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

features again are portrayed in this rudimentary way, and the chin slopes into
the neck with a suggestion of imbecility. But the drawing of the limbs and
torso are worse yet; one leg, for example, is palpably bigger than the other;
and, while some of the lines have a fine sweep of movement, passages occur
that seem to you like the fumbling of a person who cannot draw. The
grotesqueness of the whole thing shocks you. It is impressionism run mad!
But a visit to Matisse does not endorse this hasty surmise. When I
entered the big building—a disused convent—in which he works, the first
sight I encountered was that symbol of domestic conformity, a baby carriage,
and the next the father himself, a stocky simple person, in appearance a sane
and healthy bourgeois. No suggestion of the decadent esthete; still less of the
poseur or charlatan. He shows me a series of drawings from the nude. In
the first, he explains that he has drawn “what exists”; and the drawing shows
the knowledge and skill, characteristic of French academic art. Then others
follow in which he has sought for further and further “simplification,” until
finally the figure, as he expressed it, was organise. To the academician it
may appear spoilt, brutalised or enfeebled, at any rate ridiculous. But for
Matisse’s own purpose it has been “organized,” brought into conformity with
his controlling purpose. And the latter, he explains, is to sacrifice everything
to unity; so that you may be able to see the composition as a whole without
any interruption.
He sees me looking at some wooden figures carved by African natives.
These with some fragments of Egyptian sculpture are almost the only objects,
besides pictures, in his studio. As he passes his hand over the wooden fig-
ures, he utters one word, “Simplification.” Meanwhile, it does not escape
me that the incised lines and the treatment of the planes in these figures,
bear a close analogy to his own method of drawing and modeling; and I note
that his figures have a feeling of quiet self-contained bulk, corresponding to
the old African carver’s expression in wood.
Then, as he talks about the importance of form, and especially
the need of preserving and relying on its plasticity, he leads me to another
room, where in the big emptiness of the surroundings he is modeling a figure
in clay. It is a woman, seated cross-legged, and it has the proud, poignant
aloofness of Chinese hieratic sculpture, and something also of the plastic
stability, yet nervous calm, of an Egyptian statue.
In fact it is toward Oriental art that Matisse leans in his study of how
to simplify. His simplification is not for the purpose of rendering more
vividly the actuality of form ; it is to secure a unity of expression in the in-
terpretation of an abstract idea. And he is seeking for the source of the
motive and the means of achieving it in primitive art, even in what in our
sophistication we too hastily reject as the era of the child-man in art.

A few days ago I saw Miss Isadora Duncan in her dance interpretive
of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which Wagner described as “An Apo-
theosis of the Dance.” It appears that some of the musical pundits of the
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