Matisse

Henri MATISSE's first success as an artist was his Paul Cezanne-type "La liseuse" still-life, with a brown and green flowered wallpaper pattern picked up as a cloth in his later "Nature morte a l'autoportrait." But his favorite painter was actually Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, as seen in the cool greys of his "Nature morte aux peches" and "Nature morte aux raisins" still-lifes. His still-life "Grande marine grise" springboarded the empty and symmetrical freedom of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape into the Piet Mondrian-styled beaches of modern art. In fact, much of the rest of his work had a part in how twentieth-century art, with its concern over color, turned out: "La coiffure," with its enormous hanging arm from Michelangelo's "Night" figure clasping hand to head, for a modern art growing out of twentieth-century anxieties; "Collioure" series, with figures recognizable from flat colors and with meadows dyed red against green, for a dazzling light from a Eugene Delacroix-type greatest outburst of opposing colors; "Le compotier" creating, not imitating, life by giving up color as description for Japanese print-type color as expression; "La desserte" showing dark tones coloring more brilliantly than light; "Homme nu," as an Auguste Rodin-type striding figure, taking one side in the twentieth-century artistic question over form holding its own edges against color or shaping from spreading color, as in "Bronze et fruit" still-life and his Paul Gauguin-type "Nu assis" figure almost lost against the arbitrarily patterned sunlight; "Interieur au rideau Egyptien" and "L'interieur rouge" finalizing Fauvism by energizing light and uniting picture parts; "Lecon de piano," as his masterpiece experiment abstracting garden greens and room colors; "Luxe, calme et volupte" escaping into the grandly simple Cezanne style of "Trois baigneuses" and leading into Symbolism; "Madame de Matisse," as a specific person in an alertly balanced pose, just by a Constantin Brancusi-type sculptured eyebrow and nose against blue sending off grey for the curved shaping of her head, for Amedeo Modigliani's and twentieth-century art's figures directly shown as being physical presences and filling human roles; "Nature morte, Seville" riotously patterning color; "Le reve" balancing field and figure, in-between areas and physical presence in pink arabesquing against blue; "La serpentine" collecting light along arabesqued thick lower legs and thin thighs into a separately modelled physical effect, as later seen in his own "Jeannette" busts and in Pablo Picasso; "Le the," with a Cubist-type head for his daughter Marguerite; and "Vue de St Tropez" landscaping Paul Signac-type energetically brushstroked color. So, through appropriately chosen illustrations and carefully organized text, the author leaves us on excellent terms with what Matisse did for art: I particularly like the attention that Lawrence Gowing gives to the cut-paper works, such as "La danse" and "Le rouge et le noir,"