Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 23))

“ And there are some female figures that are of an ugliness that is most appalling and haunting,
and that seems to condemn this man’s brain to the limbo of artistic degeneration. On the strength
of these things of subterhuman hideousness, I shall try to put Henri Matisse out of my mind for
the present.”
Charles DeKay in the N. T. Evening Post:
“ The legend of el Dorado, the cacique who draped himself every morning before breakfast
with a fresh suit of skin-tight gold dust, seems to have revived in Europe after a slumber of several
centuries, and the land of the Dorado, never absolutely fixed on the map, seems to be now located
as the island once owned by the Manhattoes, and now by the Irish and Italians. In respect of
art, at any rate, the pull of New York upon the foreign practitioner is deep and steady. But
because in music there are to be gained prizes beyond the dreams of avarice, it is a woeful fact that
save in portraiture the harvest of art is small. Disappointment is in store for most of these artists
who cross the Atlantic, buoyed up by hopes of gain, unless their branch is the flattery of persons.
“That is why M. Henri Matisse will have to be content with a barren success of curiosity
for the sketches in color, and pen-and-ink and the etchings, that are to be seen in the Little Gallery of
the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue. Monsieur Matisse, whose name is a song, takes art
very seriously, and would die rather than make a concession to the kind of beauty in art which
rouses and delights the sentiment of the bourgeoisie. He was the most reviled and lauded
exhibitor at the Salon d’Automne; before his pictures people came almost to the polisson and
gredin stage, flourished fists were more gesticulatory than dangerous, and faces of contempt made
at one another.
“We understand at once, having seen the studio lady with her head removed and put on
crooked again like the sitters of M. Aman-Jean, and the strand scene consisting of seven or eight
layers of water-color on a virgin leaf. The clock of time goes round. How many years ago was
it that Messrs. Currier and Frank Duveneck used to send over from Munich to the water-color
shows those landscapes in which the trees were broad, green and yellow worm-tracks meandering
up and down an innocent Bristol board ?
“Well, M. Matisse sees them and goes them several better. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is a worn
phrase; ‘the sketch for the sketch’s sake’ may be invented to-day to meet the confusion into
which M. Matisse must throw an unsophisticated New York public by offering it something for
which no glib phrase is current. Each scrap of design appears to remark that it is all by itself,
and so full of genius, ’twere cruel to use it for a larger sketch. So here we have Rodinesque
swirls in outline and mashy-dashy pen-and-ink nudes, and languorous hints and colored maplets, in
which the artist has striven to revert to childhood’s sunny hour when a pad and a box of water-
colors, in conjunction with an artistic temperament in embryo, produced astonishing results.”
James Huneker in the N. T’. Sun:
“For agility of line, velocity in its notation and an uncompromising attitude in the presence
of the human machine, we must go to the exhibition of drawings, lithographs, water-colors, and
etchings by Henri Matisse at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue.
Take the smallest elevator in town and enjoy the solitude of these tiny rooms crowded with the
phantoms of Stieglitz and Steichen. No one will be there to greet you, for Stieglitz has a habit of
leaving his doors unlocked for the whole world to flock in at will. And it is in just such uncon-
ventional surroundings that the work of Matisse is best exhibited. The brown bit of paper that
does duty as a preface tells us that this fierce rebel is a leading spirit of a modern group of French
artists dubbed ‘Les Fauves.’ Durand-Ruel owns pictures by Matisse and will probably show
them here next season. The French painter is clever, diabolically clever. Lured by the neo-
impressionists, by Gauguin’s South Sea sketches, he has outdone them all by his extravagances.
His line, its zigzag simplifications evidently derived from the Japanese, is swirling and strong.
With three furious scratches he can give you a female animal in all her shame and horror.
Compared to these memoranda of the gutter and brothel the sketches of Rodin (once exhibited in
this gallery) are academic, are meticulous. There is one nude which the fantasy of the artist has
turned into a hideous mask. The back of a reclining figure is on the wall opposite, and it is
difficult not to applaud, so virile and masterly are its strokes. Then a creature from God knows
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