Art: Rainbow’s End

Henri Matisse died last week, and the most brilliant fountain of light and color in modern art was sealed.

He died in the quiet of a Riviera late afternoon, in his hotel apartment overlooking Nice. His secretary, his nurse, his doctor and a daughter were with him. For 14 years he had remarkably survived the ravages of intestinal cancer, although doctors, in 1941, had given him only six months to live. But at 84, Matisse’s heart finally stopped.

Within hours of his death, the living began to reckon Matisse’s achievements. London Critic T. W. Earp called him “one of painting’s lyric poets.” In Paris, the French Minister of Education stated that Matisse commanded “the most French of palettes.” Jack-of-Arts Jean Cocteau went further without stretching the truth very much: “He was a bright sun.”

A Matter of Fun. On a more down-to-earth level, Matisse was a pleasant, plump and proper bundle of paradoxes. He was finicky in his dress as he was daring in art; a pleasure-lover in his leisure time and a puritan in the studio. His pink face was bearded and benevolent; his slate blue eyes coolly attentive. He would discuss art lucidly and at length with all comers, punctuating his remarks by precise gestures of his small, square hands. Matisse knew his field as well, perhaps, as one man can. He tilled it conscientiously, and enlarged it courageously. Yet he maintained that painting is more instinctive than intellectual—a matter of fun, not formulae. “The important thing,” he insisted, “is to keep the naiveté of childhood. You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard, or love is within the lover.”

A grain merchant’s son, born in Picardy, Matisse began a stumbling art apprenticeship at 20. He studied for a while under Adolphe Bouguereau (a sort of defrosted Ingres) and then under the minor painter and great teacher Gustave Moreau. He practiced and trained and worked, for as he was to tell his own students years later, “One must learn to walk firmly on the ground before one tries the tightrope.” To support himself, he tried copying masterpieces in the Louvre—and learned to his dismay that the wives and daughters of the museum guards were better copyists than he.

Emancipation Day. After some years, he began to have a modest reputation for mahogany-brown canvases. He himself decided that they were stale as last week’s coffee, and turned to impressionism. His impressionist works dazzled some critics, but failed to satisfy their creator. One day he destroyed a just-finished still life, simply because “it did not express me or express what I felt.” He counted his emancipation from that day, but at the turn of the century Matisse was still trying to find his true path.

A painting, he decided, is above all a painting and not a picture. Whatever it represents is secondary; the lines and colors on the canvas are what matter. So in stead of holding a mirror up to nature, he decided to make free with her. That set tled, he spread his former paintings on the floor and regarded them as from a great distance.They showed that he had studied nature long and hard. Also, he “found something that was always the same and which at first glance I thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality … I made an effort to develop this personality by counting above all on my intuition … I said to myself: ‘I have colors, a canvas, and I must express myself with purity.’ ”

Green Hair. The pure Matisse emerged at Paris’ Autumn Salon of 1905. His works were hung in a room apart, with those of some other young rebels named Rouault, Derain and Vlaminck. A critic promptly dubbed them Les Fauves—”Wild Beasts.” Never since the Dark Ages (when artist-monks symbolized reality, instead of trying to counterfeit it, in their illuminations) had painters used colors so arbitrarily. Matisse’s colors were the brightest he could buy, brushed in flat and separated by dancing lines. A tree might be turquoise or tangerine, a river russet, a girl gold, with green hair.

From then on, Matisse’s art changed only superficially, yet met with steadily growing acceptance and eventually with acclaim. He became a millionaire, and the world’s great museums vied for the honor of exhibiting his work. Shining land, sea and streetscapes lay just outside his tall, half-shuttered windows at Nice; he brought them indoors onto canvas. His scores of “odalisques”—with a bosomy local girl posing amid a few harem props —were among his best-known pictures, not so much cheesecake as souffle, not so much woman’s form as woman’s charm.

By 1948 even the U.S. knew him well; that year he was accorded a great retrospective by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in 1951 by Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art.

Simple Beauty. Matisse’s style was sinuous as Chinese brush drawing, clearcut as Persian miniatures, and sometimes as flat as Turkish rugs; his art had ancestors around the globe. Beauty of the most serene and sensuous sort, achieved by the simplest means possible, was always his goal. He never tired of it, and consistently splendid triumphs of the pursuit flowed from his brush until he died. No 20th century painter had higher esthetic standards—or met them more often.

But standards, however lucidly set or economically met, are by no means the whole of art, and the 20th century has produced at least three painters who rival Matisse in importance: Wassily Kandinsky (for daring), Paul Klee (for imagination) and Pablo Picasso (for passion). Picasso, the only one still living, has always been more easily bored than the others, and has always come back bursting with new beauties. If much of his work is mud, the best is thunder and lightning which makes Matisse’s rainbow splendor seem a bit thin by comparison.

Paper Cutting. In his latter years, Matisse was often sick. A girl who later became a Dominican nun nursed him during World War II, and Matisse, with the generosity of genius, later reciprocated with what he hoped would be his “masterpiece”—a chapel in the Provencal village of Vence. The entire chapel and all it contains is Matisse-designed, yet the ensemble does not quite hang together (perhaps because Matisse was unused to working in three dimensions). But the stained glass windows are glorious; Matisse planned them by scissoring bits of colored paper and pasting them in semi-abstract patterns.

Between the completion of the windows and his death, the old man sat up in bed to paste together a number of pictures the same way. To visitors puzzled by the triviality of his materials and the childlike insouciance with which he handled them, he majestically explained that such work “might be compared to direct carving in sculpture—the same thing accomplished in color that Michelangelo did in stone . . . the result of my long career.” Examples such as his I cams (see cut) almost justified the boast. For variety he sometimes fastened charcoal to a long stick and with the stick sketched on wall or ceiling.

Matisse’s joy in life did not dim toward the end, nor did his art.* But he was sometimes troubled by the thought that the sum total of his influence on young painters would be negative. “I have always tried to hide my own efforts,” he wrote, “and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime . . . So I am afraid that the young, seeing in my work only the apparent facility and negligence in the drawing, will use this as an excuse for dispensing with certain efforts which I believe necessary.”

What efforts? Matisse had a proud, joyful answer: “An artist must possess nature. He must identify himself with her rhythm.”

*Last year he presented his home town, Le Cateau, with 100 of his works. An estimated 2,000 of his pictures were still in his own collection when he died.