Art: Simple Lines

Color is perhaps Henri Matisse’s chief claim to fame—he paints with colors that are as loud as a Marine band, as subtly harmonious as a Bach cantata. But “what counts most in a picture,” says 76-year-old Matisse, “is drawing and composition.” Last week 22 of his black-&-white pen-&-pencil drawings went on view at the Manhattan gallery of his son, Pierre Matisse. It was the first show to come out of France since the war, and it revealed the French master at his joyful best.

The drawings, made during the Nazi occupation of France, were simple, linear statements of the things Matisse likes most to see—flowers, faces and figures. He believes art should be a “mental soother . . . devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter. … It is through [the human figure] that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. … I do not care to repeat [details] with anatomical exactness.” The pictures look as though Matisse had been looking at the model, not the paper, and acting out what he saw with fine, free-swinging gestures of his right hand. “When you draw a tree,” he explains, “you should have the feeling to reach up with it.”