Matisse’s “Radical Invention”

Conflict Over Competition And Dependency

Before the recent MoMA show, Matisse scholars downplayed the effect on his art of external factors, even of World War I. Instead they focused on his competitive character and rivalry with other artists. As Spurling (1998) reports, intense competition permeated Matisse’s early life. His mother vigorously backed his artistic ambition, but to pursue this goal meant defying his father, a seed merchant in the Northern town of Bohain, who threatened to cut off his financial support. Sibling rivalry was another major issue for Matisse. When he was four, his two-year-old brother, Thierry August, died. His mother, who was pregnant at the time, delivered the “replacement” brother, August Thierry, within the same year. I would speculate that these events worsened Henri’s guilt over any wish to symbolically get rid of his rivals.

In 1906, the year of Paul Cezanne’s death, Matisse revealed no trace of rivalry with him, praising the late artist as “the father of us all” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 52). But while his spiritual father was alive, Matisse tempered his praise with censure. He called Cezanne’s innovative use of color a way to mimic what the artist sees that failed to evoke what he feels. In a 1925 interview, he alluded to Cezanne, but obliquely, saying, “I have accepted influences but I think I have always known how to dominate them” (Flam 1973, p. 55). As for “sibling” rivalry, Matisse and Picasso were like brothers, since they both called Cezanne their artistic “father.” As soon as they met in 1906, shortly after Picasso moved from Spain to Matisse’s homeland, they became friends, visiting each other’s studios and riding horseback together. But companionship scarcely concealed “a highly competitive relationship” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 51); each found in the other’s work a spur to his own inventiveness. When cubism, Picasso’s signature style, became dominant, Matisse criticized it as too codified, while adapting it to his own uses.

Conflicts related to dependency were another source of anxiety for Matisse. He apparently shifted onto his wife, Amélie, his reliance on the unwavering support and strength of his mother. Amélie was a capable manager of his business and social life, and Matisse felt deep affection for her, but he was infuriated by what he felt to be her intrusiveness and her evidently unfounded jealousy. Although he typically reined in his anger, plying Amélie with a profusion of loving notes, sometimes his defenses failed him and he suffered intense anxiety, gastrointestinal ailments, headaches, and feverish exhaustion. Matisse wrote to his daughter that his struggle to complete a portrait of Amélie (which ultimately required over one hundred sittings) was giving him palpitations, high blood pressure, and a constant drumming in his ears. His close friend Marcel Sembat describes Matisse painting this portrait: “I saw Matisse demented! Crying! By night he recites Our Fathers! By day, he quarrels with his wife” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 148).

Matisse’s primary mode of adaptation was to excel as an artist, which allowed him to compete vigorously, while minimizing any loss of admiration and love. For example, his struggle with the portrait of Amélie was a conscious attempt to outdo Picasso and even to surpass his artist-“father” Cezanne, whose Woman in a Yellow Armchair had inspired his own painting. Spurling (2005) says Matisse could not rest until his portrait matched Cezanne’s in its nuanced evocation of feeling (p. 142).

A Painter Of Subjective Experience

Matisse was a self-reflective man who developed ideas about art while in his thirties that remained important to him the rest of his life. His goal was to engage with the motif, whether a person, a landscape, or a bowl of fruit, and to evoke precisely what he saw, felt, and imagined, his “sensations,” to use his French term. In “Notes of a Painter,” he rejects impressionism, claiming it is too shallow, catching only “the fresh and superficial sensations of the first session.” His aim, he writes, is to find a reality deeper than “the fugitive sensations of a moment” (Flam 1973, p. 36). In 1908, when he wrote these words, Matisse’s search for a deeper reality was in tune with psychoanalysis, and with other artists of his time. But it derived from the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose works he read avidly. Like Freud, Bergson looked beneath manifest reality to the subjective, which he considered to be a flux of ever changing sensations, including memories and associations, and to comprise a truer “reality.”

Improvising techniques to evoke this deeper reality, Matisse would paint one “state” and then, in response to its effects on him, would revise it, repeating this process in a feedback loop between himself and the emerging picture. “The reaction at each stage,” he said, “is as important as the subject” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 109). He would leave traces of earlier states visible, so that the work could reflect his feelings and thoughts as they crystallized gradually in his imagination. He often scraped paint away to reveal earlier states, applied color independent of manifest reality, and pushed the motif to the “front” of the canvas, where it seems to impinge on the viewer’s space. After he had completed one large portrait, of Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg (in July 1914), he went back to it and scratched into the paint multiple graceful arcs to suggest the flow of the sitter’s energy. As a painter, he freely “said” whatever came to his mind.

Indeed, Matisse writes of his art that “the work is the emanation, the projection of the self” (Flam 1973, p. 144). This idea leads me to surmise that painting and sculpture may have been therapeutic for Matisse, helping him deal with internal distress. In a comment that brings analysis to mind, he describes each painting “session” (his word) as a step into the unknown: “I don’t know where I am going. I rely on my subconscious self . . .” (Flam 1973, p. 84). His dialogue with the image is a further parallel to analysis: he not only “gave voice” to his inner life as color and line, but also received a “response” in what he saw on the canvas. As Matisse reacted to the image and revised it, he watched it move through successive “stages,” beginning as an inexact reflection of his mental state, but gradually coming to mirror what was in his mind. When he had achieved this goal, he felt a sense of surprise at the new object before him, “as novel for me as for anyone else” (Flam 1973, p. 90), and he felt suffused with a calm satisfaction.

The Impact Of War On Matisse’s Psychology

The Impact Of War On Matisse’s Art

Toward a New Compromise Formation

Although Matisse became much more symptomatic at the beginning of the war, within a year his condition had improved greatly. By his account, the “cure” was nonstop work in the studio, which I relate to his view of art as “the projection of the self.” One may think of the “self” he projected into his art as a mirroring selfobject, a container of split-off projections, or a field on which to create new compromise formations. Within each model, one may imagine Matisse representing his inner world on canvas symbolically and, as he reacted to each “stage,” striving to create an image that would integrate this world in a more satisfying way. In the language of ego psychology, the completed image would evoke a more effective compromise formation. Matisse knew a painting was complete when it seemed in “equilibrium” and made him feel calm, perhaps a result of his identifying with this more adaptive reconfiguration of his inner “self.”

Early in the war, for example, Matisse seems to have reconfigured the role of his internal critic with the help of its symbolic externalization as the Woman on a High Stool (1914). His model was the wife of a prominent art critic who had championed not Matisse but his rival, Picasso: her clenched hands, frowning mouth, and tense, downward-looking pose suggest disapproval. Two years later, in The Piano Lesson (Figure 2), Matisse presents this same woman again, but in modified form. No longer actually present, she “appears” as the 1914 painting of her hanging on a wall. Though she seems to be “watching” the boy at the piano, the nude sculpture and the sunny garden signify that the artist/pianist remains aware of sensual pleasure, even as he diligently pursues his work under her “gaze.” Matisse seems to have internalized this compromise, in which the critic’s impact is diminished: no longer painting such dreary images as the Grey Nude, he once again found sensuous pleasure in his art, though evidently under the gaze of a strict inner judge.

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Figure 2.

The Piano Lesson (La leçon piano), 1916

This harsh judge seems to have demanded that Matisse work at a punishing level of intensity during the war years. When he complained that he felt “good for nothing,” his trusted friend Sembat advised him to “continue to paint well,” which Matisse did ceaselessly. He believed that by painting “well” he could support France at least on the cultural front, a conviction that eased his shame and guilt. According to the MoMA curators, he found a “connection between the challenges facing those at the front and the challenges of his own practice, which he had cast as a struggle of overwhelming dimensions” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 263). The curators say he considered it “critical to pursue [his art] with maximum and continuous effort . . .” (p. 24). As if he were in battle beside his countrymen, he became feverishly compulsive, often laboring long into the night. He would work until he had physically and emotionally exhausted himself.

The “Radical Invention”

Matisse’s self-directed aggression wiped out his identity as an artist of sensual lyricism and moved him toward a new integration, his “radical invention.” Subduing his natural exuberance, he cloaked his images in darkness, dulling them with gray or eclipsing them with black. He reduced his voluptuous figures and “arabesques” to near abstract geometric constructions. And he attacked the painted surface itself, the “skin” of his artworks, with his brush handle and palette knife, leaving it scarred with scrapes and gouges. Aggression and making art had long been linked for Matisse; his biographer reports him saying “the only way he could forget his work for a few seconds was to level a gun at the target in his local shooting booth” (Spurling 1998, p. 11). But with the onset of war, he seemed to take shots at his own canvas. Previously he had channeled this aggression into an art of sensual pleasure, but now, in order to integrate all of his sensations, including his newly intense aggression, his art needed to change.

In Open Window at Collioure (1914), painted early in the war, this change in Matisse’s art has begun, but a new integration still eludes him: since he has painted out the “view” with black, the pleasant colors framing the window fail to relieve a grim sense of loss. One year later, Matisse does achieve this integration in another “window” painting, The Yellow Curtain (1915; Figure 3). Its exquisite balance gives visible form to compromise: it evokes aggression and loss by eliminating realistic imagery, while it also suggests in its elegant shapes and delicate lines the essence of what has been lost. Kurt Varnedoe (1997), then chief curator at MoMA, described this museum acquisition as “a truly uncanny picture, radically austere in its abstraction, but also sensual and seductive.” By conveying the tension between the austere and the sensual, within an overall harmony, The Yellow Curtain exemplifies compromise formation and meets Matisse’s new objective: “nowadays I try to put serenity into my pictures” (Flam 1973, p. 36). “La sérénité” (Matisse 1908, pp. 60, 62) remained his artistic goal for the rest of his life.

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Figure 3.

Yellow Curtain (Le rideau jaune), 1915

Pivotal Works: The Moroccans and Bathers by a River

Recalling the period of The Yellow Curtain in a 1952 interview, Matisse described his effort to “put serenity into [his] pictures” with terms that suggest compromise formation: he aimed for “an unprecedented creation” that would integrate his “many inner conflicts.” To explain further, he said, “A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colors and forms . . .” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 310). Matisse went on to describe the challenge of attaining this integration: “From this duality issued works that, overcoming my inner constraints, were realized in the union of [these two] poles. A synthesis both pictorial and moral, governed always by the laws of harmony, held strict dominion over my work” (Matisse 1952, quoted in D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 310). Matisse’s compulsion to reconcile the exuberant “pictorial” with the starkly “moral,” under the “strict dominion” of “a synthesis,” brings to mind more than a general response to the war; it suggests self-directed aggression, the Woman on a High Stool demanding that he compromise his “innate desire” for the sensuous.

In the view of many critics, Matisse came closest to achieving his “unprecedented creation” with two large paintings, The Moroccans (Figure 4) and Bathers by a River (Figure 5), the epitome of his “radical invention.” He began work on them in 1909, but labored over many revisions through most of World War I. As completed in 1917, they are among the few paintings that Matisse himself called “pivotal” (Spurling 2005, p. 187). In these works one can see why he considered his “will to rhythmic abstraction” to be “moral”: it required extreme self-denial. His friend Sembat suggests an almost spiritual quality to Matisse’s quest: “for Matisse, to perfect one’s self is to simplify” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 153).

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Figure 4.

The Moroccans (Les marocains), 1916

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Figure 5.

Bathers by a River (Baigneuses), 1916–1917

To perfect his moral posture in the midst of war, Matisse simplified these works radically. The earlier versions had celebrated sensuality: in The Moroccan Café, turbaned men lounge in an elegant plaza, gazing at a bowl of goldfish; in the early Bathers, shapely nude women relax near a waterfall. When Matisse returned to these subjects during the war, the completed works were so different from anything he had ever painted that, out of fear of public scorn, he waited ten years before he showed them, and soon after he withdrew them yet again.

Based on his own statements, The Moroccans responds to Matisse’s guilt at seeing North African soldiers who had been maimed by a war that to them made no sense. The final version meets the moral demand to bear witness: the ordered plaza is now in fragments, as though it has been blown apart, and the Moroccans are mere shards, reduced to geometric shapes and sketchy lines. Yet as a “synthesis” the work yields to Matisse’s “innate desire” for sensuality, with its chromatic vigor and such lively touches as a potted plant made of striped circles. In his terms, the “synthesis” is “governed . . . by the laws of harmony”: shapes rhyme, blocks of color balance each other, and creative energy binds it all into an “equilibrium” (Flam 1978, p. 144), like a successful compromise formation. Matisse has neither avoided the horror of war, nor depicted it realistically, but has joined in one image both grief and joy, the loss of what was, and its essence.

Matisse achieved a similar integration with Bathers by a River. By 1916 he had simplified his earlier Arcadian vision, sensuous and playful, into an image that is stark and schematic. The “river” is now just a series of arcs that signify its flow. The figures are conjured out of broken lines and ovals. Bathers by a River withholds explicit sensuality, yet its dusky tints and enigmatic shapes offer it in a new form, greatly simplified. Scanned from left to right, its four figures could symbolize Matisse’s effort to “perfect” himself: in a verdant setting, a woman lifts off her garment; steps into the river as a snake (the Edenic bringer of “knowledge”) moves upward; looks down toward the snake, arms extended; and ends facing forward, arms behind her back, as if bound. Matisse, like the last figure in Bathers, now knows that the Eden of Le bonheur de vivre is gone. This painting may depict a “battle” between the pursuit of pleasure and a punitive morality, but it transcends the conflict, still celebrating Eden on the left, while on the right mourning its loss. With its symbolism and style, Bathers brings Matisse’s conflicted drives into a serene composition, one that evokes a compromise formation that succeeds.

Sublimation: Transcending Compromise Formation

While “compromise formation” is one way to understand Matisse’s art, it cannot explain the powerful effect of those works he called “pivotal,” such as Bathers by a River. Of this painting, the critic Karen Wilkin (2010) writes: “A handful of works throughout the history of art seem at once to sum up and transcend their moment . . . [this] is one of those remarkable objects” (p. 25). It seems likely that to create such “remarkable objects” required more than conflict and compromise, since as Brenner has stated, “conflict is both normal and ubiquitous” (1994, p. 487) and “all behavior represents a compromise formation among the forces in the mind” (1976, p. 22). Compromise formations can include such phenomena as moment-to-moment psychodynamic adjustments, parapraxes, and symptoms. For example, in Window at Collioure pleasant shutters frame a view of blackness, an image of compromise perhaps, but one that suggests depression. Yet in the works of his “radical invention,” Matisse achieves the effect he wanted, a profound sense of “serenity.”

The mystery of how art can evoke such effects was of great interest to Freud and remains a lively field of psychoanalytic study. Important insights have included those of Ernst Kris (1952), who describes the interplay of ego control and regression, and Hanna Segal (1952), who shows how symbolization can assist in repair of one’s inner world. Further insight into “those works of the imagination . . . we admire the most” comes from Hans Loewald. In my view his study of creativity does much to explain Matisse’s “radical invention” and its powerful effects. Conversely, Matisse’s paintings, along with his comments about art, support Loewald’s theory and bring it to life. Loewald presents his ideas in the final major work of his career, the monograph Sublimation (1988).

Loewald begins his treatise on sublimation with Freud’s earliest use of the term, where it refers to the ego’s avoidance of conflict with the instincts by a “diversion” (Freud 1905, p. 178) of the drives or an “exchange” (Freud 1908, p. 187) of their aims, substituting a “higher and consequently unobjectionable aim” (Freud 1910, p. 28). Loewald also takes note of a later concept, adopted by Freud (1923), Hartmann (1955), and others, which casts sublimation as merely one variant of neutralized instinctual energy. In an essay published after Loewald’s work, Boesky (1991) sidesteps energic models to define sublimation as no more than “a complex compromise formation,” one “developed in the matrix of intrapsychic conflict” (p. 24). However, Loewald argues for the earlier, special meaning of sublimation: a way of transforming “base” instincts by making them serve what Freud (1930) calls the “higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, [that] play such an important part in civilized life” (p. 97).

In Loewald’s theory, though sublimation may lead to an aim that is “higher” and more socially useful, its motive could not be more primal and personal, the desire to reexperience oneness with the mother of infancy: “a libidinal flow between infant and mother originates in an urge towards re-establishing the original unity” (Loewald 1951, p. 11). While Loewald, like Winnicott, locates the origin of “culture” in this mother-infant flow, he places it earlier, not in the “transitional space” of infant-mother play, but at the beginning of life, in the “infant-mother psychic matrix” (1988, p. 32). Loewald believes that in this “original unity” both infant and mother relieve instinctual tension through a mutual “invention of the breast.” For the nursing couple, this primary act of imagination creates an “object,” a mental representation of the breast, that mediates their attachment, containing and transmitting to each other the entirety of their subjective experience.

Invention of the breast is the prototype for all sublimation, according to Loewald: in his view the “works we admire the most in every field,” including “science, art, philosophy, religious thought and ritual” (1988, pp. 80–81), are the symbolic equivalent of that primal invention. Supporting his theory, “works we admire” most of all (those of Shakespeare and Bach, for example) seem to contain and mirror the entirety of our inner life, and the elation they evoke could be a return to the infant’s experience at the breast. Works of Matisse’s “radical invention” lend themselves to testing Loewald’s theory, since they include so much more than his earlier art, not only a libidinal Joy of Life, but also the pain of destruction and loss. Matisse’s response to those works that embody most fully his “radical invention” accords with what Loewald would predict, a mind-set that suggests the “original unity” of infancy, the subjective state that Matisse calls “serenity.”

For Matisse “serenity” does not mean passive relaxation, but a joyful absorption, a heightened cognitive and sensory awareness amid the “spectacle of the world” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 69). Like Loewald’s “mother-infant psychic matrix,” Matisse’s serenity involves a sense of oneness, with the subject of his artwork, and then with the image on the canvas, once he has made it mirror what is in his mind. Matisse often engaged in a similar process even when he was not painting, gathering up his associations to whatever he saw and binding them all together in his imagination. When this process was fully active (a function of Eros, or Nunberg’s “synthetic function of the ego” [1931]), Matisse described a feeling of oneness with the entire world, as if his imagination had transformed whatever he beheld into a container and a mirror of his inner life. With his works of art, his sense of oneness was so real that he could write, “When the artist dies he is cut in two” (Flam 1973, p. 42).

Matisse’s comments on art frequently echo Loewald’s theory, inviting us to explore how the art and the theory may inform each other. For example, Matisse, like Loewald, relates artistic vision to infancy, exhorting the artist “to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time . . .” (Flam 1973, p. 148). Loewald and he are also alike in that they see sublimation not as a neutralizing defense against desire, but as a symbolic form of satisfaction, achieved by feeling at one with the object. To Loewald, this oneness results from “transformation of object relations into intrapsychic interactions. . . . The universal road to sublimation is . . . internalization” (Loewald 1988, p. 19). For Matisse as well, internalization seems crucial to a sense of oneness: “[an artwork] comes from the artist’s penetration of the subject, going so far that he identifies himself with it . . .” (Flam 1973, p. 119).

Loewald and Matisse both recognize that a sense of oneness can never be complete. In Loewald’s theory, to reinvent the breast of early infancy means to revive the push away from the breast (and the aggression toward it, I would add), as much as the pull toward merger (Loewald 1951, pp. 11–12). The result is “binocular vision”: “a mourning of lost original oneness and a celebration of oneness regained” (Loewald 1988, p. 81). Matisse’s “synthesis of polarities” is surely a compromise formation, but it also illustrates binocular vision, a blend of loss and reunion: in The Yellow Curtain, The Moroccans, Bathers by the River, and many other works, he evokes this ambiguous state of mind by fusing the stark and the vibrantly sensual, or to use Loewald’s terms, mourning and celebration. In earlier papers I have attempted to demonstrate this idea of Loewald’s, showing how the pleasure of all creative work, including the good analytic hour, relates to binocular vision (Miller 2008, pp. 1151–1155; 2011, pp. 14–20). Paradoxically, though this mental state is one of unresolved ambiguity, it can induce an ineffable sense of calm, which may explain why Matisse arrived at binocular vision in his search for an art of serenity.

Though Matisse aimed to elicit serenity, he was like Loewald in relating creativity to instinctual tension. As early as 1910 he told an interviewer he sought “instinctual ferment . . . [and] the most instinctive way of expressing it . . .” (D’Alessandro and Elderfield 2010, p. 69). Yet Matisse tried to moderate his passion, reworking each picture until it no longer “reminded [him] of moments of overexcitement” (Flam 1973, p. 36). Of his enticing female models, he says: “The emotional interest aroused in me by them . . . is perhaps sublimated pleasure . . .” (Flam 1973, p. 82). As we have seen, Matisse’s instinctual ferment also included guilt and a need for atonement, illustrating Loewald’s idea that these “higher emotions,” which he says are themselves sublimations, in turn contribute to further sublimation. On the last page of Sublimation, his final work, Loewald writes that this subject is one of several he regrets not having had the time to address fully (Loewald 1988, p. 82).

What Loewald’s monograph does consider fully is the mysterious force that drives sublimation, which he, like Freud, refers to as Eros, an all-encompassing embrace that binds together what has been broken apart (Loewald 1988, pp. 11, 20). Matisse echoes Loewald here as well, saying, “Great love is needed to achieve this effect . . . that glowing warmth and that analytic profundity that accompany the birth of any work of art” (Flam 1973, p. 149). Matisse then asks, “But is not love the origin of all creation?” Indeed, with such works as Bathers by a River, he does seem to reintegrate through a kind of love, a fervent inclusiveness, what has been broken; by encompassing guilt and atonement, loss and reunion, mourning and celebration, his art suggests Loewald’s sublimation, and also the aim of analysis.

As if describing a self-analysis, Matisse writes that whenever he looked within himself and at the world with his artist’s “eye,” his “great love” brought him to an elevated state of serenity. His “radical invention” was evidently not just a style of painting, but a way of seeing that shaped his experience of life. Looking at his art helped Matisse maintain this exalted vision: he writes that when he stood before one of his paintings, even one from many years before, the “state of mind I was in when I made it would return” (Flam 1973, p. 92). Since his artworks remained so evocative for him, he hoped they would bring serenity to others as well, offering viewers “a soothing, calming influence on the mind” (Flam 1973, p. 38).

This altruistic “higher aim” is the key to theories of sublimation that derive from Freud and Loewald. Whitebook (1994), for example, calls sublimation a redirection of the instincts toward the “matrix of cultural objects” (pp. 329–330). To Freud (1923), the “higher aim” helps an artist infuse the created object with “narcissistic libido” (p. 30), making it a source of prideful pleasure. Thus Matisse’s “higher aim” of enriching France’s cultural heritage, by making him proud to be “painting well,” helped overcome his war-induced paralysis. Further, when Matisse realized that his art could bring solace to others (Flam 1973, p. 49), this “higher aim” seemed to clear the way for his “radical invention”: by giving him “cover,” appeasing his inner critic, it enabled him to regress more deeply, I surmise, achieving enough instinctual freedom and imaginative play to reinvent the symbolic “breast.” In theoretical terms, Eros, what Matisse referred to as “great love,” integrated his rage and guilt with his “joy of life,” enabling him to create works of such fullness and harmony that they elicit serenity.

The serenity he found in 1917, when he completed his “pivotal works,” apparently stayed with Matisse for the rest of his life. He seems to have finally resolved, or transcended, the conflict between the moral and the pictorial. As Spurling (2005) notes, “From now on the problem resolved with such labour in the great radical canvases of 1916–1917 ceased to interest him” (Spurling 2005, p. 222). Once again he allowed his art to be unabashedly sexual, and he let go of his punishing regimen of work. Overall, he became much calmer. It seems that he not only transformed his art with his “radical invention,” but that he transformed himself.

Although his life was still fraught with danger and loss, he remained amazingly steady. One test of his nerves was the disappearance of major collections of his art amid the chaos of war. A friend noted Matisse’s response: “how calmly he accepted the prospect of seeing almost his entire life achievement engulfed by the general tide of destruction” (Spurling 2005, p. 222). The friend added, “Of all the work he had produced in the ten years before the Great War, nothing remained. But no sign of this showed in Matisse’s face.” When the art world ridiculed his works at the Salon of 1910, Matisse had suffered a breakdown, fleeing to Spain in a state of despair, but now he accepted the destruction of his art with equanimity.

Until his death in 1954, at eighty-four, Matisse retained this equanimity even during the most stressful times, such as his wife’s demand for a legal separation (along with half his art) and his grown children’s recurrent crises. World War II hit him hard, exposing him and his loved ones to mortal danger; for example, his daughter, Marguerite, whom he cherished, disappeared into the Resistance, returning at the end of the war as a survivor of torture. With advancing age, Matisse suffered grave and painful illness. Although affected deeply by circumstances, he never broke down as he had after the 1910 Salon; to look at the world with his artist’s eye always restored his sense of joy. In his illustrated book called Jazz, created during World War II, Matisse wrote: “Find Joy in the sky, in the trees, in the flowers. There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them” (Flam 1973, p. 113). Several years later, he told an interviewer: “Basically I enjoy everything: I am never bored” (Flam 1973, p. 85). His interviews and letters reveal that Matisse found this joy through the exalted vision of his “radical invention.”

Matisse’s vision grew ever more expansive over the decades. At forty-two he had said, “I don’t literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me” (Flam 1973, p. 51), but by eighty-two he had moved on from the table to the world: “the artist incorporates and gradually assimilates the external world within himself, until . . . he has it within him and he can project it onto the canvas as his own creation”; he adds, “the artist’s work will then appear . . . as possessed of the same power to thrill, the same resplendent beauty as we find in works of nature” (Flam 1973, p. 149). Although Matisse’s elated sense of his “power” suggests grandiosity, it seems justified by the “thrill” his works continue to provide art lovers. He was grateful for his mysterious gift, and though not “religious” he did consider himself “spiritual”: “a picture by a good artist always inspires this feeling of escape and spiritual elevation” (Flam 1973, p. 140).

His spirituality helped carry Matisse through his final illness. Suffering nights of excruciating pain, he reminded himself that “Hell is so close to Heaven,” meaning that at daybreak he returned to the “Heaven” of his work. In loving tribute to the nun who had nursed him, he created the Chapel at Vence, where one floats in an atmosphere of light and color, what he called “an impression of boundless space” (Flam 1973, p. 149). His words recall the “oceanic feeling,” “limitlessness . . . a bond with the universe,” that Freud linked to the newborn’s bond with its mother (1930, p. 68). Matisse’s last paper cutouts were female nudes (Figure 6), painted marine blue, and wall-mounted depictions of an undersea world (his “Oceania”) that he described as “a cosmic space in which I was no more aware of walls than a fish in the sea” (Spurling 2005, p. 444). These images evoke Loewald’s theory of sublimation almost literally: return to a state of oneness with mother, experienced as immersion in the sea. Matisse seems to have found in this state of oneness a final serenity. To the end, he reached for a “higher aim” through his deepest sensations, and his art continued to epitomize the transformative power of sublimation.

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Figure 6.

The Flowing Hair (La chevelure), 1952

Application To Clinical Psychoanalysis

Loewald’s theory implies that the joint study of art and analysis can be mutually informative, because he places them on the common ground of sublimation: “the psychoanalyst’s work itself and that of his patients in the therapeutic process involve and require sublimatory activity” (1988, p. 8). Whitebook (1994) strongly agrees: “the fate of the drives that are untethered from their habitual moorings in the course of an analysis, and hence the nature and course of the treatment itself, cannot be conceptualized without a concept of sublimation” (p. 323). In Loewald’s view (1988) the analytic couple redirect their “untethered” drives toward

co-creating a “symbolic universe” (p. 67), the narrative he calls “an illusion, a play” (Loewald 1975, p. 279). If the archetype for sublimation, mutual invention of the breast, occurs both in the analytic “play” and in Matisse’s (or the viewer’s) “dialogue” with the image, one would surmise that a viewer’s response to Matisse’s art might have its correlate in clinical work, offering a fresh look at analytic process.

For example, Matisse’s sense of oneness, with the subject of his painting and with the painting itself, provides a different perspective on those times when analyst and analysand are uncannily in sync. A recent empirical study correlates a sense of oneness with successful treatment (Weinberg and Smith 2011, p. 559), and what we learn from Matisse, seen in the light of Loewald, provides a possible explanation: if a sense of oneness reactivates memories of infancy, it would make early attachment issues more accessible to working through. Joint study of Matisse and Loewald helps us visualize developmentally early states of mind that are widely regarded as central to therapeutic action: the ineffable concept of “O” (Bion 1970) and co-creation of the “third” (Ogden 1996), in both of which the analytic couple reach new insights when they put aside confining categories, including their own separateness.

The fixed images of Matisse’s art help us hold in mind other aspects of analysis, or their equivalents, that tend to be evanescent. For example, his paintings evoke elusive, intermingled feeling states as pentimenti, overlapping traces of the multiple “stages” in their creation. Since his art symbolically represents the integration of conflicting emotions, it becomes a metaphor that “pictures” an important aim of analytic process. Further, Matisse’s comments on art, particularly his idea that his images contain and mirror his inner life, suggest how the soothing effects of art and analysis may emerge from a similar process. The serenity Matisse felt when he looked at his paintings, his sense of enhanced connectedness and internal coherence, supports this parallel with analysis, because his subjective experience sounds much like a good treatment outcome.

The link between Matisse’s creative breakthrough in response to World War I, his “radical invention,” and his lasting psychological growth suggests that a goal for some analysands might be to free up their creative potential. It suggests also that for our patients, as for Matisse, aggressive drives (or destructive internalized object relationships) may lend their energy to sublimation and creativity. One example from my clinical experience: Mr. W., a fortyish attorney, felt lifted out of his depression when he left his law firm to create something of his own, an innovative public service project; much of the energy he channeled toward this “higher aim” seemed to come from his long-suppressed anger and guilt at “exploitative” law firm practices. The change in Mr. W. recalls Loewald’s epilogue to Sublimation, where he states the need to further consider “the sublimation of aggressive impulses” (1988, p. 82). The following vignettes suggest how such “aggressive impulses,” as well as libidinal energy, contribute to sublimation in the creative process of psychoanalysis.

The first vignette also highights how this creative process involves a sense of oneness between analyst and analysand. Mr. A., a sixty-year-old married man well along in his analysis, described a recent day of walking in the city of his birth. Without conscious choice, he found himself drawn to a tenement building where his maternal grandparents had lived when he was a child. His parents, an abusive mother and an ineffectual father, would leave him there many weekends, and he had found it to be a “refuge.” As he described the building, which had been much altered over the years, he and I associated to its features, such as the forbidding steel door that blocked entry, and the curve of its corner, reminiscent of the shape of my office. During this session, “the tenement” morphed into a new object, co-created in our imaginations like a mutual waking dream, or an invented breast. It overflowed with meaning. At first it symbolized the “refuge” of his long-dead grandparents, available in fantasy but in actuality now closed off. Soon it stood for his pleasure at being in my office. But it stood also for his frustration and anger at me because he could not really “move in.” We both enjoyed this associative process, which encompassed both anger and love, “mourning and celebration,” and found us voicing our thoughts as if we were of one mind.

At the next session Mr. A. cried as he said, “I want to say this. I’ve never said it before. I love you.” I felt touched and a bit unnerved by his intensity, which I related to the previous session, when I seemed to become the mother he wished for as we created between us the productive oneness of an “invented breast.” I surmised that Mr. A. was experiencing Matisse’s “great love,” “the origin of all creation.” As he associated further to the previous session, Mr. A. noted the one time his mother ever gave him something that she knew he liked: it was a persimmon, whose intense color and taste came back to him as he recalled eating it on the front steps of that tenement to which he had been so mysteriously drawn. To make the meaning even more explicit, Mr. A., who read no psychoanalytic literature, remarked that a persimmon looks a lot like a breast.

Whereas the vignette about Mr. A. evokes the subjective aim of sublimation, a return to the “invented breast” of infancy, the following vignette about Mrs. B. highlights its societal aspect, diversion of the instincts toward a “higher aim.” Mrs. B. presented as a fifty-year-old childless married woman, anxious and guilty about not doing enough for the people she loved (recalling Matisse’s guilt when his hometown was overrun by the German army). Her siblings and their children were fighting for their lives, besieged by troubles brought on by teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, and crime. Mrs. B. had been exhausting her resources, emotional and financial, in her effort to help them, partly to ease the worries of her ailing widowed mother. Though she had been an award-winning dancer and choreographer, she soon abandoned her career for work that “paid the rent” so she could be available to her family. But by the time she came to see me, she declared, “I’ve lost myself.”

During the first few months of treatment, I felt that Mrs. B. wanted me to listen and say nothing. Without a pause and in a preachy tone, as if instructing a relative, she talked of how she needed to change. Eventually, as she shifted toward deeper exploration, she recalled that her mother’s standard discipline had been abusive physical punishment, and she recognized that efforts to help her mother concealed her feelings of rage. Further insights, and a creative mobilization of her anger, enabled her to find new ways of relating to her family, to shift responsibility to them, and to feel much less burdened. She said, “I’m beginning to feel sparks of creativity coming back.” I felt heartened, and said, “I can see that creativity in how you’re rearranging your relationships.” That was exactly what she had in mind. As with Mr. A., I felt that she and I were on the same wavelength. In subsequent sessions, she described how she had, in fact, begun slowly to “rechoreograph” her life.

Around this time she reported a dream that reflected the internal changes supporting her new behavior. She said this dream was unlike any she could recall; they had all been lucid and under her control, which I thought seemed consistent with how she ran her life, the lives of those around her, and our sessions. In the recent dream she felt totally immersed and not in control. Stuck on a crowded bus, she could not get off to do what she was “supposed to do.” Finally getting off, she found herself lost and sought help in a building where a master class for dancers was in progress; when she asked to join the class, they shouted, “You don’t belong here,” but, undaunted, she expressed her sadness and determination through an improvised dance, which they so enjoyed and admired that they let her join.

Mrs. B. joined with me to explain what she was “supposed to do”: it did not mean her duty to family, but to her creative calling and, by extension, her duty to acknowledge her own desires. Her “radical invention” was to reorder her relationships so they became, like Matisse’s new style of painting, less agreeable, more aggressive. She felt the dream had affirmed her resolve to return to her dance career. Meanwhile, she was finding that to create a new mode of living was fun, like creating new dance “combinations.” Her internal change revealed itself in the feel of our sessions: no longer driven to take charge, she allowed herself to leave room for me to speak, to need me. Like Matisse, who persuaded himself that by “painting well” he could help France, she had moderated her guilt about meeting her own needs: if she did less for her family, they could grow more responsible, and if she fulfilled her potential, she could be a better role model. Like Matisse, she felt free to create a new way to live and work once she saw it as not merely self-serving, but as serving a “higher aim.”

Because Freud (1908) defined sublimation narrowly, as the source of major cultural attainments, he believed it “can be achieved by a minority” (p. 193). But if, as Loewald does, one defines sublimation more broadly, as a diversion of the instincts even toward a modest “higher aim,” and as linked to the creativity of everyday life, then it may be within reach for a majority of people. Perhaps sublimation means directing creative energy toward any “higher aim,” whether to “give back” in public service, to rework one’s family relationships, or to succeed in one’s analysis. This higher aim may function, as it did for Matisse, to appease an inner critic, permitting fuller expression of both the regressive and integrative aspects of creativity. With this broader definition, I believe the concept of sublimation helps us understand such crucial phenomena as Mr. A.’s co-creation with me of an analytic “play” and Mrs. B.’s re-creation of her life.

Conclusion

The curators of the MoMA exhibition focused on a “radical invention” in Matisse’s art, which they link to the impact of World War I. Psychoanalytic exploration of this link reveals that war-related anger, guilt, and shame worsened Matisse’s neurotic conflicts. He became more symptomatic, as his self-directed aggression drove him to work himself to exhaustion and to dismantle his renowned artistic identity. He described his art as a symbolic arena in which his libido contended with his newly stern morality. To forge a “synthesis” of these “polarities,” he created an art of compromise that evoked in him a profound calm.

When Matisse recognized that eliciting this effect through his art could benefit others and assuage his sense of worthlessness, he reached into himself even more deeply, tapping into his aggression to produce works that epitomize Loewald’s idea of sublimation: redirection of the instincts to serve a “higher aim,” paradoxically, by reviving the infant’s primal “invention of the breast.” Through his “radical invention,” Matisse’s art contained his inner conflicts within an overall harmony, transforming his personality by showing him how to achieve a lasting state of “serenity.”

I have suggested that while psychoanalysis may shed light on Matisse’s art, conversely, his art can inform clinical analysis. By illustrating the role of aggression, guilt, and atonement in Matisse’s artistic breakthrough, his work helps us address an aspect of sublimation that Loewald regretfully left unexplored. Matisse’s life and art also show the impact of trauma on existing neurotic conditions, and they provide a window onto therapeutic change: the resolution of conflict through new compromise formations, and the potentially transformative effect of sublimation.