Can Joy Exist Without Sadness?

By Kelly Grovier

2 December 2019

Is it possible to create a work of pure joy – one entirely free from any trace of trouble or
sadness? Henri Matisse believed it might be. “What I dream of,” the pioneering modernist
painter explained to an interviewer in 1909, “is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid
of troubling or depressing subject matter... a soothing, calming influence on the mind.” That
same year, Matisse began work on a canvas that is widely admired not only as one of the most
joyous in all of art history but also one of the greatest: La Danse (1909-10) – that pulsing
apotheosis of rhythm and form in which a quintet of nude figures gyrate rapturously, hand-in-
hand, in a circle for eternity.
Commissioned to adorn a staircase in the Moscow mansion of the Russian businessman and art
collector Sergei Shchukin, Matisse’s famous work is actually a blow up of a relatively small
detail of a group of six dancers seen in the distance of a compositionally more complex painting
that the artist created a few years earlier: Le bonheur de vivre, or The Joy of Life (1906).

Matisse’s 1909-10 painting La Danse has been described as ‘a whirl in ecstasy’ (Credit: Getty Images)
“I imagine a visitor coming in from the outside,” Matisse explained in an interview with the
critic Charles Estienne in 1909, describing how he expected Shchukin’s guests to experience La
Danse: “The first floor invites him. One must summon up energy, give a feeling of lightness.”
Described variously by critics as “a whirl in ecstasy” and “the most beautiful painting of the
modern world”, Matisse’s La Danse is surely proof positive that a work of unqualified joy is
indeed possible. Or is it?
Look closer and something begins to unsettle the painting’s cheery choreography near the very
centre of the canvas, knocking its blissfulness off balance – an awkward tug of gravity that
tethers the “feeling of lightness” for which Matisse was aiming. The joyous suspension that
Matisse intended to evoke is dramatically tripped up and brought crashing down when our eyes
finally fall on what is easily overlooked amid the exuberant whirl of music and muscle: the grip
that has suddenly slipped loose between the hand of the figure in the centre foreground of the
painting and the backward reach of the dancer to her (and our) left, who seems unaware of the
calamity about to unfold behind her.
Once spotted, the chink in the chain is impossible to unsee as the ecstatic electricity that only
moments before seemed to whirr without end through Matisse’s work begins to short circuit.
The figure in the foreground no longer appears to us in graceful command of her spinning body.
She lunges desperately to regain connection while her left knee begins to buckle, bracing for
what promises to be a bruising fall. Rather than be locked in an orbit of endless grace and
gaiety, the dancers we realise are forever frozen on the verge of perilous collapse. Perhaps this
is a metaphor for the inevitable (and, ultimately, fortunate) fate of every great work of art that
seeks to grasp the unseizable: a moment of unalloyed joy.
Different strokes
If you think I’m being unnecessarily negative, consider another example: Paul Cézanne’s
luminous still life Apples, Bottle, and the Back of a Chair (1902-6), a late watercolour by the
post-Impressionist pioneer, whose lucent strokes seem emphatically to affirm life’s potential
for joy. In his celebrated study of modern art, The Shock of the New, the historian and critic
Robert Hughes insists Cézanne’s watercolour belongs to “the most joyous part of [Cézanne’s]
life’s work”. Of the technique with which the painter magicked joyfulness from thin air and
thinning pigment, Hughes passionately observed: “One can almost see the swift dabs of
transparent red, yellow, and blue drying on the sketchbook in Provençal heat, fixed by the sun
so that they could be rapidly worked over… Watercolour let Cézanne record aspects of the
landscape that the weightier medium [of oils] could not so promptly fix” – namely, according to
Hughes, “the mistiness and iridescence of light”, from which such joyfulness springs.
According to the art critic Robert Hughes, Apples, Bottle, and a Chairback belonged to ‘the most joyous part’ of
Cézanne’s life’s work (Credit: Alamy)

For all its visual vibrancy, however, the work’s true power lies elsewhere – in its quiet
comprehension of loss. What at first seems a ‘joyous’ celebration of inner light is, on further
reflection, a luminous meditation on loneliness. The painting, as the art historian Carol
Armstrong writes in her book Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolours, is aware of all
that has come before it and looks back to “Cézanne’s wild early years, when he painted
orgiastic banquets”. As Armstrong sensitively notes, tuning into the subtle frequency of solitude
that electrifies the work, it’s “as if someone has finally been invited for dinner or dessert in the
studio and even been offered a seat at the table… And yet, poignantly, there is nobody there at
all”, as the superficial joyfulness of ebullient abundance is ultimately tempered by the
realisation of a deeper emptiness.
The pivot from joy to sadness that intensifies the meaning of Cézanne’s work chimes with the
writing of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, whose understanding of “That sweet mood
when pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind” helped shape cultural consciousness.
In his influential poem Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey (1798), Wordsworth
holds in eloquent equilibrium both an acknowledgement of “the still sad music of humanity”,
against which our being in the world is soulfully set, and “the deep power of joy”, that enables
us “to see into the life of things”.
In the 18th-Century Rococo painting The Swing, a young man is hidden in bushes as he watches a young woman on
a swing; an older man seems unaware as he pushes her

Sadness is the axle against which the spokes of joy spin. It rotates in even the seemingly
giddiest of paintings, such as the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s much-adored
The Swing (c 1767) – a work that, at first glance, seems utterly unencumbered by the tethers of
sadness. “Fragonard charged the whole painting,” the critics Hugh Honour and John Fleming
observe in their book The Visual Arts: A History, “with the amorous ebullience and joy of an
impetuous surrender to love. In a shimmer of leaves and rose petals, lit up by a sparkling beam
of sunshine, the girl, in a frothy dress of cream and juicy pink, rides the swing with happy,
thoughtless abandon.” She may be thoughtless, but we’re not. Her pendulating joy is bracketed
by an allegory of time’s uncurbable elapse: the reclining young man with rosy cheeks who holds
his hat out to her in the lower left corner of the work and the ageing man he will soon become,
standing in the shade behind her, desperately trying to rein in the ropes of time. Joy isn’t an
endless perpetual motion we can take for granted, but one ephemerally propelled by
perishable muscle.
A powerful painting helps us cope with sadness by offering us a way out of the pain, not by
pretending sadness doesn’t exist
No one understood better the synergies of joy and sadness than Vincent van Gogh, whose work
and psyche were invigorated and unsettled by the irresolvable friction between those contrary
feelings. “It is not true that Van Gogh never sold a work,” the critic Laura Cumming says of an
underappreciated milestone in the artist’s career in her brilliant survey of self-portraiture A
Face to the World: “a young Scotsman he met in Paris bought a picture directly from him – a
basket of apples, surging like a plucky raft on a sea of brushstrokes so exuberant the canvas is
practically overflowing: joy in all things”.

In his painting of a basket of apples, Van Gogh balanced vibrant gold with a moodier shade of blue (Credit: Kröller-
Müller Museum)

Interrupting the surging exuberance of yellow strokes and giddy gold dashes that hoist the
basket and propel it forward into our imagination, however, is an undertow of bruising blues to
the left of the woven raft that trouble its trajectory. “For years,” Simon Schama says, reflecting
on the inseparability of sadness and joy in Van Gogh’s work, “he had struggled to realise a
vision of total absorption within the vital surge of nature, a sensation so electrifying that it
would make the loneliness of modern life disappear”. Schama concludes: “For poor Vincent,
however, sometimes extreme joy was indistinguishable from extreme pain.” Ultimately, the
menacing undercurrent that begins to gather and threaten Van Gogh’s still life does not
diminish the work’s power but rather raises the stakes and establishes an impending peril that
impels our eyes to cling to the raft all the more urgently.
The truth is, we don’t want paintings of unmitigated joy: because life itself is never so pure. A
powerful painting helps us cope with sadness by offering us a way out of the pain, not by
pretending sadness doesn’t exist or by erasing it from the surface of being. Matisse’s work is
greater because it shows us life as it really is: a short step away from disaster. A great work of
art helps us prepare ourselves to pick up the pieces when things fall apart. It doesn’t expunge
from existence all trace of pain and suffering. Such a work, even if it were possible, wouldn’t be
beautiful because it wouldn’t be true.