Art: Speed

“Matisse . . . would have made an extraordinary career in the cinema . . .”

The French film director who said that spoke from experience: he had worked with Painter Matisse on a movie short, A Visit with Henri Matisse, that had Manhattan theatergoers gaping last week.

“The One I’ve Just Finished.” The film begins with routine shots of Matisse’s birthplace (Cateau-Cambrésis, in northern France) and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied. The narrator tells nothing of what makes Matisse one of the greatest painters living. But the moment the camera closes in on the 78-year-old master himself, Matisse takes charge. Blinking a little behind his gold-rimmed glasses (the floodlights apparently bothered him), Matisse faces the camera and his invisible interrogator with a grandfatherly smile, direct and forceful.

Voice: “What was the happiest period of your life?”

Matisse: “Oh, the hard times when I did not sell any pictures . . . Then I loved my pictures as a mother loves her unhappy children.”

Voice: “Of all your works, which is the one you prefer?”

Matisse: “Usually the one I’ve just finished . . . When I say it is finished, it means I can really go no further.”

What is the most essential duality in an artist? Says Matisse: “Hard work.” That sounded as if Matisse slaved over his paintings, and he does, though they never show it. The best of them look as if they had taken him a happy half-hour. In the film, Matisse gives away the secret of that effect, letting the camera peer over his shoulder while he draws his grandson’s portrait again & again and then paints a bit from a girl model. The secret: speed of execution (which need not imply hasty conception).

Matisse divides his attention equally between model and picture, turning from one to another with the quick, concentrated attention of a fan at a tennis match. When he looks at the model his brush hovers in midair; when he turns back to the canvas it hesitates a split second, then dips and weaves as swiftly as a swallow building a nest.

The Stages of Progress. Nonetheless, Matisse will spend months or even a year of intermittent work on the same picture before deciding he “can gono further” with it. When something seems wrong about a painting, he starts all over again.

Included in the film are photographs of Matisse’s The Peasant Blouse, made at 15 stages of progress over a period of five months. The painting began with a reasonably naturalistic and (for Matisse) timid sketch from a model. Every subsequent stage looks as complete as the final one, though not even the last version seems “finished”—a Matisse seldom does. In spite of the drastic changes Matisse made as he went along, every version brought his original conception more boldly into focus. His admirers might have accepted any of the early versions as a masterpiece, but not Matisse himself.