6
The Development of Matisse's Painting
1
cut-outs to achieve that ultimate synthesis of light and space through colour to which he had addressed himself some forty years earlier. Matisse's key writings relate to these pivotal points in his career, and to his changing
first
concerns. 'Notes of a Painter' coincides exactly with the transition into the Experimental sums up many of the concerns of his early career, and outlines the course that he
period,
Thus it is a prime document in the painter's conception of summation and evaluation of many of the ideas that he had passed through en route. But although the years between 'Notes of a Painter' and the 1929 'Statement to Teriade' are some of the most important of his career, he wrote nothing and gave only a few interviews which merely repeated or elaborated on the ideas in 'Notes of a Painter', or which were essentially autobiographical. It is quite likely that he felt unwilling to theorize until he had arrived at a reformulation of his imagery. would follow his
own
for the next decade.
recent work, as well as a
The three statements to Teriade (Texts 8, 10, 13) reflect Matisse's concern, around 1930, with more synthetic imagery. Having spent over a decade seduced by the charms of southern light, and committed to a descriptive rather than a synthetic vision, Matisse was evidently impatient with his own progress, and seems to have felt that he had stood still or even retreated since the bold and daring works of 19 16-17. Thus in these statements to Teriade, as well as in 'On Modernism and Tradition' of 1935 (Text 12), Matisse emphasizes the liberation of Fauve colour, the clarification of his visual sensibility, sion:
and the
expression wears thin, language.
.
.
.
This
is
it is
means of exprespower of which made human
'purification' of the
'When the means of expression have become so refined,
so attenuated that their
necessary to return to the essential principles
the starting point of Fauvism: the courage to return to the purity of the
means.' His statement refers as much to his recent painting, in which he had returned to pure colour and broad simplified forms, as to his original Fauve experience.
Though after 1929 Matisse seems to have become more willing to discuss his art, he still for Not until the 1939 'Notes of a Painter on his
the most part spoke in fairly concrete terms.
Drawing' does he begin seriously to elaborate on the symbolic quality of his forms. While in 'Notes of a Painter' he had discussed the process of how he arrived at his forms, in many of these later statements, he discusses the result the creation of plastic signs. This idea, which runs throughout the late writings, has its equivalent in Matisse's paintings of the period, in which he had been reducing his objects into signs which, taken together, would form an ensemble in which the objects functioned like actors in a play or pieces on a chess-board, images that Matisse himself used repeatedly. Throughout the 1940s Matisse also developed the theme of keeping one's instincts fresh through contact with nature and avoiding cliches. In his later years there is a strong emphasis on synthesis from remembered experience rather than direct contact with a specific motif. These ideas also follow the development of his increasingly abstract imagery. Yet, curiously, they are quite consistent with his similar remarks in 'Notes of a Painter' about the value of working both from nature and from imagination. In fact, Matisse's theoretical writings, even though they span almost half a century, have a remarkable consistency, possibly because his earliest writings date from a period of relative maturity. The major themes in his writings have to do with expression and with the relationship of art to what might be called 'sensations before nature'. Matisse's painting is based upon a condensation of fleeting sensations, recorded in the drawings, into a permanent image on canvas. Thus, although throughout his writings he constantly stresses expression and freshness of conception, the dependence of the artist upon nature is also emphasized. Matisse's intuition is informed, as it were, by deep self-appraisal and by contemplation of natural forms; he at all times tries to avoid formulae. These concerns are to be found in his earliest published state: