Henri Matisse
The Art of Henri Matisse. By Albert C. Barnes and Violotte This is not a book to put into the hands of a generally intelligent person wishing to be converted to Matisse. Its massiveness, its gloomy binding which makes it look like a nineteenth-century treatise on birth-control, its pretentious, chapter headings would all repel any but the most serious- minded devotee of modern painting. Any reader, therefore, who is prepared to surmount these minor, superfieial diffi- culties will hope to find in the hook a permanent contribution to our knowledge of painting, a sound evaluation of the achievement of Matisse, a systematic analysis of his methods.' But he will be disappointed. If he succeeds in toiling through the 300 pages of text, he will probably be left at exactly the same point as at the beginning. The book opens with a chapter or two of rather second-rate psychology which will not appeal to those who believe that psychology, at any rate in its present elementary state, has nothing to do with art. We then embark on aesthetics proper with chapters on Plastic Design and Decorative Design, filled with vague' and sometimes meaningless generalizations. The chapter on Transferred Values is one of the most peculiar. It is there suggested that Matisse continually makes use of certain' motifs " which add a colourful, lyric charm to his pictures." One of these motifs is the rosette, which the present writer was unable to trace in any of the paintings said to contain it. But even supposing that it was really there, it would be hard to accept what appears to be the authors' conclusion— namely, that, because the design was vaguely star-like, or rosette-like, the spectator was subconsciously moved by the romantic likeness to a star or to a flower. The authors devote a great deal of space to tracing the various influences which have gone to form Matisse's style: According to them Matisse has at one time or another made use of almost every great nineteenth-century artist, of Japanese prints, of Persian miniatures and tiles, of Coptic textiles, of Roman mosaics, of Hindu and Negro sculpture and of many other models. This may possibly be true, but one cannot help wondering whether . they have not sometimes mistaken accidental similarity for deliberate borrowing. It would be interesting to know exactly what external evidence there is for thinking that Matisse has really studied all these
sources. The more technical chapters on drawing, colour and so on contain some interesting comments on individual paintings. The main section of the text ends with an attempt to estimate Matisse's absolute value as an artist. He is first compared with all great artists from Giotto to Cezanne and is found " to sustain comparison with all but the greatest masters." Secondly, he is placed ahead of all his contem- poraries, and for this purpose a very unfair account is given of Picasso and Detain. Finally, there is one of those dangerous comparisons between the different arts from which it appears that Matisse is the Stravinsky of painting. The second half of the book it composed of about 130 pages of plates, well chosen, but regrettably small, and of a series of analyses of selected paintings by Matisse.
ANTHONY Mawr, -
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