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HENRI-MATISSE
WHILE the bitter struggle against the narrow dictates of a retrospective and so-called classic academy was in progress, and before the older scholastic forces had finally been put to rout, the Impressionists calmly arrogated to themselves the authority of their dumbfounded predecessors. Their pictures, because more restricted and not based on the fundamentals of art, soon became as familiar and commonplace as the paintings of Gérôme, Cabanel and Bouguereau, and in becoming familiar settled into the groove of a new academism as immobile and self-satisfied as the old. The Neo-Impressionists were the first to react against them, and later Gauguin and his fellow synthesists openly declared war. Cézanne at that time was little known and less understood. Living apart and alone, he was counted out of the main struggle. The decadents of the movement, Degas and his circle, continued their popularising process: their eyes were so fixedly turned inward that they saw little of what was going on about them. Gauguin, putting aside imitation of nature for interpretation, began the great movement which was to culminate in the most extreme reaction against Impressionism—Cubism. And Matisse who, arousing public interest in the new, is responsible for the popular Cézanne discussions of today, was the next man to carry on Gauguin’s work of pigeon-holing Monet and his followers. But whereas the Impressionists had completely forgotten the classics, Gauguin wished to recommence the entire cycle by reverting to the forefathers of those very classics. He also had his decadent followers, but there was no one to continue his methods and inspiration. If it is difficult to perceive an analogy between him and a painter like Jacopo dei Barbari, compare the works of these men with a later drawing by Matisse. The similarity of the first two, by being contrasted with the latter, will at once become apparent. Gauguin clung close to the drawing of the primitive Christians; and the classic seed within him, though it never flowered, was never dead.
While the form in Matisse at times has all the suavity of contour of a Liombruno or a Romanelli, there is a more purely sensitive reason for it than in the well-taught decadents of the later Renaissance. In the classes of Bouguereau and Carrière at the Beaux-Arts he had seen to what an impasse a too great love of antiquity would lead. Furthermore, with his many copies in the Louvre, by command of the state, he began gradually to realise that the classics had become a fetich, and that the only salvation for a painter was to seek a different and less-known inspiration. This course was not so difficult as it had once been, for the younger men had already liberated themselves from popular mandates. The freedom of the artist was now an assured thing, and while the public still scoffed and offered suggestions, it no longer felt that a man’s expression was its personal concern. To be sure, popular rage against things which appeared incomprehensible was still evident, but it was the impotent rage which sneers because it can no longer strike. The Salon des Artistes Indépendants was in full swing, and the new artists who had ideas rather than tricks and who were intent on discovering new fields through devious experimentation, found therein a refuge where they could expose as conspicuously as could the academicians. In this healthful Salon Matisse has exhibited regularly up to a few years ago, and it was here and in the Salon d’Automne—another exhibition which at first was animated by high ideals but which has lately fallen into the hands of cliques and picture merchants—that his fame took birth.
With Matisse’s advent we behold the paradox of an artist who is in full reaction against the Impressionistic and classic doctrines and who at the same time reveals a certain composition and makes colour of paramount interest. The Matisse of exotic inspiration came from the studio of Gustave Moreau who, by his intelligent toleration of the virile enthusiasms of his pupils, facilitated the way toward complete self-expression. There are Matisse drawings extant which are impeccable from the academic standpoint—drawings in which is found all the cold “right drawing” of the school. There are paintings in the Neo-Impressionistic manner, except that they display a sensitive use of harmonious colours, which should have shown Signac and Cross the error of their rigid science. Also there are still-ives which recall Chardin, one of Matisse’s great admirations; and at least one study of a head, done in Colorossi’s old academy on the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, in which a love of Cézanne’s form and colour mingles with a respect for Manet’s method of applying paint.
Gauguin too served as a provenance for the later colour vision of Matisse. Indeed it is as much from Gauguin as from Cézanne that he stems. The broad planes of rich tones and the decorative employment of form in the former had as great an influence in Matisse’s art as did the perfect displacement of spaces in the canvases of the Provençal master. Gauguin, while still leaning to the classic, desired a fresher impetus. He therefore sought distortion in exotic inspiration; but the man who was led to distortion through a pure love of unfamiliar form and to whom Matisse owes the deciding influence toward a new body, was the Spaniard Goya. The deformed, the grotesque and the monstrous were with Goya a passion. In his Caprichos it is easily seen that he, too, was tired of the established formulas regarding the human body, and strove to vary and enrich it. By emphasising a characteristic trait, by shifting a certain form, by exaggerating a certain proportion, he sought to obtain, as did Matisse, the complete expression of what he felt to be essential in his model. The deformations in Gauguin came as a result of an outline which after the first drawing was left unchanged for the sake of its naïf effect. But in Goya and Matisse the deformations are the result of a highly developed plastic sense which glories in new and unusual forms. With them the human body is treated as the means through which an idea is expressed—an idea of form, not of literature. Compare, for instance, the drawing called Deux Tahïtiens, one of Gauguin’s best works, with Matisse’s Baigneuses, a canvas of three nudes one of which is playing with a turtle. In the former the proportions are distorted as much as in the latter, but these proportions are flat and are an end in themselves. They have no intellectual destiny. In the Matisse picture the exaggerations grow out of a desire to express more fully the form which the artist has felt to be important and characteristic. In the seated woman the torso and neck constitute a personal and original vision, and the crouching woman’s back has as much solidity as the Vénus Accroupie of the Louvre.
Matisse’s simplified vision of form came, as did all synthetic modern art, from Ingres and Daumier through Seurat, Degas and Gauguin. That Ingres, the master of so classic a school, should have unconsciously felt the need for modifying and simplifying an object is a significant indication of the fatigue which is always produced by an adherence to a set form. In his drawings the details are omitted merely because they do not further the achievement of his own particular kind of beauty. In Daumier they are absent because they detract from the spontaneous emotion of the whole; in Degas and Manet, because they hinder the fluency of action and obscure the complete and direct image; in Seurat, because they interfere with the suavity of line itself; and in Gauguin, because they preclude that naïveté of appearance he wished to obtain. In Matisse began the conscious process of making form arbitrary, of bending it to the personal requirement of expression. In Cubism form became even more abstract. In Ingres’s drawings there is an entire lack of suppleness: his figures appear like a first sketch in wood for a German carving. In Gauguin this wooden look becomes a trifle more fluent; the proportions are artistically improved. And in Matisse there is no trace of the awkward or the stiff. While his form is more simplified than that of the two other painters, the simplifications come as a result of that artistic rightness of proportion which is an outgrowth of the ultimate refinement of knowledge and taste.
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