Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 25))

HENRI MATISSE AND ISADORA DUNCAN

[SMONG the sculptors, painters and critics, quoted in the latest issue
J of Camera Work, there were only two men who dissented from
^ the proposition that photography may be a form of artistic ex-
54 pression, and one of these was Henri Matisse. He regards pho-

tography as a source of documents, valuable to the artist for their richness of
suggestion; a means to an end, not an end in itself. Therefore the photog-
rapher should not tamper with the record. Let the objectivity of the latter
be completely preserved.
This opinion is interesting in its self-revelation of Matisse, whose own
motive is to get away from objectivity and to make his pictures interpret an
abstract idea. While he has a small but ardent following in Paris, to the
great majority of artists and critics his work is betise. Some one dubbed
him and his group Les Fauves ; and the name has stuck; and certainly from
the ordinary standpoint of appreciation and criticism <c The Wild Men ” have
justified it. To the academic painter their pictures are an inconceivable out-
rage ; to the impressionist, as offensive as those of the original impressionists
were to the conservatives of their own day.
To the student, however, who keeps aloof from the clatter of cliques
and tries to understand each man in the light of the man’s own intentions,
some questions arise: Is Matisse a charlatan? If not, is he, though not try-
ing to deceive others, a victim of self-deception ? On the other hand, is it pos-
sible that a later generation may endorse at least his motive, just as today we
endorse the motive, if not all the productions, of impressionism ?
What is his motive ? As he himself explains it, it is the effort to inter-
pret the feeling which the sight of an object stirs in him. This has a familiar
sound. Yes, there is nothing novel in the general motive of Matisse. The
novelty begins to appear in its application. He too is an impressionist,
but with a difference. It is not the ocular but the mental impression that he
is intent on rendering, which again has a ring not unfamiliar. But his
difference consists in the big gap which appears between the ocular and the
mental impression. For example, I saw a picture of a woman. The original
I was told, had a band of orange and scarlet ribbon around her throat and
waist; otherwise she was dressed from head to foot in black. So much for
the ocular impression. This, however, when it had filtered through his men-
tal vision, emerged as a brilliant color scheme of rose, purple, peacock-green
and blue, with a prevalence throughout of greenish suggestion. Why not, you
reply? He was not bound to represent the woman as you or I might have
seen her. How much better, if the contrast of yellow, red and black sug-
gested to his imagination a sumptuous and subtle color harmony, that he
should create it.
Yes, as an abstract proposition, such a course seems admirable. But
you examine the picture in detail, the features of the face have been drawn
in with lines of the brush, very crudely as it seems, almost like a child’s hand-
ling of the brush. Then you turn to another picture, this time of a nude. The