Reflections on the Snail

Henri Matisse: L'Escargot (1953) 
Gouache on paper, cut and pasted on paper 
mounted on canvas

The Little Greek hates snails, because they eat her plants. But I like them ...

Perhaps it's because I grew up watching The Magic Roundabout and had a particular fondness for Brian. But it's also because, like other molluscs, they seem to me to be fascinating creatures, gastropodding about in the dampness of the garden and leaving a silvery slipstream of mucus in their wake, an ephemeral trail that points the way for the beaks of birds that love to eat them. 

The fact that snails have little tentacles on their head, a primitive little brain, and possess both male and female sex organs (i.e., are hermaphrodites), also inclines me to view them favourably; they are both alien and perverse when considered from a human perspective. 

I particularly like the tiny baby snails, newly hatched, with a small and delicate shell already in place to conceal their nakedness. They are very pretty and very sweet. Francis Ponge speaks of their immaculate clamminess. The fact that people can kill them with poison pellets without any qualms is astonishing and profoundly upsetting to me. 

To her credit, the Little Greek only tries to dissuade the snails from eating her plants by using (mostly ineffective) organic solutions, such as coffee granules and bits of broken eggshell sprinkled around. Alternatively, she sometimes rounds 'em up and relocates the snails to the local woods - though this enforced transportation of snails also makes me a little uneasy, as it's all-too-easy to imagine little yellow stars painted on their backs.   

Not that this prevents me from eating them, prepared with a garlic and parsley butter when in France, or cooked in a spicy sauce when in Spain ... 

Note: the Francis Ponge poem to which I refer and from which I quote is 'Snails', trans. by Joshua Corey and Jean-Luc Garneau, Poetry, (July/August, 2016). Click here to read in full on the Poetry Foundation website.  

Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence

I. Voir Vence et Mourir

There are not many places in the world I would like to visit, but the small medieval market town of Vence, on the French Riviera, is one of them.

For one thing, Lawrence died in Vence (2 March 1930) and having been to the town in which he was born, Eastwood, I'd like to complete the pilgrimage as it were (fully aware of the fact that his body no longer lies in the local cemetery, having been exhumed, cremated and shipped over to the United States at Frieda's bidding in 1935).

My primary reason for wanting to go to Vence, however, is to see a place of Catholic worship designed and decorated by an artist whom Lawrence loathed: the Chapelle du Rosaire was built between 1949 and 1951 under the direction of Henri Matisse, who regarded it as his masterpiece.


II. Going to the Chapel

From what I've read and seen, the chapel is not particularly striking from the outside; white walls, a rooftop decorated with a blue-and-white zigzag pattern and an elaborate metal cross. The interior, however, is both a very beautiful religious space and a great modern art space; doubly sacred, if you will.

The altar is made of warm brown stone and was chosen for its resemblance to the colour of bread and the Eucharist. Matisse also designed the bronze crucifix on the altar, the candle holders in bronze, and the small tabernacle. Behind the altar is a large image of Saint Dominic.

For the walls, Matisse designed three murals. Aged 77 when he began work on the chapel, Matisse was in such poor health that he could only work from a wheelchair using a long stick with a brush strapped to his arm. The images he drew on paper were then transferred to the ceramic tiles by skilled craftsmen.

On the side wall there are abstract images of flowers and of the Madonna and Child, all created in simple black outlines. On the back wall are the traditional scenes known as the Stations of the Cross, depicting the gruesome last days of Christ. Whereas these fourteen scenes are usually depicted individually, Matisse cleverly incorported them into a single composition.

As much as I admire his minimalist wall designs, what I really love are the three sets of stained-glass windows, upon which Matisse spent a great deal of time. The windows make use of just three colours: an intense yellow for the sun; a vibrant green for vegetation; and a Virgin blue for the sea and sky. The colour from the windows floods the chapel's all-white interior and, via a play of nothing more than lines and light, Matisse miraculously opens what is a very limited space on to infinity.


III. In the Footsteps of Sylvia Plath

For me, Matisse's chapel possesses what Lawrence would have termed a fourth dimensional quality and one can't help wondering what the latter would have made of it had he lived to see it: would he still dismiss Matisse as a clever trickster who masturbated in paint and produced works full of nothing more than willed ambition and the impotent glories of virtuosity ...?

Whilst we can only guess Lawrence's critical response, we can know for sure what the American poet Sylvia Plath thought of Matisse's Chapel, as she recorded details of her visit to it (along with then lover Richard Sassoon) on 6 January 1956 in her journal. She also sent a postcard to her mother the following day from Nice, in which she wrote:

"Yesterday was about the most lovely of my life … How can I describe the beauty of the country? Everything is so small, close, exquisite and fertile. Terraced gardens on steep slopes of rich red earth, orange and lemon trees, olive orchards, tiny pink and peach houses. To Vence - small, on a sun-warmed hill, uncommercial, slow, peaceful. Walked to Matisse cathedral - small, pure, clean-cut. White, with blue tile roof sparkling in the sun - I just knelt in the heart of the sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel."

It sounds so lovely: one can only hope Vence hasn't been ruined in the intervening 60 years by commercial and residential development, tourism, immigration, etc. like many of the other towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.


See: The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol 1: 1940-1956, ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, (Faber and Faber, 2017).

Cut it Out - Reflections on Blue Nudes and Racial Fetishism in the Work of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)

The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier. 

Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines. 

Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ... 

Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period. 

Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards: 

This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure. 

There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism. 

Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...