A.S. Byatt begins her short story “Art Work” with a description of a painting by Henri Matisse. The painting, Le Silence habité des maisons (literally translated as Silence Inhabited by Houses), was completed by Matisse in 1947, when he was living in Vence, in the south of France near Nice.
“Two people sit at the corner of a table,” Byatt writes of the painting. “The mother, it may be, has a reflective chin propped on a hand propped on the table.” The child beside her is looking at an opened book, the pages of which are blank (i.e. silent). The faces of the figures are also blank. The room is shrouded in darkness, the walls black, and the two people, the table, and a vase of flowers are blue outlined in yellow. The room is a depiction of silence. Only through the large window behind the mother and child can we see trees and grass and a bit of sky, and imagine wind stirring in the leaves and grass, and clouds moving across the sky.
After the opening paragraph, the Matisse painting is not mentioned again, although Matisse is. The story, the central one of three that make up The Matisse Stories, features a family; a son, a daughter, a wife and a husband. The wife is the design editor of a women’s magazine called A Woman’s Place. The husband is a painter, loud and vexatious, whose fixation with painting everyday objects, which he calls “fetishes,” as blocks of colour has ensured his lack of success. The house is not silent, but it inhabits silence: there is much noise but little communication. The washing machine thumps, the television drones, the daughter’s record player blares, the husband rants, and the wife’s typewriter clacks. But no one is really speaking.
Octavio Paz once wrote that everything is translation: “Even learning to speak is translation,” because it translates ideas into words. In that sense, the story is a literary version of the painting. If the painting is a translation of silence, then “Art Work” can be read as a translation of the painting. Matisse translated ideas into colour; A. S. Byatt has translated colour into words. Such a consideration expands our notion of translation: translation can exist not only between languages, but also between disciplines.
Matisse, like the husband in the story, was obsessed with colour: according to British art dealer Acoris Andipa, Matisse believed that “colour had the ability to convey emotions and to tell stories. In his work, colour was not just a visual element but a language in itself.” Robin, the husband, “keeps giving [the housekeeper] lectures on tones and complementary colours.” Inside the room in the painting, the only colours (except for the black wall) are yellow and blue; through the window, in daylight, the view of trees, grass, and sky is composed of different mixtures of yellows and blues. The tree trunk is brown (which is red, yellow and blue). In “Art Work,” the housekeeper’s name is Mrs. Brown.
Early in the story, the daughter, Natasha, is alone in her room, listening to music. She “cannot hear the outside world….She lies on her bed and twitches in rhythm.” Her legs, Byatt writes, are “white, limp, relaxed, twitching. Twitches can’t be painted.” But if silence can be painted, why not twitches? In the painting, the silence is within the room; outside, the trees twitch. And in the story, we can imagine Natasha twitching as she listens to the music. Byatt has given herself the problem of translating silence into words, and like Matisse she accomplishes it through images.
In “The Chinese Lobster,” the third of the Matisse stories, the painter Peregrine Diss gives an account of his visit to Matisse after the Second World War. Matisse was born in 1869, so he would have been in his eighties at the time of Diss’s visit. He would have been painting – or thinking about painting – Le Silence, his last work on canvas, before he became too ill to paint and turned to making collages with cut-out pieces of painted paper.
“The rooms in that apartment were shrouded in darkness,” Diss recalls. “I was terribly shocked – I thought he lived in the light.” (Byatt’s italics.)
In 1946, Picasso and a friend, the painter Françoise Gilot, visited Matisse in Vence. They found him living in a small house, which because of his declining eyesight he kept in darkness: “All shutters were closed,” Gilot later wrote. In a painting hanging on the wall, however, “a date tree swinging its palms in the garden outside was framed by the window’s colourful Tahitian curtains and repeated, larger than life on the wall, as if the strength of the painting allowed reality to become a mere reflection.”
Matisse lived in darkness, but in his paintings, colour is “larger than life.” In Byatt’s story, Robin’s obsession with colour is also larger than life. As he explains to Shona McRury, a gallery owner, he views his work not as representations of objects, not paintings of glass figurines, lipstick tubes, or rubber bands, but “as a series of problems, really, inexhaustible problems, of light and colour, you know.” McRury decides against representing his work, which she says might look repetitive, perhaps even boring, “to the uneducated eye.” Both the Matisse painting and Byatt’s story explore what happens when the internal life struggles to connect with life outside the window: Matisse succeeds in making the connection; Robin does not.
“Art Work” is a brilliant story on its own, but for me it gains a level of interest when read as a translation of the Matisse painting. I think all translations gain when they are held up against their originals. They are works of art in themselves, but they are also a series of set problems. Not insoluble problems: translations succeed insofar as they solve the problems of language and meaning that inevitably arise when moving from one culture to another. Douglas Hofstadter, the American translator of Françoise Sagan’s That Mad Ache, wondered if he could translate ascenseur as “elevator.” Un ascenseur in Paris is not the same thing as an elevator in New York. Translators have to resolve such problems all the time.
I think of Henri Matisse, lying in a darkened room, thinking about colour, about the language of colour, about the way the colours outside his room tell a story. And I think of “Art Work” as that story.
Love that!!! I’m going read it.