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Wallace Stevens, Poetry, and France

 | 
Juliette Utard
, 
Bart Eeckhout
, 
Lisa Goldfarb

Part Three. Stevens’ French Connections Real and Imaginary

“A Touch of Paris”: Stevens, Walter Pach, and Matisse

Glen Macleod

Texte intégral

  • 1 On the relations between Stevens and Picasso, see G. MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From (...)

1Critics have made much of Wallace Stevens’ relation to Picasso but little of his relation to Picasso’s chief rival, Matisse.1 Yet Stevens was deeply interested in modern French painting and Matisse was the leading French painter (not counting Picasso, who was Spanish) throughout his mature poetic career. This chapter will explore Stevens’ relations to Matisse, especially through their mutual friendship with Walter Pach. I will argue that Matisse was far more important to Stevens than has generally been realized and that Stevens’ poem “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside”—which contains the only mention of Matisse in his poetry—was conceived, in part, as a tribute to the great French artist.

  • 2 R. Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium, p. 82.
  • 3 For Stevens and the Arensberg circle, see G. MacLeod, op. cit., p. 3-24.

2The familiar story of Stevens’ relation to modern art begins with the Armory Show of 1913. It was there that the American public was first introduced to a broad array of modern European and American art, including Post-Impressionism and Cubism, revolutionary movements in painting that were centered in Paris. We know from his daughter Holly that Stevens attended the Armory Show.2 His interest in modern art began there and was nurtured throughout the 1910s by his close ties to the group of artists and writers who gathered at the apartment of Walter Conrad Arensberg, Stevens’ good friend from his Harvard days. When Stevens recalled of Arensberg in 1954, “I don’t suppose there is anyone to whom the Armory Show of 1913 meant more than it meant to him” (Letters, 821), his familiar tone suggests how much that historic exhibition shaped his own experience, too, as part of the Arensberg circle, from 1914 (when Arensberg moved to New York) to 1921 (when Arensberg left New York for California).3

3It was modern French art that caused the biggest furor at the Armory Show and that Walter Arensberg began collecting at the exhibition. A photograph of the Arensberg apartment in 1918 shows a wall full of recent French paintings: in addition to the copy of Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, there are three Picassos, a Braque, a Derain, and a Renoir. The Arensberg circle itself included many French artists-in-exile, driven to New York by World War I: Duchamp, Francis Picabia and his wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Albert Gleizes and Juliette Roche, Jean and Yvonne Crotti, Henri-Pierre Roché, and the composer Edgard Varèse. Stevens was in his element here because he spoke French fluently and because he had long cherished a highly romanticized vision of Paris. Five years before the Armory Show he had written to Elsie, “One must keep in touch with Paris if one is to have anything at all to think about” (SP, 199). Now he could keep in touch with Paris simply by visiting Arensberg’s apartment on West 67th Street.

Charles Sheeler, Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print Image: 7 5/8 x 9 13/16 inches (19.4 x 24.9 cm), sheet: 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), mount: 8 1/8 x 10 inches (20.6 x 25.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-990

Charles Sheeler, Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print Image: 7 5/8 x 9 13/16 inches (19.4 x 24.9 cm), sheet: 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), mount: 8 1/8 x 10 inches (20.6 x 25.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-990

© The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

4All of this explosive interest in French art—the Armory Show itself, Arensberg’s sudden conversion to Modernism, and Stevens’ crucial involvement with the New York avant-garde—might never have happened without the efforts of one man: Walter Pach. Stevens scholars have been aware, in a general way, of Pach’s friendship with Stevens and his involvement with the Armory Show. But recent scholarship has made it possible to see Pach’s character and career in much greater detail and to speculate more confidently on Pach’s importance to Stevens, particularly the part he played in arousing Stevens’ interest in French painting. Pach wore many hats in organizing and promoting the Armory Show and he became, in the process, a kind of one-man epitome of the modern art world. His work on the Armory Show propelled his reputation as a critic of modern art in the United States and helped establish the pattern for a career in which he was involved in practically every aspect of the art world. Pach was an artist, art dealer, agent, organizer of exhibitions, writer and translator of books and articles about art, lecturer, art collector, and adviser to other collectors, including Walter Arensberg.

Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach, c. 1903 Walter Pach papers (1857-1980) Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach, c. 1903 Walter Pach papers (1857-1980) Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
  • 4 L. E. McCarthy, Walter Pach (1883-1958): The Armory Show and the Untold Story of Modern Art in Amer (...)
  • 5 Quoted in E. R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in (...)
  • 6 L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 166.

5As a “dedicated Francophile”4 Pach devoted much of his career to promoting the cause of modern art, which for him sprang from the Parisian-based art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He would have agreed with James Thrall Soby who declared in 1930 that French painters were “the only true artists of the age.”5 Throughout his life Pach spent as much time in Paris as he could, saying that he felt most at home there.6 Stevens credited Pach with inspiring Arensberg’s lifelong obsession with modern art: “Probably Pach helped [the Armory Show] to take the extraordinary hold on him that it took in fact” (Letters, 821). Pach’s enthusiasm for modern art probably had a similar effect on Stevens himself. His friendship with many of the most important living French painters and sculptors gave Stevens an insider’s perspective on the art world. As I have argued elsewhere, Stevens’ own creative process came to depend, to a large extent, on close interaction with the contemporary art world. His friendship with Walter Pach was his longest and most enduring connection to that world. In later years, when he visited Pach’s studio on the top floor of 3 Washington Square North (now owned by New York University), he felt that he was experiencing “a touch of Paris” (Letters, 491).

  • 7 Ibid., p. 35.

6The main thing that made Pach so essential to the success of the Armory Show of 1913 was that, during the preceding decade, he had spent most of his time in France. As a student-painter himself, he studied with (among others) the American painters William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, both of whom conducted summer classes in Europe between 1903 and 1910 in Haarlem, Madrid, London, and Florence. Pach helped organize some of those classes and taught art history during the 1907 and 1910 trips. He lived in Paris from the fall of 1907 to spring 1908 and again from the fall of 1910 until just before the Armory Show in 1913. During those years he made it his business to get to know virtually all the important avant-garde artists, including Picasso, Matisse, Marcel Duchamp and his brothers Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Constantin Brancusi, André Derain, Odilon Redon, Raoul Dufy, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, and others.7 All of these artists were eventually included in the Armory Show primarily because of Pach’s personal connections with them. The most famous work in that show, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, was there because Pach personally chose it and convinced Duchamp to lend it. In fact, Pach was responsible for selecting and negotiating the loan of virtually all the art sent from Europe to the Armory Show, and particularly the avant-garde works.

Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach in his studio, c. 1930-1940 Walter Pach papers, 1857-1980 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach in his studio, c. 1930-1940 Walter Pach papers, 1857-1980 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
  • 8 G. Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits, p. 338-340.
  • 9 J. Bishop, “Sarah and Michael Stein, Matisse, and America,” p. 138-139.

7In addition to avant-garde painters, Pach also got to know the most important modern art dealers and collectors in Paris. The most significant of the collectors were the Stein family—Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo as well as their brother Michael and his wife Sarah. Gertrude was so taken with Pach that she wrote one of her verbal portraits of him in 1909 or 1910.8 It was Pach who persuaded the Steins to lend two Picasso paintings and three Matisses to the Armory Show—including the notorious Blue Nude.9

8Through the Steins, Pach met Henri Matisse at their home in Fiesole, Italy, in July 1907. The two men liked each other immediately and became lifelong friends. For the purposes of this essay, the chief significance of this friendship is that it gave Wallace Stevens a close, personal connection to the best-known French painter of the time. My aim is to clarify what Stevens would have known of Matisse, particularly as a result of knowing Pach; and what he thought about Matisse. This last point is an issue because Stevens’ only mention of Matisse in the poetry, in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” of 1952, has seemed to some readers a bit condescending. He compares the chapel in the poem to the chapel that Matisse designed in Vence. But his phrasing is ambiguous: “It is like a new account of everything old, / Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that” [my italics] (CPP, 448). What exactly does this allusion to Matisse mean?

  • 10 H. Stevens, “Wallace Stevens: Letters to Ferdinand Reyher,” p. 391.
  • 11 Le Point (Colmar), special [Matisse] number XXI (July 1939). See M. J. Bates, “Stevens’ Books at th (...)

9We know in a general way that Stevens liked Matisse. His comments on the painter in letters are few but respectful. He lists Matisse with Klee and Braque as Modernists whose work is always interesting (Letters, 574). He says he prefers Matisse to Gauguin, partly because Matisse is insistently enigmatic.10 And he writes that, although he dislikes orientalism, “I like it well enough the way Matisse does it” (Letters, 797). In his library was a special issue of the French periodical Le Point (1939) devoted entirely to Matisse—mostly reproductions in black and white, many of them drawings.11 So however belittling his reference to “Matisse at Vence” in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” might seem, he was obviously intrigued by the artist.

  • 12 See R. Buttel, op. cit., p. 158, M. Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination, p. 8, a (...)

10Critics have compared Stevens and Matisse in various ways. Dorothea Beard links Stevens’ idiosyncratic use of color to Matisse’s Fauve period. A number of critics have seen a Matisse-like atmosphere in the opening stanza of “Sunday Morning” with its calm, sensuous air of luxury and comfort: “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug […]” (CPP, 53).12 George Lensing finds that Stevens and Matisse have fundamentally similar sensibilities:

  • 13 G. S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, p. 101.

The two were contemporaries; they came to their work as artists relatively late and after the study of law. Stevens and Matisse were temperamentally reserved and conservative, but in their art they shared a love for […] “the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.”13
 CPP, 111

11Despite their often exotic imaginations, in their personal and professional lives both Stevens and Matisse presented a strictly conventional appearance to the world. Both dressed like businessmen and dutifully performed the conventional roles of bourgeois husband and father. Stevens was seldom seen without his three-piece suit even when relaxing in Elizabeth Park or watering his garden; Matisse generally worked in his studio wearing a suit under his painter’s smock. Both had an exaggerated sense of formality that contradicted the popular myth of the decadent artist.

12In several well-known photographs by Brassaï of Matisse in his studio, the artist, dressed in a suit and tie, intently sketches a nude model lying (or standing, or sitting) directly in front of him. There is a comic discrepancy between his improbably formal bearing and her very informal state of undress. This aspect of Matisse may well have inspired Stevens’ poem “So-and-So Reclining on her Couch” in which the artist-speaker is painting from a nude model in his studio. As he contemplates the young, naked female before him, his attention—seemingly oblivious to the potentially scandalous nature of his situation—is deeply engaged in transforming her into the abstract Projections A, B, and C. Given their intimate closeness, his address to the model at the end of the poem is hilarious in its formality: “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks” (CPP, 263). The anonymous nude model suddenly becomes for the reader what she always was, apparently, for the artist: a particular, respectable, married woman, simply doing her job of posing.

  • 14 The exception is James Baird, who concludes his book about structure in Stevens with a comparison b (...)
  • 15 A. Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, p. 208-209.

13Despite such parallels, most readers of “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” either pass over the reference to Matisse or make little of it.14 The poem describes a church in ruins: “St. Armorer’s was once an immense success” but now “What is left has the foreign smell of plaster,” “A sumac grows / On the altar,” and the roof is full of holes. Alan Filreis has shown that this poem was partly inspired by the letters and postcards that Barbara Church sent Stevens from Europe after World War II, describing the destruction and misery she saw there.15 Stevens’ ruined church represents one of his central themes, the failure of outdated systems of belief, but in the particular context of postwar Europe. To replace the wreck of St. Armorer’s, Stevens imagines a new chapel arising beside it, outside it, created by the imagination of the poem’s unnamed protagonist:

Its chapel rises from Terre Ensevelie,
An ember yes among its cindery noes,
His own: a chapel of breath...

14The chief distinction in the poem is between the church and this chapel. By definition a chapel is smaller than the church to which it is attached. But unlike the empty, dilapidated St. Armorer’s Church, this chapel is vital and living: “no sign of life but life, / Itself […] this present, / This vif, this dizzle-dazzle of being new / And of becoming […].” (CPP, 448-449).

  • 16 E. Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, p. 294.

15Stevens seems to have got the idea for his title image, St. Armorer’s Church—i.e., a church whose patron saint is a munitions manufacturer— from the Church of the Good Shepherd in Hartford.16 This church was built in memory of Samuel Colt, the gun maker, whose factory headquarters was in Hartford. The church’s signature feature is the Armorer’s Porch, which is decorated with colt pistols and other gun parts carved in stone. But Stevens moves his church to France, as the French phrases scattered throughout the poem make clear ( “Terre Ensevelie,” “en voyage,” “vif”).

  • 17 A. Filreis, op. cit., p. 214.

16 Filreis reads the poem in the post-World War II political context, arguing that it reflects a kind of naïve American optimism, a poetic revision of the Marshall plan for reconstruction of Europe that “respond [s] to physical destruction by presuming that a renovation through American rhetoric would be sufficient.”17 It is a persuasive and deeply informed argument, but what concerns me in this essay is that Stevens’ reference to Matisse gets rather lost in such a relentlessly political context. I want to shift the ground a bit and argue that the poem is as much about Matisse the artist as it is about the postwar political climate.

  • 18 The poem was first published in Poetry 81.1 (October 1952), p. 72-73.
  • 19 See “Matisse Show Opens at Museum of Art,” The New York Times, 14 Nov. 1951, p. 28.
  • 20 A. B. Louchheim, “Section of Matisse Chapel Designs Opened at Museum of Modern Art,” p. 38.
  • 21 Quoted in A. H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, p. 288.

17Stevens published “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” in 1952.18 In the previous year, on November 13, 1951, the Museum of Modern Art had mounted a major Matisse exhibition covering the artist’s entire career. The New York Times hailed it as “one of the greatest art events in several seasons.”19 About a month later, two new rooms were added to the exhibition, documenting the creation of the Chapel of the Rosary that Matisse had designed for a convent in Vence.20 The artist, now 81 years of age, had devoted four years—and even a good deal of his own money—to completing this project. Working with an architect, he designed every part of the building, both inside and out, including the stained-glass windows, the altar, and the vestments for the priests. The chapel had been consecrated on June 25, 1951, by which time the artist was so infirm that he could not attend the ceremony. Matisse considered the chapel his masterpiece: “This chapel is for me the ultimate goal of a whole life of work […].”21 The exhibition—as well as Director Alfred Barr’s magisterial book on Matisse, with nearly 250 pages of plates, published to coincide with the exhibition—treated the Chapel at Vence as the crowning achievement of the artist’s career. Stevens’ reference, in 1952, to “Matisse at Vence” was pointed and timely.

  • 22 A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 11.
  • 23 “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing su (...)
  • 24 Quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse; The Conquest of Colour, 1909-19 (...)
  • 25 Ibid., p. 274.
  • 26 J. T. Soby, “Matisse Reconsidered,” p. 34.

18This context helps us understand what Stevens may have meant by that reference. The MoMA exhibition, in addition to re-examining Matisse’s whole career, also marked a crucial turning point in Matisse’s artistic reputation. For roughly a quarter of a century before that exhibition, Matisse’s reputation had been equivocal at best. During the 1920s, as Barr diplomatically puts it, “The growing traditionalism and charm of his painting greatly increased his popularity and the commercial value of his art.”22 This is a nice way of saying that Matisse’s art became more conventional, less avant-garde, in its choice and treatment of subjects. This was his Nice period, best known for the odalisques with which he became identified in the popular imagination. As his commercial success and popular appeal grew, advanced artists and critics accused Matisse of selling out and betraying the Modernist cause. In contrast with his chief rival, Picasso, they saw Matisse as merely decorative and sensual. His own much-quoted comment that he wanted his paintings to be like a comfortable easy-chair for the tired businessman did not help the situation.23 Clive Bell in 1930 contrasted Matisse with Picasso this way: “To get anything out of the pictures of Picasso […] requires an intellectual effort”; Matisse’s paintings, on the other hand, provide “pure and simple delight.”24 Bell’s implication is that Matisse is a mindless hedonist, worldly and superficial. At about the same time the Surrealists, taking the official Communist line, condemned Matisse as a bourgeois reactionary.25 This general prejudice against Matisse lasted for decades. The MoMA exhibition corrected that situation almost overnight, making the greatness of Matisse’s achievement amply clear. James Thrall Soby, for example, who had been one of Matisse’s detractors, entirely reversed his view: “[Matisse] emerges as a very great figure indeed. He makes Picasso look to his laurels, and that is extravagant praise.”26

Isabelle Giovacchini, Photo of the interior of the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence Photo:

Isabelle Giovacchini, Photo of the interior of the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence Photo:

© Isabelle Giovacchini Chapel: © Succession H. Matisse

  • 27 L. Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, p. 61.

19In this changed climate of opinion, Stevens’ line “Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that,” takes on an ironic charge. The phrasing seems, at first, to echo the old prejudice against Matisse as merely decorative. But Stevens is unlikely to have shared that prejudice, having himself been misjudged as merely “decorative” for years. (Robert Frost’s quip “The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about—bric-a-brac” neatly capsulizes this critical attitude.27) For Stevens and his informed readers, his allusion to Matisse would have evoked the painter’s current triumph and his renewed reputation as the greatest French artist of his time. In this context, the phrase “and a great deal more than that” takes on a positive sense, signifying the whole of Matisse’s achievement over a long and very productive career, not simply his latest masterpiece at Vence.

Henri Matisse, Reclining Odalisque, 1926 Oil on canvas, H. 15-1/8, W21-5/8 inches (38.4 x54.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967 (67.187.82)

Henri Matisse, Reclining Odalisque, 1926 Oil on canvas, H. 15-1/8, W21-5/8 inches (38.4 x54.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967 (67.187.82)

© Succession H. Matisse Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY

  • 28 At the time of the MoMA exhibition, Stevens and Pach had fallen out of touch. It was a very busy pe (...)
  • 29 In addition to Pach, the other panelists were Edward Steichen, Max Weber, and Meyer Schapiro; Alfre (...)

20The American celebration of Matisse in 1951-52 would have had personal meaning for Stevens mainly because of his friendship with Walter Pach. Whether or not Stevens attended the MoMA exhibition, the publicity and discussion accompanying it would certainly have brought Pach to mind.28 For one thing, to mark the opening, the Museum held a symposium on “The Art of Matisse” that featured Pach.29 In order to understand fully the significance of Matisse to Stevens in 1952, therefore, we need first to appreciate how much of what Stevens knew of Matisse came to him through—or was colored by—his friendship with Pach. So let me backtrack a bit and try to characterize that friendship in more detail.

  • 30 M. J. Bates, “Stevens’ Books at the Huntington,” p. 22.

21Both Pach and Stevens led very busy lives, but both made the effort that sustained their friendship for forty years, from about 1914 until Stevens’ death in 1955. Only a few of the letters and postcards they exchanged survive—ten from Pach to Stevens (and one from Pach’s wife, Magda)—not counting the announcements of exhibitions that Pach sent Stevens. (For instance, a postcard announcing an exhibition of Pach’s work, held in May-June 1935, is laid into Stevens’ copy of William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell.30) To my knowledge, there is only one extant letter from Stevens to Pach and I will consider that below. The correspondence spans the years 1917 to 1952 and mostly records invitations to get together in Hartford or New York, or missed chances of meeting. The postmarks range from Paris to California and Mexico as Pach traveled for his art, or to teach at various universities, or to give lectures around Europe and America. When Stevens and Pach did manage to meet, it was mostly in New York. The one letter from Pach’s wife includes a recipe for a claret punch that Stevens had enjoyed at their New York apartment. Pach’s letters include greetings to Elsie and Holly, too, suggesting that the two families got together on more than one occasion. Although Stevens’ side of the correspondence is mostly missing, we can sometimes tell from Pach’s responses what the poet wrote about. For instance, he told his friend about the exciting program of Modern art offerings at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford after A. Everett “Chick” Austin arrived there to stir things up in the late 1920s. He also asked Pach’s advice about buying French paintings in the late 1930s when he started building his own art collection.

  • 31 Letter from Walter Pach to John Quinn, November 29, 1915, John Quinn Papers, Archives of American A (...)
  • 32 Stevens’ translation of Jean Le Roy’s “Instant de clarté” was published as “Moment of Light” in Mod (...)
  • 33 Wallace Stevens Archive, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, WAS 447625 (July 18, 1918).

22There is little record of the period when they were in closest touch—that is, from about 1914 through the early 1920s, the period of the Arensberg circle, when Stevens wrote the poems collected in Harmonium (1923). That is to be expected, of course, because the two men could then see each other easily, regularly, and had little reason to write to each other. We know that by 1915 they were close enough friends that Stevens would casually stop by Pach’s apartment for visits. In November 1915, Pach invited John Quinn, the pioneering collector of modern art, to dine at his apartment. Stevens dropped by after dinner and joined them for conversation.31 What they said is unfortunately lost. But the episode shows how easy his friendship with Pach was, and how it helped broaden Stevens’ acquaintance in the world of avant-garde art. In a letter to Carl Zigrosser three years later, in February 1918, Stevens mentions that he “dropped in on Walter Pach last Sunday morning” (Letters, 204). The casualness of his tone suggests that he continued to see Pach regularly even after he moved to Hartford in 1916. It was Pach who designed the set for Stevens’ play Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick in 1917. In 1918, Pach persuaded Stevens to translate into English the French poem “Instant de clarté” by Pach’s friend Jean Le Roy.32 In the same year Stevens invited Pach to illustrate his own poem “Earthy Anecdote.” Soon after that poem was published, Pach sent Stevens a postcard from Berkeley, California, where he was giving a series of lectures over the summer: “Dear Wallace, Do let me have a line to say just what you think of my drawing for the Earthy Anecdote. I’m very curious.”33 We don’t have Stevens’ reply to Pach, but we know his feelings about the illustration from what he wrote to a mutual friend: “Walter Pach’s illustration is just the opposite of my idea. I intended something quite concrete: actual animals, not original chaos.” But he immediately qualified this criticism: “Still, it is quite nice as it is. And anyhow, it was very decent of Walter Pach to go to the trouble” (Letters, 209). In this episode, the genuine feelings of a warm, human friendship—Pach’s eagerness to please, Stevens’ gratitude for Pach’s efforts—matter far more than any artistic differences between them.

  • 34 E. R. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 91-92.

23Recently the art historian Laurette McCarthy has discovered one of Stevens’ letters in the Walter Pach papers at the Archives of American Art. It illustrates something of the quality of their friendship. In May of 1928, Pach was invited to give a lecture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, in conjunction with an exhibition of modern French painting—the first exhibition of its kind in Hartford.34 Pach was an obvious choice as a speaker for this occasion. Ever since the Armory Show fifteen years earlier, he had been known as the best man to explain modern painting to the wary and sometimes hostile American public. Stevens attended this lecture and wrote to Pach the following day:

  • 35 W. Stevens, quoted in L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 128. The painting Stevens refers to is Matisse’s (...)

As a matter of fact, your lecture was surpassingly good. I had thought it was too much of an outline of art, as you went along. But the lovely and unexpected denouement of the floppy matisse [sic]: the one in white with the big hat, justified your process. And yet I doubt too if the long pedagogical preface should be there. The particular doubt relates to the fact that it obscures you. That is the part of the lecture that seems to be a little like preaching. Unquestionably it is the paler part.
The essential part of it comes when you are showing the slides and when the mere nervousness of talking is changed into the concentration and excitement of discussing those things for which you have a positive passion.35
 May 4, 1928

24One obvious irony of this letter is that Wallace Stevens is advising Walter Pach about how to speak in public, when Stevens himself would later become known for his monotonous, barely audible lecturing style. But the point I want to emphasize is how remarkably frank Stevens’ criticism of Pach’s lecture is. Such candor is another sign of their genuine friendship. Pach, for his part, was sincerely grateful for Stevens’ honest assessment:

Walter Pach, Illustration for Wallace Stevens’ “Earthy Anecdote,” c. 1918 Modern School Magazine, v. 5, no. 7 (July 1918), p. 193 Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Walter Pach, Illustration for Wallace Stevens’ “Earthy Anecdote,” c. 1918 Modern School Magazine, v. 5, no. 7 (July 1918), p. 193 Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey
  • 36 Quoted in L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 129.

Thanks ever so much for your letter on my modern art lecture at Hartford. […] You gave me the most helpful idea of how it sounded that I’ve had in years. Mere praise is no more helpful than straight disparagement—and I’ve had both.36
 May 10, 1928

  • 37 The thirteen paintings by Matisse in the Armory Show are listed in A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 150.
  • 38 See L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 87. Matisse wrote to Pach in November 1924 asking him to advise an (...)
  • 39 J. Cauman, op. cit., p. 12.

25From Stevens’ point of view, the highlight of Pach’s lecture was his informal, impromptu commentary on slides of Matisse’s paintings. Stevens notes that, when discussing Matisse, Pach loses his “nervousness” and his talk becomes exciting because he is “discussing those things for which you have a positive passion.” Stevens knew Pach’s passion for Matisse first-hand because the time of their most frequent contact—roughly from 1914 through the early 1920s—was also the time when Pach was most closely associated with Matisse. It was Pach who had personally persuaded Matisse to lend ten paintings to be exhibited at the Armory Show, in addition to the three Matisse paintings lent by the Stein family.37 After the Armory Show, Pach became Matisse’s “primary agent in the United States,” a role he played with great skill and energy until 1924 when Matisse’s son Pierre moved to New York to establish his own art gallery.38 During Stevens’ entire Harmonium period (1913-1923), when he saw Walter Pach most frequently, Pach was serving as Matisse’s “eyes and ears and business representative in New York.”39 Stevens could hardly have got closer to Matisse without moving to France.

Grant Tyson Reynard, Walter Pach Lecturing (no date). Oil, n. d. Gift of Jane Wilcox. Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska

Grant Tyson Reynard, Walter Pach Lecturing (no date). Oil, n. d. Gift of Jane Wilcox. Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska

Henri Matisse, White Plumes, 1919 Oil on canvas,28 ½ x23 1/8 in. (72.39 x58.74 cm) Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund47.41

Henri Matisse, White Plumes, 1919 Oil on canvas,28 ½ x23 1/8 in. (72.39 x58.74 cm) Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund47.41

© Succession H. Matisse Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art

  • 40 W. C. Agee, “Henri Matisse at the Armory Show—and Beyond,” p. 219.
  • 41 Quoted in A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 150.
  • 42 W. C. Agee, op. cit., p. 220.
  • 43 L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 49.

26For his part, Matisse had good reason to be pleased that he had taken Pach’s advice to participate fully in the Armory Show. Although the best-known painting from that exhibition was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, it was really Matisse who stole the show. As art historian William C. Agee puts it, “Matisse was the most radical, most polarizing, and most influential artist at the Armory Show—even more so than Duchamp, who was associated with a single work, his famous Nude Descending a Staircase.40 Matisse was a succès de scandale. What the public and critics found most offensive in his paintings was their Fauve color. The very title Blue Nude (1907) emphasizes the arbitrary use of color that—combined with the assertiveness of the nude figure, the distortions of anatomy, and the large size of the canvas— still gives that painting a disturbing power. To give one more example, the even larger Red Studio (1911), whose walls, floor, and furniture are defined only by outlines drawn on a solid red background, is a Fauve experiment to see how far Matisse can go in exploring the expressiveness of pure color. The New York Times famously derided these paintings as “ugly […] coarse […] narrow […] and revolting in their inhumanity.”41 When the Armory Show traveled to Chicago, Matisse’s work “incited a near riot” and art students burned in effigy a copy of his Blue Nude.42 Pach was delighted with all this publicity. He wrote to Michael Stein from Chicago: “Matisse, I really believe, awakens more interest than anyone else in the show […].”43

  • 44 The catalogue of the 1915 Matisse exhibition at the Montross Gallery is available online at: http:/ (...)
  • 45 Michael Stein was forthright about this situation in a letter to Pach of October 19, 1914, writing (...)
  • 46 The catalogue for the Montross exhibition was probably among those Stevens donated to the Wadsworth (...)
  • 47 “Matisse at Montross,” p. 2.
  • 48 “Matisse Sells Well,” p. 9.

27After the success of the Armory Show, Pach and Matisse—with support from Arthur B. Davis, Walt Kuhn, other artists, and dealers—organized the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in the United States, at the Montross Gallery in New York. In order to help plan the exhibition, Pach traveled to Paris to meet with Matisse in October 1914, right in the midst of World War I. For several weeks he saw Matisse regularly, putting together an exhibition that would include 74 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints—almost half of them completed within the last year.44 (It was during this visit that Matisse produced his portrait-etching of Pach.) Matisse cooperated so willingly with Pach on this project partly because his sales in Europe had ceased abruptly when the war broke out and he was anxious to cultivate the American market.45 In the event, their efforts paid off: the Montross exhibition opened in January 1915 and was an enormous success, despite the fact that it represented Matisse’s most radically experimental period. It included, for instance, the austere Woman on a High Stool (1913-14) with its severe geometry and nearly monochrome gray palette, the very opposite of the boisterous sensuality that had characterized his paintings in the Armory Show. Stevens is unlikely to have missed this landmark exhibition, though we have no record of his attending.46 Conservative critics were once again scandalized, of course; one labeled Matisse “The Apostle of the Ugly.”47 But this time serious collectors also came. Over 80 works were sold—even more than the number listed in the catalogue because there was such a demand for prints that the gallery had to ask Matisse to send more from Paris.48

  • 49 Walter Pach to Henri Matisse, March 30, 1916, Henri Matisse Archives, Les Héritiers Matisse, Issy-l (...)
  • 50 Barr suggests the Futurist connection (op. cit., p. 185).

28A year after that exhibition, in March 1916, Pach wrote Matisse that Arensberg had authorized him to offer 4000 francs to purchase Matisse’s Mademoiselle Landsberg (1914), an offer the artist accepted.49 This painting represents a side of Matisse that probably surprised the artist himself and that Stevens could not easily have forgotten. Its nearly monochrome palette is about as far away from Fauve color as it is possible to get. The mask-like face suggests that Matisse may have been looking at Picasso’s Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The curved lines scored into the paint with the wooden brush handle suggest folded wings, or heart shapes, or perhaps Futurist lines of force radiating from the sitter.50 The painting is an obvious, deliberate challenge to conventional taste. Here, certainly, is the enigmatic, Modernist Matisse that sparked Stevens’ interest (Letters, 574). The painting was prominently displayed in the Arensberg apartment where Stevens would have seen it often. The Matisse Stevens knew from his Harmonium years was essentially an experimental artist, tirelessly re-inventing the world from scratch every day with his brush or pencil. That same inventive spirit is evident in the cut-outs of his final period, which were the means he used to design the Tree of Life windows for the chapel at Vence. It is in this sense that we can think of Matisse’s life and career as the central analogy for Stevens’ “chapel of breath” in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” “always beginning because it is part / Of that which is always beginning, over and over.”

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Walter Pach (etching), 1914 Etching with chine collé, plate: 6 ¼ x 2-5/16 in. (15.9 x 5.9 cm.), sheet: 11 x 7-3/8 in. (27.9 x 18.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929 (29.89.15)

Henri Matisse, Portrait of Walter Pach (etching), 1914 Etching with chine collé, plate: 6 ¼ x 2-5/16 in. (15.9 x 5.9 cm.), sheet: 11 x 7-3/8 in. (27.9 x 18.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929 (29.89.15)

© Succession H. Matisse Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York

Charles Sheeler Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print. Image: 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches (19.4 x 24.4 cm), sheet: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm), mount: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-989

Charles Sheeler Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print. Image: 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches (19.4 x 24.4 cm), sheet: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm), mount: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-989

© The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

  • 51 Another aspect of Stevens’ retrospective mood in the 1950s was his thinking about his own ancestors (...)
  • 52 Stevens sent the manuscript of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” to the Hudson Review in early March  (...)

29Stevens’ interest in Matisse spanned his entire mature career, beginning with the Armory Show of 1913. By the time of the Matisse retrospective at MoMA (1951-52), Stevens was seventy-two years old and in a retrospective state of mind himself.51 His poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” was written at about the same time as “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside”—while the Matisse exhibition was showing in New York52—and might also have drawn inspiration from Matisse. Stevens imagines the philosopher George Santayana, his former mentor at Harvard, approaching death in a convent in Rome, looking back on his entire life’s work and summing it up, metaphorically, as the design of a building. It is his culminating masterpiece, much like Matisse’s chapel:

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
CPP, 434

30These lines could easily apply to Stevens himself, nearing the end of his career, contemplating the monument that will be his published works. Knopf had been pressing him since 1945 to bring out a collected volume of his poetry (Letters, 501). We might think of the Collected Poems (1954) as Stevens’ own retrospective exhibition, with the section of new poems titled “The Rock” (including “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”) playing the same role as the chapel at Vence in the Matisse retrospective at MoMA.

  • 53 W. Pach, lecture on “Classical Elements in Modern Art,” delivered at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hart (...)

31In “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” Matisse represents the fundamentally experimental artist in the sense that Stevens declared, “All poetry is experimental poetry” (CPP, 918). The chapel at Vence may be Matisse’s masterpiece but its perfection is less valuable, less admirable than Matisse’s endless drive toward self-expression, which is the imperative at the core of all genuine art: “Time’s given perfections made to seem like less / Than the need of each generation to be itself, / The need to be actual and as it is” (CPP, 448-449). Walter Pach once defined the modern artist as “one who expresses the especial pulse and thrill of the life of his time.”53 For Stevens, as for Pach, Matisse embodies the creative spirit that, by re-imagining the world freshly again and again, makes happiness and fulfillment possible for the artist and for others. This, I think, is the primary meaning of the line “Matisse at Vence and a great deal more than that.”

Notes

1 On the relations between Stevens and Picasso, see G. MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism, p. 57-78.

2 R. Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium, p. 82.

3 For Stevens and the Arensberg circle, see G. MacLeod, op. cit., p. 3-24.

4 L. E. McCarthy, Walter Pach (1883-1958): The Armory Show and the Untold Story of Modern Art in America, p. 44.

5 Quoted in E. R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America, p. 142. Pach also promoted many of his fellow American Modernists as well as the Mexican Moderns in the 1920s and 1930s.

6 L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 166.

7 Ibid., p. 35.

8 G. Stein, Two: Gertrude Stein and Her Brother, and Other Early Portraits, p. 338-340.

9 J. Bishop, “Sarah and Michael Stein, Matisse, and America,” p. 138-139.

10 H. Stevens, “Wallace Stevens: Letters to Ferdinand Reyher,” p. 391.

11 Le Point (Colmar), special [Matisse] number XXI (July 1939). See M. J. Bates, “Stevens’ Books at the Huntington,” p. 17.

12 See R. Buttel, op. cit., p. 158, M. Benamou, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination, p. 8, and B. Costello, “Stevens and Painting,” p. 168.

13 G. S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, p. 101.

14 The exception is James Baird, who concludes his book about structure in Stevens with a comparison between Matisse’s chapel and the architectural structure (the “dome” of his title) that he considers the central metaphor of Stevens’ entire oeuvre. See J. Baird, The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens.

15 A. Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, p. 208-209.

16 E. Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, p. 294.

17 A. Filreis, op. cit., p. 214.

18 The poem was first published in Poetry 81.1 (October 1952), p. 72-73.

19 See “Matisse Show Opens at Museum of Art,” The New York Times, 14 Nov. 1951, p. 28.

20 A. B. Louchheim, “Section of Matisse Chapel Designs Opened at Museum of Modern Art,” p. 38.

21 Quoted in A. H. Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public, p. 288.

22 A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 11.

23 “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue” (quoted in J. D. Flam, Matisse on Art, p. 38). The quotation is from Matisse’s 1908 essay “Notes of a Painter,” which Flam calls “one of the most important and influential artists’ statements of the century” (p. 32).

24 Quoted in H. Spurling, Matisse the Master: A Life of Henri Matisse; The Conquest of Colour, 1909-1954, p. 372.

25 Ibid., p. 274.

26 J. T. Soby, “Matisse Reconsidered,” p. 34.

27 L. Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, p. 61.

28 At the time of the MoMA exhibition, Stevens and Pach had fallen out of touch. It was a very busy period for both men. Apparently Stevens wrote Pach in early October 1952, expressing his concern that perhaps Pach had gone “off” him and proposing that they meet in New York. Pach responded to the proposal with friendly reassurance though there is no record of their meeting (Letter from Pach to Stevens, October 16, 1952, Huntington Library).

29 In addition to Pach, the other panelists were Edward Steichen, Max Weber, and Meyer Schapiro; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was moderator (see “Important Exhibition of Work by Henri Matisse to Open at Museum”).

30 M. J. Bates, “Stevens’ Books at the Huntington,” p. 22.

31 Letter from Walter Pach to John Quinn, November 29, 1915, John Quinn Papers, Archives of American Art. Quoted in L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 91. Thanks to Laurette McCarthy for identifying this source (telephone conversation, April 26, 2016).

32 Stevens’ translation of Jean Le Roy’s “Instant de clarté” was published as “Moment of Light” in Modern School (October 1918). Stevens’ actual translation of the title was either “Moment of Clearness” (Opus Posthumous, 325n.) or “Instant of Clearness” (CPP, 1008n.). Another hand canceled Stevens’ version and wrote “Moment of Insight” above it. The manuscript is in the Carl Zigrosser Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania Library.

33 Wallace Stevens Archive, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, WAS 447625 (July 18, 1918).

34 E. R. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 91-92.

35 W. Stevens, quoted in L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 128. The painting Stevens refers to is Matisse’s White Plumes (1919). The Matisse number of Le Point in Stevens’ library (see note 3) contains a black-and-white reproduction of this painting on p. 25.

36 Quoted in L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 129.

37 The thirteen paintings by Matisse in the Armory Show are listed in A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 150.

38 See L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 87. Matisse wrote to Pach in November 1924 asking him to advise and guide his son Pierre when he moved to New York: “Could you please do whatever you can to help him?” (quoted in J. Cauman, “Henri Matisse’s Letters to Walter Pach,” p. 11). Pach obliged willingly and energetically. This demonstrates something of his remarkable character. Pach depended on commissions to support himself as an artist, as Matisse was well aware. Now Matisse was essentially asking Pach not only to give up any future commissions on sales of Matisse’s work but also to give Pierre, his new rival, the benefit of all his professional expertise and connections in New York. Pach’s generous response shows that, where art was concerned, he was not motivated by greed or self-interest. He had an idealistic commitment to art: both to his own painting and to the cause of modern art in general. McCarthy’s book shows many examples of this selfless generosity. It is surely one of the traits that Stevens admired in Pach.

39 J. Cauman, op. cit., p. 12.

40 W. C. Agee, “Henri Matisse at the Armory Show—and Beyond,” p. 219.

41 Quoted in A. H. Barr, op. cit., p. 150.

42 W. C. Agee, op. cit., p. 220.

43 L. E. McCarthy, op. cit., p. 49.

44 The catalogue of the 1915 Matisse exhibition at the Montross Gallery is available online at: http://gildedage.omeka.net/exhibits/show/highlights/item/493

45 Michael Stein was forthright about this situation in a letter to Pach of October 19, 1914, writing about the proposed Montross exhibition: “Should you get into communication with [Matisse], don’t fail to impress on him that he must now look to America for a market for his art for some time to come” (quoted in J. Cauman, op. cit., p. 3).

46 The catalogue for the Montross exhibition was probably among those Stevens donated to the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1922. He described his collection of catalogues as “a pretty complete survey of what had been shown in New York for the last ten years” (Stevens to Ferdinand Reyher, February 2, 1922, in H. Stevens, “Wallace Stevens: Letters to Ferdinand Reyher,” p. 399). To coincide with the exhibition, Pach published an essay called “Why Matisse?” in the February 1915 issue of The Century. Aimed at making Matisse’s work more accessible to a wider public, the essay included a translation of some of Matisse’s own statements about his painting.

47 “Matisse at Montross,” p. 2.

48 “Matisse Sells Well,” p. 9.

49 Walter Pach to Henri Matisse, March 30, 1916, Henri Matisse Archives, Les Héritiers Matisse, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. Thanks to Laurette McCarthy for informing me of this source.

50 Barr suggests the Futurist connection (op. cit., p. 185).

51 Another aspect of Stevens’ retrospective mood in the 1950s was his thinking about his own ancestors—an activity that sometimes brought Matisse to mind. Writing to Barbara Church in 1954 he remarked that the Pennsylvania Germans (from whose lineage he descended) “have visions during their work with the greatest regularity” and that this religiosity was what “invited them to the New World and sustained them there.” This observation made him think of Matisse’s chapel at Vence: “How curious it is that we don’t have chapels in factories or insurance offices. What a thing it would be to find something like Vence in one of the Ford plants” (Letters, 843).

52 Stevens sent the manuscript of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” to the Hudson Review in early March 1952 (Letters, 744-745).

53 W. Pach, lecture on “Classical Elements in Modern Art,” delivered at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, as quoted in “Walter Pach Defines Modernist in Art.”

Table des illustrations

Titre Charles Sheeler, Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print Image: 7 5/8 x 9 13/16 inches (19.4 x 24.9 cm), sheet: 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), mount: 8 1/8 x 10 inches (20.6 x 25.4 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-990
Crédits © The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 30k
Titre Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach, c. 1903 Walter Pach papers (1857-1980) Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 15k
Titre Unidentified photographer, Walter Pach in his studio, c. 1930-1940 Walter Pach papers, 1857-1980 Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 45k
Titre Isabelle Giovacchini, Photo of the interior of the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence Photo:
Crédits © Isabelle Giovacchini Chapel: © Succession H. Matisse
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 39k
Titre Henri Matisse, Reclining Odalisque, 1926 Oil on canvas, H. 15-1/8, W21-5/8 inches (38.4 x54.9 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967 (67.187.82)
Crédits © Succession H. Matisse Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 63k
Titre Walter Pach, Illustration for Wallace Stevens’ “Earthy Anecdote,” c. 1918 Modern School Magazine, v. 5, no. 7 (July 1918), p. 193 Photo: Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries, New Brunswick, New Jersey
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 69k
Titre Grant Tyson Reynard, Walter Pach Lecturing (no date). Oil, n. d. Gift of Jane Wilcox. Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, Nebraska
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 42k
Titre Henri Matisse, White Plumes, 1919 Oil on canvas,28 ½ x23 1/8 in. (72.39 x58.74 cm) Minneapolis Institute of Art, The William Hood Dunwoody Fund47.41
Crédits © Succession H. Matisse Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 24k
Titre Henri Matisse, Portrait of Walter Pach (etching), 1914 Etching with chine collé, plate: 6 ¼ x 2-5/16 in. (15.9 x 5.9 cm.), sheet: 11 x 7-3/8 in. (27.9 x 18.7 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1929 (29.89.15)
Crédits © Succession H. Matisse Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 34k
Titre Charles Sheeler Interior, Arensberg’s Apartment, New York, after May 1919 Casein silver print. Image: 7 5/8 x 9 5/8 inches (19.4 x 24.4 cm), sheet: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm), mount: 7 15/16 x 9 15/16 inches (20.2 x 25.2 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950, 1950-134-989
Crédits © The Lane Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/6817/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 34k

Auteur

The author of Wallace Stevens and Company: The Harmonium Years, 1913-1923 (UMI Research Press, 1983) and Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism (Yale University Press, 1995); co-curator of the art exhibition Painting in Poetry/Poetry in Painting: Wallace Stevens and Modern Art (Sidney Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, 1995); editor of Wallace Stevens in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and editor or co-editor of seven special issues of The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is Vice President of the Wallace Stevens Society and Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Waterbury.

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