Matisse Swan Self

The year that I was born Matisse Natty in a grey fedora hat, Goateed, sat In a boat sketching a swan in the Bois de Boulogne. (The swan glides to the right, pays no attention; Matisse, all attention, gazes down At the unseen image on his lap). One can trace the progress of this work From diffidence to imperial certitude: A final thrust of neck so forceful in its sweep, A flap of wing so focused one might say Nothing swan escapes it. Only coincidence connects my birth, the indifferent swan, Matisse’s hand moving across the paper, That and the hopeless urge to bind The too contingent self to history By anchoring at visible islands. Yet the elegant floating, The neck so neatly and naturally Curved back upon itself, The fanned wings momentarily uplifted Poised not so much for flight as ritual gesture, The brilliance of the light— All the possibilities are there: Mystery of swans of lakes of lines of purity, of choosing.

Linda Nochlin 1973 (Sunday, August 06, 2000)

Linda Nochlin, Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1931. She graduated from Vassar College, received her M.A. from Columbia University and her doctorate from the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. She specializes in the art of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, focussing particularly on the work of Gustave Courbet, the Impressionists, and issues concerning the representation of women and the work of women artists. Among her numerous publications are: Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1966;Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904: Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall, 1966; Realism, London, Penguin Books, Ltd., Style and Civilization Series, 1971; Women Artists: 1550 to 1950, with Ann Sutherland Harris, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976; Courbet Reconsidered, with Sarah Faunce, Brooklyn Museum and Yale University Press, 1988; Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, New York, Harper & Row, 1988; and The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society, Harper & Row, 1989; The Body in Pieces [Thames and Hudson: The Neurath Lecture]) 1994, The Jew in the Text (Thames and Hudson, 1995), a volume which she edited with Tamar Garb, and most recently, Representing Women (Thames and Hudson, 1999). She has also written many articles on modern art and artists, including studies of Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Morisot, Cassatt, Seurat, Matisse and Picasso, and, among contemporary artists, Ellsworth Kelly and Mary Frank, Deborah Kass and Philip Pearlstein. She has received various fellowships and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for the best article published in the Art Bulletin in 1967 by a scholar under forty and the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for Critical Writing, given by the College Art Association, 1977. Recently, she has been named Scholar of the Year by the New York State Council for the Humanities.(1997) and received the annual recognition award from the Committee on Women and the Arts of the College Art Association(1998). She has been a Fellow of the Princeton Insitute for Advanced Study, the New York University Institute for the Humanities, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her teaching activities have included professorships at Vassar College, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Yale University and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. She is working on a study of French Nineteenth-Century bathing and bathers called Bathtime. In addition, she is writing an analytic history of the modern portrait from the time of the Impressionists to the present.