast, he is part of the maternal.body at the same time that he enacts the fantasied Oedipal union. Matisse’s “lovers” condense fantasies of intrauterine experience, maternal se- duction, castration, and primal scene. Ail the primal fantasies of the origins of the body, sexuality, sexual difference, and subjectivity are conflated in one stun- ning pictorial incident. But one might argue that both the abject and ecstatic elements of the fantasy of the maternal body are present in this fantasy image of origins. The mother's place is both source and fading point of all subjectivity and language—and in the latter role she may threaten the subject with dissolu- tion. Glimpses of maternal plenitude and pre-Oedipal satisfactions generate pleasure but also, according to classical Freudian theory, involve fear of castra- tion and loss of identity. Yet it is Matisse’s pictorial solution that is particularly brilliant and disturbing: he explicitly conflates the voluptuously displayed femaleMARGARET WERTH PAGE 67 9, Henri Matisse, study for Le Bonheur de vivre, 1905. Pencil and ink on paper, 18 x 23 om. © 1980 Succession H. Malisse/ARS N.Y, Nude of the Western tradition—Titian’s no less“°—with infantile sexuality and the pre-Oedipal experience of the maternal body. SS | am not saying that this is wholly new. The female Nude has always worked the fantasies of maternal seduction and castration to its benefit. And the image of mother-and-child was often an occasion for painters to depict a seductive or voluptuous female nude.*' What is new is that Matisse goes beyond the confla- tion of Nude with the image of mother-and-child in his explicit inclusion of the lover and in his condensation of multiple fantasies into one jarring figural inci- dent. The unsettling ambiguity and multiple erotic charge Matisse gives to his Nude-as-Maternal-Body is nothing like the sentimentalized good mothers of Pu- vis de Chavannes or Maurice Denis nor the rigorously educative ones of Sig- nac. He is perhaps closest to the libidinous, primitivizing mothers of Gauguin, but his source here is significantly Western, not exotic or primitive. The couple's startling marginal placement within the frame of the canvas, echoing that of Titian’s nude, as well as its rote as merely one of many ambiguous and multiplyPAGE 68 GENDERS determined fantasies elaborated within that frame, distinguishes Matisse’s de- piction from its predecessors and plays its part in propelling the viewer through a constantly shifting fantasmatic sequence. Bonheur du regard Does Bonheur sustain the pleasure it means to (re)produce? Both Signac’s con- temporary disgust and Flam's retrospective worry about the bathetic character of Matisse’s image point to its potentially regressive character, its inability to elevate its subject sufficiently to qualify as a proper image of idyll that would resonate with collective meaning. This is in part due to Bonheur's refusal to be- long or not belong to its tradition and its genres, to its oscillation between and conflation of various representational modes of being-in-nature, being natural: bacchanal, arcadian pastoral, golden age, paradise; or garden of earthly delights.” The painting represents a formal and thematic synthesis of massive scope, from caveman to Monsieur Ingres, but the garden of earthly delights perhaps comes closest to the heterogeneity of Matisse's fantasy, his dispersion of pleasures throughout the picture, and his creation of an anarchic ludic space in which all imaginary pleasures, and their potential terrors, become available. | am arguing that this idyllic representation is explicitly not transcendent, or, per- haps better, that the moments of potential transcendence—in the music making of the faun, for example, or the ecstatic dance of the dancers—are held in irre- solvable tension with a resistant and very material visualization of unconscious fantasy life*° Matisse’s image of the bonheur de vivre encompasses a catalog of infantile fantasies, a sequential imagining of a mythic infantile sexuality, with the fantasies of seduction, castration, and primal scene animating his fantas- matic mise-en scéne, and the perverse structures of auto-erotism, narcissism, and exhibitionism playing their part, while the mythic realm of the communal Dionysian dance is relegated to the circle of dancers at the distant epicenter of the composition, ** The question then arises how this contributes to the viewer's position of hedo- nistic appropriation, a question | cannot yet answer. The viewer seems to have the option of taking up a sequence of identificatory positions, successively or simultaneously, but none dominates for long: the picture does not seem to offer a hierarchy. One might argue that the multiplication and ambiguity of gendered bodies, the changing balance of fragmentation and completeness of bodies represented, the shifting identificatory positions available to the viewer, and the irresolvable figural relations simply add up to more to see, more positions from which to see it, and thus more pleasure, But what is the effect of this multipli- cation of figures of desire, the effect of this irresolvability and unfixing of the viewer's position on the pleasure available to the viewer? How does the “desub- jective" viewer participate in the “syntax” of Matisse's myth of origins? Matisse’s imagery seems to be an unembarrassed apology for infantile satis- factions and Dionysian joys, his elaboration of primal fantasies meant to standMARGARET WERTH PAGE 69 as the possible basis of a collective myth of utopia. But can a collective myth be built out of this multiplication of desired objects, this fragmentation and de- realization of the body and its pleasures: from the grasspicker’s inchoate body to the faun’s indeterminate gendering, from the lovers’ conflation of pre-Oedipal union with primal scene, to Beauty mocked by the two nymphs? In the repre- sentation of the idyllic body, unity with nature, and erotic possession, woman as fantasied object of desire holds sexual difference in piace. The maternal body is ground for the myth of imaginary unity, of a refinding of the original lost object, and of the body's possession of a “natural” sexuality. Yet while with one hand Matisse figures the unified body, with the other he casually disfigures—and dis- engenders—it. Thus the beauty of the formal ordering of the body and its sex- uality, the pleasurable side of figuring difference, is made more complex and at points thoroughly undermined. In the two nymphs, for example, there is a con- flict between their supposed auratic presence yet cartoonlike representation — femme fatales masquerading as Nude, the polarization of sexual difference exaggerated to the breaking point. One wonders: is this innocence, irony, or idiocy? NOTES | would like to thank Nancy Locke and Michael Leja for their careful reading of this paper as t was revising it for publication. 1. Which included an “étude de tableau exposé aux Indépendants.” 2. For a discussion of proposed sources for Bonheur, see Allred Bart, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), pp. 88-69, cited hereafter as Barr; James Cuno, “Matisse and Agostino Carracci: A Source for the ‘Bonheur de vivre; " Burlington Magazine 122 (July 1980): 503-505; John Elderfield, Fauvism and Its Affinities (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1976), pp. 97-102; Albert Elsen, “Rodin’s ‘La Ronde,’ " Burlington Magazine 57 (May 1965): 290— 299; Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 187-162, cited hereafter as Flam 1986; John Hallmark Neff, "Matisse and Decoration: The ‘Shchukin Panels,” Art in America 63 (July 1975): 40; Ellen Oppler, Fauvism Re-Examined (New York: Garland, 1976), p. 175. Matisse’s earlier copies made in the Louvre—including Watteau’s Féte champé- tre, Boucher’s Pasiorale, Poussin's Bacchante and Echo et Narcisse and Annibale Carracci's Pay- sage avec une scéne de chasse—must also be considered as background to his interest in pastoral landscape ca. 1905-06. 3. This paper reflects the formal and theoretical questions addressed by my dissertation (in progress), which deals with idyllic and pastoral imagery in French avant-garde painting ca. 1894— 1908. 4. Louis Aragon, Henri Matisse: A Novel (London, 1972), pp. 142-143; quoted from the pretace to Henri Matisse: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Philadelphia Mu- seum of Art, 1948). 5. Clement Greenberg, Nation, June 29, 1946: 792, 6. Henti Matisse, “Notes d'un peintre," La Grande Revue, December 25, 1908: 733, 741. Translated in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (New York, 1973), pp. 36, 38, cited hereafter as Fiam 1973,PAGE 70 GENDERS: 7, An engagement thal marked the painter's early career from Luxe, calme et volupié (1905) and Bonheur de vivre (1906), through Le Luxe and Le Luxe if (1907), to Baigneuses a /a fortue (1908), ‘and culminating in the decorations La Danse and La Musique (1910). 8. “It is not the Golden Age of the ancient Greeks that is represented but rather a state of grace achieved through total harmony with nature, a mystical transcendence of self through self, which is peculiarly and distinctly Matissian” (Flan 1986, p. 157), 9, While my use of the notion of “pastoral” in the contaxt of the diverse production of utopic, idyllic, oF mythological imagery in early twentieth-century painting poses both practical and theoretical probiems, | believe it can still provide @ useful frame for discussion of the themes under consider- ation here. For recent theoretical discussions of pastoral in literature, generally treated now as mode or theme and not as genre, see Paul Alpers, "What Is Pastoral,” Critical inquiry (Spring 1982); David Halperin, Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Anciant Tradition of Bucolic Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), and Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and ideology: Virgil to Valery (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). For a recent discussion in the field of the fine. arts, see the exhibition catalog Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape (Washington: Philips Coi- lection in association with the National Gallery of Art, 1988). 10. Flam has noted the relation between the outline drawing of the goats and prehistoric cave paint. ing, drawings of which were published by Abbé Breuil early in the century, although this fascinating primitivist reference has yet to be fleshed out sufficiently (Flam 1986, pp. 159-160). 11. The syrinx being the transformation of the woodland nymph Pan desires into the instrument and origin of his art, his sighs animating the reed the nymph’s body has become, his music the com- pensation and remembrance of his loss 12. Their two songs also conjure up the classical pastorai's convention of competing shepherd musicians and their amoebean, or answering, songs. 13. Barr, p. 88. 14, Daphnis was sometimes described as a friend of Pan, who taught him to play the syrinx, Piore ‘Schneider situates Bonheur de vivre between Longus's myth of Daphnis and Chioe and Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. See Pierre Schneider, Matisse (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), pp. 243-244, See also his discussion of Bonheur, p. 244ff, 15. For a discussion of Cézanne's Baigneurs and Baigneuses, see the catalog for the exhibition (Cézanne: Die Badenden (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 1989). Melvin Waldtogel has argued that one of the earliest bathers is a variant on La Tentation de St. Antoine. See Waldfogel, "The Bathers of Cézanne," Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1961, p. 44. Cézanne’s L’Enlavement was sold in the 1903 Zola sale to Vollard, It should be noted that Cézanne was also engaged in a strange ongoing dialogue with the modem déjeuner as idyll, something Matisse attempted the year before with his Luxe, calme et volupté. Two drawings from the early 1860s indicate Cézanne’s early interest in traditional pastoral imagery: both Satyres: jeune garcon and Scéne pastorale depict a Pan figure. ‘See Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), vol. 2, nos. 47, 48. Specific sources cited for Cézanne's “generic” bathers include Claude-Josephe Vernet’s Baigneuses and Delacroix’s Baigneuses turcs. See Ger- trude Berthold, Cézanne und die alten Meister (Stuttgart: Kohihammer Verlag, 1958), pls. 36, 31 Cézanne was fascinated with classical literary pastoral as a student and with classical landscape as a painter. He copied two figures from Poussin's Les Bergers d'Arcadi in the Louvre and made @ wateroolor after Titian's Concert champéire. For the watercolor, dated ca. 1878, Venturi 865, see John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: The Watercolors (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), no. 65.MARGARET WERTH PAGE 71 16. This is true, of course, for other artists of the period as well. Cézanne's bather paintings were well known by the late 1880s—Emile Bernard for one did a series of Cézannist Baigneuses at that time—and Cezannisme crescendoed in the first decade, virtually institutionalized by the Cézanne etrospectives at the Salon d’Automnes of 1904, 1905, and 1907. His Baigneurs au repos of ca. 1875-76 was part of the Caillebotte bequest to the Luxembourg and had its own scandalous history in the 1890s. It was exhibited in the 1905 Automne and was reproduced in the attack pub- lished in Lllsstration (November 1, 1905) alongside other modernist abominations to be ridiculed, including Matisse’s Fauvist Femme au chapeau, There was at least one Baigneurs—now in the Cone Collection, Baltimore—at Gertrude Stein's, According to Venturi, several avant-garde artists owned bathers canvases: Roussel, Denis, Monet, Renoir, and Degas. And, of course, Vollard had plenty of canvases to look at. Bonnard’s Portrait d'Ambroise Vollard of ca. 1904-05 includes a Quatre baig- neuses (Venturi 386). Last, but certainly not least, is the famous photograph of the Cing Baigneuses (he original painting is at the Kunstmuseum, Basel) owned by Derain and visibie in the photograph of his studio taken by Gelett Burgess and published in “The Wild Men of Paris” in Architecturat Record (May 1910). 17. Matisse, Ecrits et propos sur Fart (Paris: Hermann, 1972), p, 133; tetter to Raymond Escholier, November 1936, from Nice, upon the gift of his Trois baigneuses to the Petit Palais (trans. Flam 1973, p. 75). 18, Matisse, “Notes”: 739 (trans. Flam 1973, p. 38) 19, Flam 1986, p. 154, 20. Repeating the composi of Matisse’s Cézanne Baigneuses. 21. "Matisse, whose attempts | have liked up to now, seems to me to have gone to the dogs. Upon a canvas of two and a half moters he has surrounded some strange characters with a line as thick as your thumb. Then he has covered the whole thing with flat well-defined tints, which—however pure—seem disgusting . . . ah those rosy flesh tones, It evokes the worst Ranson, the most detest- able cloisonnismes de feu Augustin—and the mutticolored shop fronts of the mezchants of paints, varnishes and household goods” (Barr, p. 82) 22. Shown in the Seurat retrospective at the 1905 Indépendants along with several studies for the painting and with La Baignade. 23. Exhibited at the 1903 Indépendants. 24. Bonhour's affinities to Ingres are a commonplace of the literature, and the comparison is apt given the retrospective devoted to his work Matisse would have seen at the Salon d’Automne of 1905, which included Bain turc as well as drawings for the composition of L’Age dior. Matisse’s response to Ingres is not limited to the works shown at the Salon, however—Ingres's La grande odialisque in the Louvre is an important precedent for Matisse's rectining nymphs. In addition, there is the famous anecdote of Matisse’s comparison of Manet's Olympia (Manet also had a retrospec- tive at the 1905 Automne) to Ingres’s La grande odalisque: Matisse preferred Ingres because “the sensual and willfully determined line of Ingres seemed to conform more to the needs of painting,” Jean Puy, “Souvenirs,” Le Point (July 1939): 36; cited Barr, p. 91 25. Quoted in John Elderfield, The Drawings of Henri Matisse (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 25. 26. This is characteristic of Cézanne's later bather paintings, for example, Bafgneurs, ca. 1896, which Matisse could have seen at Gertrude and Leo Stein's in 1905. Rodin's presence here is also suggested. Matisse, ca, 1898-99, went to the master’s studio, where he was reportedly admonishedPAGE 72 GENDERS for his “facility of hand," the remedy for which would be more detailed drawings. See Raymond Escholier, Matisse, ce vivant (Paris: Fayard, 1956), pp. 161—162. Albert Eisen has discussed Rodin's ‘drypoint “La Ronde"——which was shown in 1905 at the Musée du Luxembourg and reproduced as the centerfold of the June 1905 issue of ’Art et Jes artistes—in relation to Bonheur See Elsen, “Rodin's 'La Ronde,’ p. 299, The juxtaposition of the two figures on the left side of Bonheur could be interpreted as a response to the abstraction of the figures in Rodin’s print: both a reaction against the print’s grave, elevated tone and a demonstration of the range of Malisse's ability to reduce and simplify his drawing. 27. This pairing of figures turned out to be a fertile one for Matisse: He repeated the dyad of kneel- ing figure in service to standing nude a year later in Le Luxe; and he was still meditating on the crouching figure in Baigneuses a la tortue of 1908. 28. Matisse, “Notes”: 735 (trans. Flam 1973, p. 36). 29, See Matisse’s letter to Signac, July 14, 1905, from Collioure on the problems of drawing as sculptural and color as decorative: "Avez-vous trouvé, dans mon tableau des Baigneuses un ac- cord parfait entre le caractére du dessin et le caractare de la peinture? Selon moi, ils me paraissent tolalement différents fun de l'autre, et méme absolument contradictoires. L'un, le dessin, dépend de la plastique linéaire ou sculpturale, et rautte, la peinture, dépond de la plastique colorée.” (Have you found in my picture an accord between the character of the drawing and that of the painting? In my opinion they seem totally different, one from the other, absolutely contradictory. The one, draw- ing, depends on linear or sculptural plasticity; the other, painting, depends on coloured plasticity.) Quoted in Henri Matisse: Exposition du Centenaire (Paris: Grand Palais, 1970), p. 68. Itis significant that Matisse himself reters here to his painting as a Baigneuses, transposing it from @ Baudelairean context to a Gézannian one. 30. The nymph on the right personifies and reproduces the dreamy, narcissistic “regards clos” of the faun of Mallarme’s poem and of Matisse’s painting, while she and her double also represent the “lane pur" exhibited to the gaze. The relation between Malisse’s image and Mallarmé’s poem has been broached by Jack Flam (1986, pp. 166-187). 31. Paint handling also changes across the canvas, from flat, matte color areas—in the sea and sky, for example—to stippling—as in the background o the left of the standing nude and grasspicker— to occasional, seemingly arbitrary applications of thick impasto—as in the face of the goatherd. 32, Flam, for example, comes close to agreeing with Signac. He sees the painting as a flawed masterpiece because it “alternates between a sense of the sublime and the feeling that itis almost abit silly... the abstract and the topical are mixed in a way that just barely escapes bathos” (Flam 1986, p. 164), 83. See Schneider, Matisse, p. 258, or Flam 1986, p. 162. 34. Her double turns her back on the viewer, offering the other side to the figure and directing the viewer's gaze, with hers, to the dancers in the distance. 95. See Barr, 9, 89, for a discussion of the radical transformation of this figure from drawing to canvas. 36. In this case Matisse would follow classical literary pastoral, where erotic themes were norma- tively bisexual. 37. Cézanne would never co-join his male and female figures in this way: his men were usually dressed in the company of women, or bathing amongst themselves, of, rarely, occupying the same landscape, eyeing the women at a distance. See, for example, the two versions of La Baignade,MARGARET WERTH PAGE 73 Venturi 272 and 275, ca. 1875-77. The closest he comes to joining his men and women would be in ‘the two versions of La lutte d'amour. 98. In the pencil and ink study for the composition she is laid out flatly on the slope, legs parted and ankles crossed, without drapery, Her placement in the study tends to consolidate the right-hand side of the picture, isolating it from the left. Matisse is having great difficulty with her head and arms in the study, a difficutty he resolves in the final version by eliminating them. In the early study her pose and position relative to the piper and the nymphs above lack animation, whereas in the oil skeIch the couple generates a new focus of activity, separate from that of the piper, and Matisse has already discovered the circulatory structure he deploys in the final picture. 99. The dispersed character and destabilized structure of fantasy in Matisse’s painting is perhaps best initially described in terms of the psychoanalytic notion of primal fantasy—the manifest text that produces multiple potential enunciations. See Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contti- bution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversion,” Standard Edition, vol. 17, pp. 194-195. 40. The right hand figure of Titian’s Andrian Bacchanale in the Prado, Madrid, 41. An example would be Poussin’s L'Enfance de Bacchus in the Louvre, in which the sleeping Mother-Nymph is a close sister of both Titian’s and Matisse’s nudes. We do know that Matisse a few years earlier made a copy of another erotic mythological Poussin, Echo et Narcisse, also in the Louvre. In the myth of the infancy of Bacchus these female figures were often wives separated from hearth and husband, accompanied by an infant whom they would suckle alternatively with young animais, transforming the activity proper to the nursing mother, 42. No one reference point lays claim to the image, yet Matisse never wholly displaces the tradition he invokes. Certainly much of the problem of interpretation arises from the historical context of the painting, the cultural frame in which images of utopia, pastoral, or idyll had to struggle to secure meaning. Matisse's effort to forge an imagery of pleasure was obviously part of a wider preoccu- ation with representing the body, the natural environment, and sexuality, 43. What Laplanche has called “that strange materiality of unconscious psychic reality,” that “corps Granger interme." See "La pulsion et son objet-source: son destin dans le transfert," in La Pulsion: Pour quoi faire (Association Psychanalytique de France, 1984). An additional question, too complex to broach in this essay, is the relation of “rhythm” to the representation of fantasy and desire. Bon- heur de vivre is usually heralded as a pictoriat celebration of “rhythm,” whether in terms of linear arabesque, pictorial structure, kinesthetic incident, or musica! metaphor, This reference to "rhythm’ 1s offen meant to connote an eroticization of energy and movement that embodies en original bon- ‘heur—"thythm” as elan vital, instinct, energy, fa vie, libldo—expressed through the painter's re- sources of ling, color, form, and gesture. 44. The French psychoanalysts Laplanche and Pontalis have argued that autoeroticism is at the origins of fantasy, and this autoerotic fantasy is detached from any natural object. Thus the subject is caught in a sequence of images and participates in the scene of desire but has no fixed position within this scene. See Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, "Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origine du fantasme," Les Temps Modernes 19 (1964) for a discussion of the varying definitions an¢ structures of fantasy in Freudian psychoanalytic theory: “En situant Vorigine du fan- tasme dans te temps de lauto-érotisme, nous avons marqué la liaison du fantasme avec le désir. Mais le fantasme n’est pas ‘objet du desir il est scene. Dans le fantasme, en effet, le sujat ne vise pas l'objet ou son signe, i! figure lui-méme pris dans la séquence d'images. II ne se représente pas Vobjet désiré mais i! est représenté participant & la scéne, sans que, dans les formas les plus Proches du fantasme originaira, une place puisse [ui etre assignée . tout en étant toujours orésent dans Ie fantasme, le sujet peut y étre sous une forme désubjectivée, c’est-A-dire dans la syntaxe méme de la séquence en question.” (By locating the origin of fantasy in the period of autoereticism,PAGE 74 GENDERS we have shown the connection between fantasy and desire. Fantasy, however, is not the object of desire, itis the scene of desire, In fantasy, in fact, the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object but is himself represented as participating in the scene of desire, without, in the earliest forms of fantasy, being assigned any fixed place in it... while always present in the fantasy, the subject may be there in a desubjective form, that is to say in the very syntax of the sequence in question.) See also Jean Laplanche on auto-erotism in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehiman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 72-73.GENDERS 9 November 1990 Articles Judith Butler Lana's “Imitation”: Melodramatic Repetition and the Gender Performative 1 Helena Michie The Greatest Story (N)ever Told: The Spectacle of Recantation 19 Michael Selig Hollywood Melodrama, Douglas Sirk, and the Repression of the Female Subject (Magnificent Obsession) 35 Margaret Werth Engendering Imaginary Modernism: Henri Matisse's Bonheur de vivre 49 Sarah Schuyler Double-dealing Fictions 75 Joseph Bristow Nation, Class, and Gender: Tennyson's Maud and War 93 Alan Sinfield Closet Dramas: Homosexual Representation and Class in Postwar British Theater 142 Books Received 132 Notes on Contributors 136 Genders is published by the University of Texas Press in cooperation with the University of Colorado at Boulder