Cultural Resistance in Henri Matisse’s Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans

Abstract

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) adopted medievalism, a motif of cultural resistance in Occupied France, as a symbol of national unity through his appropriation of the fifteenth-century poems of Charles de Valois, duc d’Orléans (1394–1465). Matisse saw parallels between the plight of the medieval poet, held captive in England, and his own circumstances in France during the Second World War. Begun in 1942, while recovering from his near-fatal illness, aided by his friend André Rouveyre (1879–1962), encouraged by the fugitive poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982), Matisse introduced covert symbols and coded messages of hope and rebirth into his book to highlight his nation’s heritage as he silently participated in the cultural battle that was being fought in France. This article analyses the aesthetic evolution of his wartime illustrated book Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950), and examines his choice of poems, the handwritten text, his decorative illuminations, the images, d’Orléans’s portrait and the frontispiece within the context of the disruption to the French nation and his own personal circumstances.