Free The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt Page A

incoherence.
    It began with my usual dispirting CRIT with the DVP. He asked me why I had not writen more of the disertation than I had and I said I had not been very well and also preocupied with getting on with my art-work, as you know, in the Joint Honours Course, the creative work and the Art History get equal marks and I had reached a
very difficult stage
with the Work. But I had writen some notes on Matisse ‘s
distortions
of the Female Body with respect especially to the spercificaly Female Organs, the Breasts the Cunt the Labia etc etc and also to his ways of acumulating Flesh on certain Parts of the Body which appeal to Men and tend to imobilise Women such as grotesquely swollen Thighs or protruding Stomachs. I mean to conect this in time to the whole tradition of the depiction of Female Slaves and Odalisques but I have not yet done the research I would need to write on this.
    Also his Women tend to have no features on their faces, they are Blanks, like Dolls, I find this sinister.
    Anyway I told the DVP what my line on this was going tobe even if I had not writen very much and he argued with me and went so far as to say I was hostile and full of hatred to Matisse. I said this was not a relevant criticism of my work and that Matisse was hostile and full of hatred towards women. He said Matisse was full of love and desire towards women (!!!!!) and I said
‘exactly’
but he did not take the point and was realy quite cutting and undermining and dismisive and unhelpful even if no worse had hapened. He even said in his view I ought to fail my degree which is no way for a supervisor to behave as you will agree. I was so tense and upset by his atitude that I began to cry and he pated me on my shoulders and tried to be a bit nicer. So I explained how busy I was with my art-work and how my art-work, which is a series of mixed-media pieces called Erasures and Undistortions was a part of my criticism of Matisse. So he
graciously
said he would like to see my art-work as it might help him to give me a better grade if it contributed to my ideas on Matisse. He said art students often had dificulty expresing themselves verbally although he himself found language ‘as sensuous as paint’. [It is not my place to say anything about his prose style but I could.] [This sentence is heavily but legibly crossed out.]
    Anyway he came—
kindly
—to my studio to see my Work. I could see immediately he did not like it, indeed was repeled by it which I súpose was not a surprise. It does not try to be agreable or seductive. He tried to put a good face on it andadmired one or two
minor
pieces and went so far as to say there was a great power of feeling in the room. I tried to explain my project of
revising
or
reviewing
or
rearranging
Matisse. I have a three-dimensional piece in wire and plaster-of-paris and plasticine called
The Resistance of Madame Matisse
which shows her and her daughter being
tortured
as they
were
by the Gestapo in the War whilst
he
sits like a Buddha cutting up pretty paper with scissors. They wouldn’t tell him they were being tortured in case it disturbed his
work.
I felt sick when I found out that. The torturers have got identical scissors.
    Then the DVP got personal. He put his arm about me and hugged me and said
I had got too many clothes on. He said they were a depressing colour
and he thought I ought to take them all off and
let the air get to me.
He said he would like to see me in bright colours and that I was really a
very pretty girl
if I would let myself go. I said my clothes were a statement about myself, and he said they were a
sad statement
and then he grabed me and began kissing me and fondling me and stroking intimate parts of me—it was disgusting—I will not write it down, but I can describe it clearly, believe me Dr Himmelblau, if it becomes necesary, I can give chapter and verse of every detail, I am still shaking with shock. The more I strugled the more he insisted and pushed at me with his body