Art
Matisse and Others Ax exhibition of drawings by Matisse is always important. When, as in that now on view at the Leicester Galleries, it contains many recent drawings and several groups dating from last year, its interest is even greater. But at the same time It is quite likely to be a disappointment, and the more recent the drawings the more likely the disappointment. We all like to know what Matisse has been at recently, but if we are to enjoy without reservation drawings like those at the 'Leicester Galleries we must put out of our minds Matisse's earlier work and eschew comparisons.
Before the War—particularly from about 1906 to 1912— Matisse was probably the most important artist working in 'Europe, if we judge by the effect which his discoveries in those 'years produced. Painting was intensely alive during that period, and it was going through a transformation of funda- mental importance. Sensitive artists were revolted by the merely pandering art of the Salon and the Beaux-Arts, but equally the new idiom evolved by the Impressionists was 'worn out and reduced by men like Signae to a convention as -dead as that of Bouguereau. To attain to freshness of vision required greater efforts, and they were mainly made by Matisse, who aimed at recapturing the vision of a child—at any rate in its spontaneity—by systematic simplification. This freshness he certainly attained and he kept it nearly till the time of the War, when his discoveries were absorbed by a group of younger artists who evolved from them a more or less completely abstract style. In the pre-War period Matisse could boast that he aimed at drawing like a child of Live, but at the same time he could write (in 19)8) : " ('e que je polorsnis par dessus tont c'est l'expression . . . , je ne puis pas 'distingner entre le sentirmid que fat de la vie et to facon dart je le. Is-minis." That is to say, his new vision was applied to the direct interpretation of life, to expressing his feelings about. people and things. This is exactly the impression which we get from his paintings of the early period. Those astonishing portraits of his wife and daughter are essentially statements -about characters, and statements, incidentally, of great clarity and originality. Since the War everything seems to have changed. Of all qualities freshness of vision is the hardest to preserve, and mil h Matisse it has slowly vanished, leaving the simplicity, which was formerly its great weapon, as a trick tending always more towards emptiness. Matisse's drawings now have many qualities—infinite skill, lovely calligraphy, and so on—but the vision which inspires them seems no longer to be one of the real world. He no longer seems to be expressing his feelings about life and people, but to be showing how dexterously he can handle the pen, or to what simple terms he can reduce a given composition. The exhibition at the Leicester Galleries will arouse endless admiration, but an admirat ion inspired by skill, not by the serious interpretation of reality.
I have always disliked the paintings of Andre Masson, who is exhibiting at Wildenstein's, but in his earlier work there was enough of a sort of hang-over from Cubism to make his pictures at any rate agreeable as patterns and colour harmonies. Now he has embarked on a much more whole-hearted form of Super-realism, and like most Super-realists he is ridden by a particular motif. In his ease the motif is unusually grim and sinister, namely the skeleton. Is it merely chance that this familar late mediaeval theme should now be thrust on us again ? Or were late mediaeval artists driven by the same sort of despair as the Super-realists to the same sort of escape in the same sort of nightmare world ? And when Masson deserts skeletons it is only to fall among grasshoppers,- which form the almost equally sinister theme of many of his paintings.
What a relief it is to go from this type of painting to the honesty and relative realism of Clive Gardiner. From the paintings which he is showing at the French Gallery one would never guess that he was primarily known as a poster designer. For his oils are carefully considered works with none of the flashiness or dangerous cleverness which is generally connected with posters. In paintings like the -Three Sirens, or La Penseuse, in which the influence of Cezanne has not been left too visible on the surface, he shows a real power of monumental composition.
Ars-rnoxv BLUNT.
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