Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

jury, composed wholly of Academicians, to decide which wall exhibits the greatest vitality. We
hold no brief for this new movement; we doubt whether we shall ever be convinced by it, but we
cannot help seeing there is vitality in it, and we advise any one who is interested in what is going on
among the men who are trying to get rid of what they consider deadwood in art to visit the galleries
and get Alfred Stieglitz’s views. He is about the only one of the Photo-Secession band who seems
to be able to explain what the men are trying to do.”
Mr. Mather in the “Evening Post”:
“The little collection of drawings by Henri Matisse, at the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth
avenue, has already been briefly described. A second visit suggests certain critical afterthoughts.
It would be well if the visitor could forget that Matisse is the object of a cult, the reputed possessor
of strange secrets and philosophies, the regenerator of the torpid art of the age. It would be well
to ignore all this and suppose that these are anonymous sketches which the post has brought to
Mr. Stieglitz, and which have so warmed his heart that he has asked his friends in to see them.
Looked at in this way, the dread Matisses would lose all their portentousness. We should see
merely a handful of peculiarly serious and drastic studies from the nude model. They are no more
odd than working drawings usually are. Matisse’s concern is in the tension, weight, and equipoise
of the figure as a whole. He merely spots in the features, as negligible quantities, though now and
then a skeletonized face has extraordinary character. If he had merely omitted the features, as
draftsmen of the figure often do, seven-eighths of the repellant oddity of this work would disappear.
As it is, the visitor must not bother about the faces, but keep his eye on the whole design until its
energy and rhythm strike home.
“Matisse conceives the body as a powerful machine working within certain limits of balance.
The minute form of the tackles and levers does not signify for him, what counts is the energy ex-
pended and the eloquent pauses which reveal the throb of the mechanism. The important thing is
that muscles should draw over the bone pulleys, that the thrust of a foreshortened limb should be
keenly felt, that all the gestures should fuse in a dynamic pattern. So much for the vision. It
differs in no essential respect from that of great draughtsmen of all ages. A Matisse drawing,
looked at without prejudice, is no more bizarre than a study of action by Hokusai or Michelangelo.
It belongs in the great tradition of all art that has envisaged the human form in terms of energy and
counterpoise. Look at any of these drawings, the walking woman so sensitively balanced, the
crouching woman, she who averts some attack, she who stands firmly with her leg doubled back
sharply on a chair. In the last drawing note how the bulk, and retreat, of an almost invisible calf
of the foreshortened leg is indicated by a single powerful stroke that tells of the tension athwart
the knee. Such drawing is odd only because it is so fine that much of it there cannot be. The near-
est analogies to these sketches are those remarkable tempera studies by Tintoretto which have
recently been discovered and published in part in the Burlington Magazine. In fact, Matisse is
akin to all the artists who approach the figure with what Vasari calls furia. The Frenchman is a
kind of modern Pollaiolo.
“His originality lies less in vision than in a strenuous economy of workmanship. He will
have the fewest contours and the most expressive, will not shirk any syncopation or exaggeration
where he seeks an effect. That his method is really more concise than that of Michelangelo may be
doubted. Hokusai’s is certainly more direct and simple and equally potent. A calculated rough-
ness which occasionally disguises itself as the queer linear slackness with which Rodin has familiar-
ized us, brings Matisse’s manner very close to that of the aboriginal designers who scratched animal
forms on bones in times pre-historic, or only yesterday adorned with admirable animal paintings the
caves of the South African veldt. These savage masterpieces show the same keen sense for balance
and significant action. Matisse is reputed to have individual and novel theories about counterpoise,
correlation of gesture, etc. It may be so, but these drawings merely suggest a fresh attitude toward
the model, and a desire for unhackneyed poses. That some doctrine may be involved is sug-
gested in those caricatures in which he bloats and distorts the figure, evolving a grotesquely expres-
sive pattern out of a pose that already grazes the impossible. The ingenuity of such studies will
escape any but a trained eye. Perhaps he is experimenting to ascertain the bounds of the physic-
ally possible and pictorially credible. It would be like the eminently intelligent and experimental
nature of the man to do so.
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