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

Elizabeth Luther Cary in the “New York Times”:
“At the Photo-Secession Galleries are the drawings by Matisse and the photographs of his
paintings which are intended to lead the public gradually toward appreciation and comprehension
of his theories of color, which are his only original contribution to modern art, and, for that matter,
no more strictly original than Velasquez’s system of grays and blacks or Monet’s system of broken
tones, which were only the fulfilment of theories long before tentatively put into practice. There
is a good deal of nonsense spoken about the difficulty of getting at the inner meaning of these inno-
vators. Their inner meaning is usually no more than the effort to get life into old forms of expres-
sion. In the matter of drawing it is hardly too much to say that this is always the case—in the mat-
ter of color there is more fresh news coming from the impact of art and science.
“The Matisse drawings that are on exhibition are out of place in a public gallery. They are
studio affairs, and every pupil of the Art Students’ League or graduate of Julian’s would see in a
moment that they indicate an immense knowledge of the human figure and a powerful draftsman-
ship. We happened the other day upon a little figure drawing by Gleyre, Whistler’s early master,
and knocked about nowadays by ‘modern’ critics for being academic. It looked very much like
a number of these ‘academics’ drawn by the great Matisse. There is this difference. Matisse
enjoys, as Degas did, facing the most difficult problem possible. For this reason he poses his
figures in all sorts of tortured positions, to interrogate the pull on the muscles, the folds of the flesh,
the geometry of the planes, etc. We assume this to be his reason for choosing many of his poses;
at all events, this is what he gets out of it.
“Some of the drawings are more than studies. There is a woman leaning forward, resting
her weight on her arms, that is Egyptian in the expression of bulk and coherence. In this figure
with its rich, palpitating line, its structural forms hewn out of bold masses of light and shadow,
its big, vulgar, imposing realism, we have a clumsy but masterly creation. Then there is another
figure drawing, this time a draped figure of a peasant girl in a picturesque peasant costume, that
throws a strong light on what Matisse and others of his class (he has a class) have accomplished
with their persistent and furious investigation of the contours of flesh and the anatomy of muscle
and framework. Here we have a subject that every one has used, the kind of thing that was chosen
not so many years ago for a parlor decoration, painted on a tambourine, the kind of thing water-
colorists brought back with them in myriad examples from Italy in their sketch boxes. As a sub-
ject nothing could be more invested with banal associations. What does Matisse make of it ? A
live creature, with a face that might have absorbed the hardness of some rock-set mountain village,
a figure heavy with much eating, massive and muscular with much exercise, a narrow brow, a big
waist—watching her you see her amble with the dignity of some tame beast of the pastures across
the bit of paper on which he has placed her. That, of course, is what draftsmanship of the search-
ing sort does. It takes any subject and makes it the artist’s own, the arch-type from which all
interpretations of it seem a weakened version. And this is the sort of thing that we may invite the
public to behold—this, and the forcible self-portrait, the two versions of a dinner table, the spark-
ling bouquet of flowers, the gaunt feminine head with its planes carved out beneath the veil of
skin, and apparently no intervening tissue. We do not ourselves believe in taking the public into
the workroom where they criticise without knowledge, condemn without reason, and are honestly
at sea.
“Matisse is heralded here by a certain group of devotees as the master of a school whose in-
fluence shall spread. It may be so, but we doubt it. To us he seems to be the final word of that
gorgeous hymn to abstract color raised by Cezanne, or possibly by some less famous predecessor.
If there is anything to be done with the theory beyond his expression of it we cannot forecast it.
We seem to see, instead, a crowd of feebler minds turning it into a more or less incoherent babbling
and finally permitting it to die out altogether. It remains to be proved, however, and in the mean-
time he is one of the masters of form, and in his least experimental essays a lover of that geometry
on which classic art is founded.”

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