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

what Parisian shambles leers at you — the economy of means employed and the results are alike
significant—and you flee into another room. The water-colors are Japanese in suggestion, though
not in spirit. They are impressionism run to blotches, mere patches of crude hectic tintings.
What Matisse can do in his finished performances we shall see later. His sketches are those of a
brilliant, cruel temperament. Nor has he the saving cynicism of a Toulouse-Lautrec. To be
cynical argues some interest; your pessimist is often a man of inverted sentiment. But Matisse is
only cold, the coldness of the moral vivisector.”
Elizabeth Luther Cary in the N. T. Times:
“In the ‘Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession,’ 291 Fifth Avenue, a collection of
drawings, lithographs, water-colors, and etchings by M. Henri Matisse, of Paris, are on view.
The water-colors, which are in the first room, are examples of the theory of the decomposition of
light pushed to its extreme limits and expressed with a kind of sophisticated naivete. Although the
uninitiated eye will be confused by the application of the color in streaks and dots of pure pigment,
the idea is, of course, far from a new one, and M. Matisse has a sense of form quite sufficient to
lead him to build up compositions in which dignity and balance are controlling factors?
“One or two of his little views of water and shore, vibrating with light and gay in color,
have a charm like that of broken snatches of song in the open air, disconnected yet suggestive
of the whole and spontaneously blithe. The drawings in the inner room are in the nature of
academics, showing a trained insight into problems of form and movement with a Gothic fancy for
the ugly and distorted, many of them amounting to caricatures without significance.”
The Scrip (June) said:
“The work of Henri Matisse is not well known in New York except to the men who have
lived in Paris of recent years or who are closely following the development of the latest work
of that eccentric and sometimes unbalanced city. During the month of April the Photo-Secession
Galleries, New York, had an exhibition of his drawings, lithographs, water-colors, and etchings.
An examination of this exhibition gave one the impression that Matisse is very modern and very
Parisian, a great master of technique — and a great artist, if estimated from the brilliant stroke, the
subtle elimination and the interesting composition revealed. But Matisse, like nearly all the other
very modern Frenchmen, feels that pull toward physical distortion, that sickening malevolent desire
to present the nude (especially women) so vulgarized, so hideously at odds with nature, as to
suggest in spite of the technical mastery of his art, first of all the loathsome and the abnormal,
and both with a marvel of execution and a bewildering cleverness that somehow fills one with
a distaste for art and life. This point of view would probably not obtain with an artist, because
first of all he would feel the consummate skill with which the Frenchman achieves his purpose; he
would not look at the subjects from the lay point of view. But the mere observer, who is bound
to take a little emotion to an interesting picture gallery, is pretty certain to find that emotion
unpleasantly stirred, in spite of the utmost desire to be impersonal and appreciative. Matisse
is at present the leading spirit of a group of ultra-modern Frenchmen, many of whom have great
gift with tragically decadent souls. But Paris adores Matisse and young France imitates him,
and the purely normal person wonders a good deal about it all.”

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