Carol Bird Ravenal: Creative Connections

Carol Bird Myers Ravenal was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1926 and received her PhD in Art History from Harvard University in 1963. Dr. Ravenal is Professor Emerita at American University, where she taught art history, art education, studio, and design from 1968 to 1997, after teaching previously at the Rhode Island School of Design and Rhode Island College. She took courses in psychoanalysis and met regularly for five years with Division 39-Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association. She has presented and written numerous lectures and articles, including “Matisse: Love as Art” in the Annual of Psychoanalysis (November 1995). Dr. Ravenal has been a member of the International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) since 1985 and served as the IPA’s Vice-President. Together with Mary Coleman, for some years starting in the 1980s, they organized a psychohistory group in Washington, DC. As a painter in acrylic, she has shown in over 40 solo and group exhibits throughout the United States and abroad. Among her many awards and honors are the Sears-Gilbert Radcliffe Fellowship, the first woman to receive the Harvard Paul J. Sachs Traveling Fellowship, an American University Summer Research Fellowship, a Scandinavian Summer Fellowship, president of Phi Kappa Phi, and member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 2009 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Brooklyn College Alumni Association. Dr. Ravenal lives with her husband, Earl, in Washington, DC, and at Wilderness Farm in Talbot County,

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Maryland. Some of her paintings may be viewed at www.flickr.com/photos/carolravenal/ and she may be contacted at . A detailed question-and-answer dialogue by e-mail in summer 2011 with Bob Lentz resulted in a self-narrative for the Makers of Psychohistory Research Project, excerpts from which follow.

Parents

As a pre-adolescent, I idealized my mother and father. Loving notes were sent to my mother about her “aerial” quality, visual talents, and clear voice. Birthday cards were written to my father as a most wonderful and strong daddy. This was modified at adolescence as dependence on their approval waned, particularly due to the ongoing interaction and empathetic mirroring of my identical twin, Amy.

It appeared to Amy and me that our mother’s erudition and language were so eloquent that we assumed anything we added to a discussion would pale by comparison. Her intense desire to know our feelings, we felt, was a way of incorporating us, swallowing us whole. She appeared to dissolve boundaries between herself and us. However, when occupied with canvas and paint I experienced silence and fusion with the object, which freed me from being emotionally swallowed by Mother. The early reality of a brilliant, artistic mother and the idealization of both parents allowed me to paint “joyous” paintings, even as they required privacy and solitude.

Living until she was 92, Mother was alone for 18 years after our father died at 74. We then sponsored her first travel to Europe, although she was legally blind. There she sang uninhibitedly in the open-air café at San Marco, attracting new friends and admirers. We recall that among her last words were these from Robert Louis Stevenson: “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” A reason I chose the topic of other research was because of Mother’s centrality in my own life. She was not only domineering; she was vital, talented, and impressive.

Identical Twin Amy

At birth Amy and I weighed about nine pounds together, with thin red skin. I was 10 minutes older. Since the hospital did not have incubators we were sent home “to expire.” The family

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myth is that Mother, magic rescuer, rubbed us with oil, warmed the oven, and made an improvised incubator at home. We were then plucky little chickens, I guess! However, we were unable to nurse, continued to lose weight, and received blood transfusions from our father at three weeks. Mother, so proud of our survival and her place in it, wrote a short article for a refrigerator company for keeping our bottles safe, although we never had one. We were often on display in beautiful baby contests and at schools and were asked comparative questions. Taught at an early age, we replied, “Comparisons are odious.”

Sister Amy attended Brooklyn College a year after I did. Amy then attended Yale for an additional senior year in painting and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. With Yale connections and wonderful color studies under Josef Albers, she was hired by an architectural firm of “Yalies” headed by Walter Gropius. Her three children are architects, who attended Yale, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and MIT. Amy later received the prestigious Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship for two years and was the invited speaker at the 25^th reunion of Radcliffe alumnae.

After six years at RISD, I taught at Rhode Island College, miles from home. This necessitated learning to drive. Amy proved an inspiration as I thought, “If Amy can do it, so can I.” We are not competitors as much as models. One takes a step and the other follows.

The extent to which Amy and I were both similar and different because of birth order, weight, maternal attention, disposition, college history, my psychoanalysis, coping mechanisms within marriage, and reflection in our art, has been an ongoing study. One of the fascinating things revealed in my five-year analysis was how the seeming surface similarity of art content, when probed, revealed the extent of the similarity as well as differences in personality and style with that of Amy. These can be anticipated in the early infant photographs. I presented an early version of these observations some years ago at the annual International Psychohistorical Association (IPA) meeting.

I saw my struggle with my twin, Amy, in many simple paintings I made of fruits with a sharp knife. The underlying con-

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tent of a halved fruit on a table with a sharp cutting knife dividing the halves finally revealed itself as the entire convoluted story of twinning. I saw myself as struggling to become a separate person who need not feel guilty with separation. I was not joined at the hip. My more vulnerable twin, who had suffered scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, and whooping cough, which I escaped, is now blinded in one eye from a cataract operation. I knew that even if taller, stronger, perhaps more resilient, I could identify with and love her.

My artistic twin and I, from our frail beginnings, will be, to our delight and utter amazement, 85 years old this November. Amy in Massachusetts and I, in daily calls, exchange empathetic advice and information about our activities and gardens, and feelings about children and spouses. The creative life has sustained both of us, as it has the artists I studied.

Early Academic Life, Marriage, and Children

As an undergraduate, I attended Brooklyn College, a long healthy walk from home. I was enamored of the Design Department and its chairperson, Robert Jay Wolff, Yale graduate, articulate, attractive, and aesthetic. I wished he were my father, my friend. He became my mentor; encouraged me in my personal art pursued at home, nominated me for Phi Beta Kappa, and recommended me for a teaching position at Smith College at graduation. In 1959, Professor Wolff invited me to replace a faculty member on sabbatical. As I was employed at Rhode Island School of Design and had three children, it was not possible.

A few months after moving to Providence, a former roommate at Harvard introduced me to a younger, 23-year-old, brilliant, Harvard Summa graduate, concert violinist, and business man, Earl C. Ravenal. His family lived in Providence and their old stone cotton mill factory was in Fall River, Massachusetts. He had just completed his two years of army service in Japan, basically on the ski team. When he walked in the door, handsome and with a brilliant smile, and took me to dine at an Italian restaurant, after months of eating frozen dinners, I felt he was just fine. His family had the stable financial attributes missing in mine. (I don’t believe artists belong to a social class, though someone once said I was “haute Bohemian.”) I thought Earl far surpassed me intellectually. I could

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not outshine him as my mother did my father. When clouded by loving feelings we may not take into account family history, or wonder about a remote father, a mother suffering from angina, or a dysfunctional sibling. We do not attempt as much research about marriage compatibility as we might in consulting Consumers Report for a dishwasher. But that was the age before Google. I proved hasty in important areas.

Earl and I married seven months after meeting. With a wedding gift of $10,000 from his parents, we purchased a small Colonial house at the crest of the hill overlooking the city. Three children were born in the next four-and-a-half years. I continued to teach full time. Cornelia Jane was born March 12, 1957, during my first year. The chairman informed me that “If you do that again, you will not be rehired.” I planned more carefully. John Brodhead was born August 1, 1959, and Rebecca Eliza, September 5, 1961. Returning to teaching a week after her birth, I was exhausted by walking the hill to nurse and back to class. Cornelia is now a playwright, script writer, film producer, and composer. John is the Sydney & Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Rebecca has been making pottery for over 20 years and teaching ceramics for the past six years.

A Thesis Topic, Ye Gods: The Modest Architectural Mode, An Analysis of Five Domestic Dwellings in Providence, Rhode Island, c. 1780-1812

I had expected to write my PhD thesis on a 19^th-century French painter, but the option of travel to Europe was no longer available after the birth of my children. While searching for a new thesis topic in Providence, one rose up under my nose, or eyes. As I walked down the hill to RISD along Benefit Street, I passed a row of 18^th-century derelict houses. After Brown University destroyed wonderful Colonial houses to build imitation dorms, one grand dame, Mrs. Chace, purchased those on Benefit Street, determined to save them. I followed the restoration of five houses from the Colonial to the Federal periods over five years, photographing each step, conversing with workmen, salvaging great strips of 18^th– and 19^th– century wallpaper, scrutinizing 18^th– and 19^th-century paint ads, collecting paint fragments which I sent to a commercial paint company

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to determine modern equivalents, and tracing the origin of style in 18^th– and 19^th-century carpenters’ pattern books. I connected all the dots from wills to windows to economic conditions at the time of these five vernacular houses. The thesis was finally completed as I traced the evolution of a simple pediment entryway from 18^th– century Providence to Italian Renaissance Palladio and thence to Roman Vitruvius. When invited back to Harvard to “discuss” the thesis, I was faced with a long table full of professors. I did not realize this was actually the defense. Excited about the topic, I knew every detail and could answer any question. I was awarded the PhD degree in 1963. This was the first year degrees were conferred by Harvard rather than Radcliffe. An article on my life and thesis work was then published in The Providence Journal.

Simultaneously, from my French window overlooking the city, I had been drawing and painting (acrylic) small-scale works of the scene below. When Amy left Yale, I had purchased the portfolio of prints assembled by her eminent professor, Josef Albers, on “The Interaction of Color.” I completed each color study independently. Based on all these works and my small paintings of the city below, I had exhibits in museums and galleries and wrote the review of the annual art exhibit for The Providence Journal.

Washington, DC, and American University

We moved to Washington, DC, in 1969, when Earl started to work in the Defense Department as Director of the Asian Bureau of Systems Analysis. After examining military bases in Taiwan in small aeroplanes, his ears, already impaired from childhood problems and later the noise in his family’s factory, were affected and he became hearing impaired. This resulted in the next years in his almost total deafness. As a concert violinist, this has exacerbated his isolation and impacted our lives considerably.

I took courses at the Corcoran School of Art and at American University (AU) with the vertical stripe artist, Gene Davis, Washington Color School painter. Hired at AU the next year to head Art Education, I trained student teachers. I learned and taught crafts, design, and theory for K-12. After seven years, art and music were dropped from public schools and from AU’s department. The next assignment at AU included art history, painting, color, and design. I operated “on all cylinders.”

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As I moved from Brooklyn to the next four locations, each evoked a different response. On weekends in Washington I put my easel, canvas, and paints in the back of the station wagon, parking wherever I could find a likely scene and space along the Potomac River. Weaning myself from the reality of greens, I moved towards exploration of intense color relationships, rather than painting based primarily on observation. After the purchase of Wilderness Farm I had a wide world and river to navigate.

Most germane to my development during my sabbatical year, 1978-1979, was joining a women’s art group. Among other issues, we identified and discussed the most critical person in our lives. Regardless of the immediacy of the present with husband, children, work, or lovers, to my surprise it was for each of us primarily our mothers. Under the supervision of a Swedish mask expert, and with some trepidation, we made plaster moulds of our faces. From these, we made a variety of expressive masks. After the death of my mother-in-law, her elegant dresses, ball gowns, hats, and shoes were sent to me. Members of the group chose an outfit complete with shoes, hat, and gloves. Inexplicably, our masks and poses identified with the apparel. Wearing them we enjoyed riding a carousel, shopping in the supermarket, and photographing spectators studied disregard or amusement. An exhibit was held in the Folger Shakespeare Library, and an enthusiastic review on TV and in the Washington Post followed.

Identification with Edvard Munch

At this time I had a one-person exhibit at Hood College in 1978. Two of my recent landscape paintings were stolen. I was deeply depressed and made masks with expressions which indicated this extreme dismay. These paintings were my children, too. The intensity of feeling was allowed, rather than repressed, by identification with Edvard Munch. The year before, I had received an American University summer travel grant to Norway to study this artist who wanted the world to experience his personal angst. Studying his paintings I came face to face with his raw nerve endings and their impact on millions of people through his multiple prints. Amplifying their meaning were his reactive notes, plays, and poems.

Fortuitously, I had been working with a psychiatrist friend,

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Dr. Harold W. Wylie, Jr., for two years on Munch. We had access to the extensive Munch print collection and library of Sally Epstein. Dr. Wylie and I had jointly given a paper, “Edvard Munch: A Study of Narcissism and Creativity,” to the American Psychoanalytic Association annual meeting in New York City in December 1976. During the next few years we each acquired some skill in the area of the other. He knew a little about art history, and I wished to relate the surface style and themes of art to the underlying motivation. Courses in psychoanalytic theory had provided me with basic knowledge. With our periodic discussions, my Norwegian study of hundreds of paintings in the Munch Museum in Oslo and those rarely seen in the underground stacks, and the translation of the 63 loose-leaf books of notes in old German by the daughter of the Norwegian counsel in the U.S., I was able to expand and relate manifest meaning to latent meaning, surface to depth. (See more comments on Munch later in this narrative.)

Analysis: 1980-1985

Working in a collegial manner with Dr. Wylie, I became more acutely aware of issues in my marriage around isolation, inability to share or listen, fear of intimacy, and conflicting political and social values. The combination of factors precipitated my decision to enter analysis at age 53. This occurred in an aesthetically challenged room five days a week for five years. My analyst, Paul Gray, was the éminence grise of the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. His ideas were published in a series of seminal journal articles over 40 years. His 1994 book, The Ego and the Analysis of Defense, had a profound effect on psychoanalysis.

Since my long-experienced angst had precipitated my journey into analysis, I harbored the fantasy of immediate alleviation. As I look back on my notes of 25 years ago, I note my repetition of the same dilemmas over and over, and Dr. Gray’s kind, non-critical listening to these vicissitudes of daily life. His interest lay in my way of thinking, in reminding me of the possibilities of alternate ways of being, of thinking. I was not completely aware at first of the importance of this careful listening to dreams, fantasies, and memories, and wished then for more overt empathy, a passion and expressiveness that might match mine. His interest in the capacity of the ego’s self-observing potential often felt to me as neutrality,

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when I needed empathy. However, I became more analytical in my hour, understanding the relationship with my twin, the guilt I might have felt had I believed I surpassed her in any way, given an advantage of size and health, and my identification with and therefore anger with the irrational behavior of my spouse.

Analysis and Creativity

What did I achieve in analysis? Did I become more or less creative? Was there a stylistic breakthrough or did I simply understand more clearly the roots of creative and personality structure? There was the fascination and challenge of seeking out the latent meaning of the collage of dreams. I developed a psychoautobiography on twinship and a course on Munch, Gauguin, and Matisse from a psychobiographical viewpoint, which was taken by students from all departments of the university. I reviewed texts on Mary Cassatt and John Gedo, and by Andrew Brink, among others.

Could analysis of photographs from birth to the present, too, reveal personality? It was an approach I used first in my article on Edvard Munch in decoding the gestures, glances, and expressions of a family portrait of children brought together by the mother’s anticipated death. I poured through our childhood photos, noting the active and more passive body positions of each, the interplay of Amy and me always as close as could be, one leg over the other lying on a couch, even as adults. The impact of a domineering mother could be balanced by the interdependence on the twin.

How, most importantly, did art, the creative visual ability I had inherited from Mother’s family, sustain me? I believe it was the understanding of the psyche, the mind, to entertain alternatives, to fly, that was encouraged and amplified. It then became the twin of the observing and piercing eye.

Creative Activity

My art is a merging of spirit, eye, and mind with the object world. My eye and internal world react viscerally to a landscape framed by a window or a still life of tomatoes from our garden. My heart beats quickly as I squeeze out blobs of color on my palette. With large arm movements the entire composition is given tentative and spontaneous form. Then I step back and see what the hand has wrought. I spend many hours assessing, calibrating, adjusting rela-

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tionships, making whole. I evaluate surface composition decisively. According to my daughters I remain too visually judgmental.

As a formalist, I remain wedded to the capture and reformulation of the object world. I realized through analysis that I am involved with visual and emotional boundaries. I long for resolution of chaos, and construction of beauty, making “one of opposites” in my way. The coalescence of opposites of dark/light, figure/ground, near/far, open/closed, freedom/order, and complementary colors corresponds unconsciously to internal states. I extend the idealization learned at my mother’s feet to the world of form.

My art is life-enhancing and sustaining. Visual awareness and sensitivity is a blessing and a misfortune. Judgments about friends, the environment, what color dish I use for the fruit in the morning—all are based on what the eye deems most beautiful. It has sustained me in bitterest moments, by either reflecting feelings in paintings of anguish or replacing chaos, irrationality, and a world without emotional intimacy by activity, involvement, pleasure, and beauty. Aesthetic transformation is a prime defense. As Tosca sings, “I live my life for art, Love gives meaning to life” (Act II). I am constantly surprised, yet confirmed, when viewers say my art is joyful.

Problems in the Art World and the Future of Creative Activity

The course on aesthetics at Harvard was dropped many years ago, the word itself considered blasphemy. It has returned slowly as some ask, Why is this better than the other? How can I know? Many art historians, even 50 years ago, lacking visual sensitivity, had no basis for judgment. In that class, when faced with a decision on quality between a Rembrandt, a follower, or a copier, even with a list of criteria, most students could not identify the authentic. So, eventually, as art historians and curators, they turned to other disciplines to supplement their disadvantage: history, literature, politics, gender studies, or semantics. Or, the important critics of the 1950s, such as Clement Greenberg, became the arbiter. If he determined philosophically that art is in linear development from realism to abstraction, then abstract abstraction is the premier art form.

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Some edgy performance art appears to be a bid for one-shot fame. One may think it is removed from the expression of the public, the era, and the environment. Or, just the opposite, exhibitionist art is an excellent reflection of the contemporary chaos and disassociation. It provides instant gratification, is regressive, totally egocentric, a product of an era of sexual promiscuity, socially revealing networks, wars, despair, financial chaos, irresponsibility, rejection of group interests, and personal and national boundary dissolution. However, there is wonderful innovative dancing, writing, poetry, and music, which unite discipline and art. Some manifest only through groups, others are solitary. Perhaps future classes in the arts can be a combination of unfettered individuality with the spirit and group solutions of the more interactive classrooms on the best educational Web sites.

We must find another way of seeing America and ourselves in the immediate future. We must upgrade exponentially, face the dilemmas of the globe. Perhaps the creative, energetic artist, or entrepreneur, such as Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, will identify the future direction and lead the way.

At the farm now in mid-August, I look out and see four men tying together the broken limbs of an old pink crepe myrtle tree struck last night by lightening, trying to make it whole. That’s about it for nature, for art, and for life.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), Norwegian Symbolist/ Expressionist

Ironically, although creative activity is often based upon the dual pivots of good genetic inheritance and nurture, conversely it may be driven by illness and insufficient childhood interaction and empathetic response. Loss, rather than abundance, can be the trigger. The desire to re-play disappointing experiences, to revisit them from multiple viewpoints stylistically, would seem to be counter to the healing process. It may be similar to the analytic hours/years à la Woody Allen, never to end.

Tension is present when faced with the multiple tasks of engineering a form from conception to fruition. There may follow a surcease of repressed energy in the birthing release of form. Once released, the tension, the visual or narrative issues that were its

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genesis, returns and must be released time and again. The resolution of much creative endeavor is the construction, or development, of a time-curtailed gratifying self-object.

Edvard Munch’s iconic work, The Scream, has been heard around the world. It begged for understanding of its genesis. The critical importance of the earliest caregivers on the development of his personality and his future relationships with women was fundamental. Specifically the multiple and chronic childhood deprivations—loss of loved ones, his mother’s tuberculosis when married and early death shortly after the birth of her fifth child, his adolescent sister’s death, his own illness, and his elderly physician father’s morbid pietism—were given symbolic and expressive form. He felt born with the seeds of madness: “The angels of fear, sorrow, and death stood by my side” (in Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream, 2005, p. 2). The development of an iconography of a tripartite division of women—Madonna (mother), Medusa (all seductive women), and Martyr (mother and aunt)—and subsequent inability to trust a woman for fear of loss and abandonment was inevitable. In the early idealization phase of a relationship, entered with enormous apprehension, the new sexually appealing woman might be seen as a sexualized mother/Madonna but soon transformed into a decapitating/castrating Salome. The longing for Munch was for reunion with his dead mother.

I published “Three Faces of Mother: Madonna, Martyr, Medusa in the Art of Edvard Munch” in the Journal of Psychohistory 13(4), Spring 1986, pp. 371-412. Perhaps my most incisive summaries in public lectures on Edvard Munch were at the Kreeger Museum in Washington in 2009 and at a large Osher Lifelong Learning Institute lecture for retirees at AU in January 2011.

Paul Gauguin (1848, Paris-1903, French Polynesia), French/ Peruvian Symbolist

My eye and exploration turned to the lifelong search for unity of religions and genders in the curious androgynous figures of the Symbolist painter Paul Gauguin. In my May 1988 lecture “Running to Paradise: Quest for Sexual Identity in the Art of Paul Gauguin” to the Washington Chapter of the Institute of Psychohistory, I reviewed this search. Again, childhood origins and family fantasies generated this need and capacity.

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Paul Gauguin was born in France to a literary Creole mother of Spanish Peruvian ethnicity and a Parisian journalist father. Escaping the political turmoil of Paris, they embarked on the long voyage to Lima, Peru, where his mother believed she should inherit the fortune of an elderly uncle. Tragically, her husband died en route, but she and Paul were well received by the uncle and resided with his family four years. The longed-for fortune was never forthcoming. Returning to Paris, Paul joined the merchant marines at 17. Upon his return, he married a robust Danish woman, Mette Gad, by whom he had five children.

He became a Sunday painter after his weeklong profession as a stockbroker. Following a financial downturn he focused his abundant imagination and energy on painting full time, which led to marital and family breakdown. Artists from Cezanne to van Gogh, with whom he lived for a short time in Arles, influenced him. Styles from impressionism to Japanese prints and places from Breton to Tahiti were instrumental in his development. As a theater lover he also wrote reviews of the popular plays on androgyny. These he signed as a woman author. As his mother and father had done, he reacted and acted on his convictions.

In some paintings in France, Gauguin identified thematically with the crucified Christ, assuming the visage of a dual Saint/ Satan tempted by the apple hanging above his head. In Tahiti he fantasized that the dark natives among whom he lived had direct contact with their earth gods and the spirits of the universe. Gauguin sought an authentic voice, although intellectually contrived, in his flight from civilization. He roamed the countryside from Breton to small villages in Tahiti awaiting an epiphany.

Seeded as a child traveling from France on the unrewarding voyage to Peru, in years sailing around the world in the merchant marines, and as an adult traveling back and forth from France to various villages in Tahiti, he had been a searcher for unification: the commonality of Christianity and purer primitive religions. In his art gender differentiation was diffused, reversed. Female figures are often large, sexless, and strong, their feet flattened as they rise from the ground; men are supple and young. At the end of his life, suffering from the last stages of syphilis, passed on to his teenage “wife,” impotent, he fashioned the posts of his wooden house

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into phallic symbols as replacements for lost virility.

What then was the purpose of his life as an abandoning wanderer? Was it to find that elusive fortune: the unification of father/mother in a single universal being, androgynous, imbuing the solitary life with ultimate meaning and value?

Henri Matisse (1869-1954): French Fauvist/Formalist

As an infant Henri was barely expected to survive the first winter in the bare-earthed two-room home of his grandparents. When frail Henri was about two years of age, a second male was born but died just before his second birthday when Henri was four. Two months after this death, another male child was born. Matisse was probably given incomplete, or erratic, nurturing, as his mother went through a series of emotional upheavals. A passive young adult, wishing to please, he succumbed to his father’s wish that he study law. Although he passed the bar, he remained despondent at the boring practicing. Returning home with severe appendicitis and recurrent stomach ailments, he spent two years recuperating in bed. His mother, now encouraging, gave him a coloring book. He leapt at it as a lover, or in his words, “a beast,” discovering his first affair. He had found his life’s calling. Against his father’s wishes, he traveled to Paris to study art. Over the years he developed his infatuation through a number of contemporary colorful styles from naturalism, fauvism, and pointillism, to his unique interpretative formalism.

All themes were linked to the object world. Many were based on a series of models, expressly required as essential visual stimulation. Some of these women became, as may have been usual in the artist/model unit, his lovers. His intellectual, professionally encouraging, long-suffering wife Amélie, who bore him two boys, Pierre and Jean, later adopted his daughter Marguerite by his first model, Caroline. Through financial, political, and personal upheavals he abandoned Amélie periodically for travel to private, exotic, or warmer sites. These trips were to find the external stimuli he required. He may have had the attachment to her and his family of which he was capable, but he was described as self-centered, cold, remote, and unable to stop for a moment from his true sustaining love: art.

Matisse’s versatility was expressed in a range of mediums

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as well as styles. These included not only his marvelous joy-filled paintings, but book illustrations, wall-sized murals, paper cutouts, and stained glass windows. Among his last works were large religious wall drawings on “The Stations of the Cross.” These were for the intimate scaled chapel in Venice. They were drawn when confined to bed or a wheelchair with duodenal cancer. As Renoir, whom he knew and admired, had his painting brush tied to his severely arthritic fingers, Matisse worked on sketches from bed, holding a long bamboo pole with drawing implement attached.

When his adored artistic nurse, Sister Jacques-Marie, attended him in the hospital he was emotionally devastated if he thought he had ignored her in any way. He begged, like a child, for forgiveness, or he could not sleep. These were, perhaps, moments of regression as with his original caretaker.

In his art and the major portions of his life Matisse had turned from passive to assertive, dependent to independent, and depressed to alternatingly melancholic and joyful. With Picasso as friendly competitor, he became one of the leading artists of the 20^th century. He continues to fill our lives with the beauty of his energetic, exuberant, color-saturated paintings of flowers, plants, portraits, interiors, figures, landscapes, and reconstructed harem scenes. Worldwide accolades sustained him, replacing his mother’s divided attention when he was a frail infant.

When I completed the five-year psychobiography of Matisse, “Matisse: Love as Art” published in the Annual of Psychoanalysis (November 1995) ten years after I terminated analysis, I dedicated it to Dr. Paul Gray.

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