Jeannette (III)

Henri Matisse, 1911 · Gallery 506 · Floor 5

Check these out. Start at the end with the one that still looks like a person. Then work your way down. That's Jeanne. In the first one, a face you could imagine meeting. Soft cheeks. Everything more or less where you'd expect it. The second one's still her. A little firmer. Things are getting pushed around, but you'd know her on the street. Then the third. Now something's happening. By the fourth, the features are turning into lumps. Heavy ones. And the fifth. One eye's practically a glob. The nose is a blade. And what is going on at the top of her head? From the right angle, the whole thing's basically a bronze maraca. But look back down the row. He keeps changing what gets to be big. What gets to stick out. What he can get rid of. A cheek becomes a lump. A nose becomes an edge. He's treating a face like something he can rearrange. Which, in clay, it is. Matisse said sculpture helped him sort out his ideas for painting. Apparently, sometimes you have to work on somebody's head to get your own straight. Five versions over six years. Like he's trying to figure out which wrong one's the right one. You keep looking for Jeanne. Even in that last one. A bit of a face here, something almost familiar there. How far can he push it before you stop seeing somebody? He stopped at five. But she only sat for the first two. After that, he worked from the heads he'd already made. So we're watching him change a sculpture of a woman. Then change the sculpture again. By the fifth, he's taken off a clump of hair, built up the brow, stretched the neck. And he built it on a plaster cast of the third. Apparently, you're allowed to skip one.

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