ART
To the Tate Gallery has come an exhibition of work by Matisse which includes forty-nine bronzes—nearly all the sculpture he has ever executed. Six pieces were shown as long ago as 1912, in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and another more recently in Battersea Park, but it is true to say that this facet of the artist's personality is scarcely known in this country. It proves to be of greater interest than value. With M. Matisse we associate an untrammelled spontaneity of linear arabesque and a splendour of colour freed from all mundane responsibility. The fluency and grace at which he has constantly, even stubbornly, aimed all his life are inseparably bound up with his two-dimensional semi-oriental conception of decoration. Sculpture provides no outlet for his especial gifts. Think of the other painters who have used the medium: Renoir, who, in giving to his golden girls solidity, gave them a ripeness and roundness yet more real; Degas, whose daring ypt subtle exercises in movement were so recently to be seen in these same galleries; or Picasso, whose fantasy and invention have opened up new fields for a succession of followers. By comparison with these, Matisse has made heavy weather of the third dimension. There are few pieces in this exhibition where signs of struggle are not apparent, and fewer where they have been resolved.
Barye and Rodin, a little surprisingly, provided his starting point, and some of the earlier, impressionistic heads—like the small study of Pierre Matisse—are indeed among the most satisfactory solutions to be seen here. A decade later cubism forced itself upon his atten- tion, and the four progressively distorted heads of Jeannette cannot but recall Picasso's Head of a Woman completed the previous year— to the latter's advantage. La Serpentine, the monumentally placid head of 1927, and the Tiara with its swelling, Picasso-like protru- berances, seem to come nearest to the Matissian ideal.
Evidence of Matisse's steadfast efforts towards effortlessness is to be seen more clearly in several series of drawings and paintings, notably the thirteen earlier stages of the painting The Dream, shown in photograph alongside the final version. All his life Matisse has felt the necessity to make these groups of variations upon a theme, as though no one statement were capable of expressing all that he feels about a subject. Those for The Dream were made over a period of nine months in 1940, each being superimposed on its predecessor, each being complete in itself, none remaining visible in the final painting. The progressive simplifications are of great interest as showing how Matisse works. Note the gradual elimina- tion of the jar at the right, and the final envelopment of the head by the line of arms and back, so that it appears at last isolated as it
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