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Updated: August 12, 2024
Be that as it may, from Matisse there is little or nothing to be learned, since Matisse relies on his peculiar sensibility to bring him through. If you want to paint like him, feel what he feels, conduct it to the tips of your fingers, thence on to your canvas, and there you are. The counsel is not encouraging. These airy creatures try us too high.
The great modern painters Derain, Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Friesz, Braque, etc. were firmly settled on their own lines of development before ever Jazz was heard of: only the riff-raff has been affected. Italian Futurism is the nearest approach to a pictorial expression of the Jazz spirit. The movement bounced into the world somewhere about the year 1911.
It was no longer the Greek conception of form that prevailed on the banks of the Seine, or wherever art was produced. Art was become again, what the Orientals had always known it to be, significant form. It was as though Persia had been born again in Henri Matisse, for instance.
Only, it does appear to be true that whereas Matisse is a pure artist, Picasso is an artist and something more an involuntary preacher if you like. Neither, of course, falls into the habit of puffing out his pictures with literary stuff, though Picasso has, on occasions, allowed to filter into his art a, to me, most distasteful dash of sentimentality. That is not the point, however.
Then, at the right moment, he plunged headlong into the movement, became the student of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, though not, curiously enough, of Bonnard, the modern artist with whose work his own has the closest affinity, and, for a year or two, suffered his personality to disappear almost beneath the heavy, fertilizing spate. He painted French exercises. He was learning. He has learnt.
He was incomparably simple and unpretentious; they found his presence comfortable. But there is a question as to what they would have thought had they known that, lying awake in the morning, Milt unsmilingly repeated: "Hair always straight down at the back. Never rounded. Nix on clippers over the ears. "Matisse is a popular nut artist.
Also of this: it takes a more intense effort of the creative imagination to leave out what Tchehov leaves out of his short stories than to say what Meredith put into his long ones. In the Plutarchian method there was ever a snare, and I have come near treading in it. The difference between Matisse and Picasso is not to be stated in those sharp antitheses that every journalist loves.
In France, where even amateurs of painting enjoy a bit of rhetoric, for two or three days after the death of Renoir one could not be long in any of their haunts without being told either that "Renoir est mort et Matisse est le plus grand peintre de France" or that "Renoir est mort et Derain," etc.
The point is that whereas both create without commenting on life, Picasso, by some inexplicable quality in his statement, does unmistakably comment on art. That is why he, and not Matisse, is master of the modern movement. The knowing ones those, I mean, who are always invited to music after tea, and often to supper after the ballet seem now to agree that in art significant form is the thing.
Nor will they ever experience the joy of sudden decision in front of a picture by Matisse, which ends in the sale of a Delacroix. I know a lady in Paris whose salon presents a different aspect each summer. Do her Picassos go, a new Spanish painter has replaced them. Have you missed the Gibbons carving? Spanish church carving has taken its place. "And where are your Venetian embroideries?"
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