98
PARTISAN REVIEW
largest amount of his sculpture this country has yet had the chance to
see in one place. Regrettably, however,
his
landscapes are still scanted,
though they represent one of the most luminous sides of his art.
The New York show confirms what one had begun to recognize at
Philadelphia : that Matisse had not relaxed so much during the 'twenties
after all, even though he did go back to Chardin, Manet, the Impres–
sionist still-life of the 1870's, and a firm modeling of the figure. He
may have turned off the highway leading to abstract art and ceased
from spectacular adventuring, but it was not altogether the
detente
one used to think. He began to paint with a new subtlety and, as
he
extended and consolidated his command of the traditional methods of
painting, tradition itself received new light from the subtlety. He, the
great exponent of pure color as the means to form, showed what could
still be achieved by modeling with dark and light, and how this model–
ing could contribute to the tightness desired of modem composition–
just as, in the years between 1914 and 1918, he had demonstrated how
black and gray could approximate the effect of flat primary colors.
There is a habit of referring to Matisse as a decorator. The irony
is that pure decoration is the area in which he has failed oftenest. His
paper cut-outs, his ventures into applied art, and most of what I have
seen of his tapestry designs, book decorations, and even murals seem to
me the feeblest of the things he has done. He is an easel painter from
first to last; this is obscured-if it really is-only by the unprecedented
success of his efforts to assimilate decoration to the purposes of the
easel picture without at the same time weakening the integrity of the
latter. True, something like decorativeness seemed to have an adulter–
ating effect on his art during the 1930's and a large part of the 1940's,
but it was, in a manner of speaking, an accident. Matisse was flattening
and generalizing his motifs for the sake of a more abstract, "purer," and
supposedly more soothing effect. Cheerfulness in pictures
is
always a
little decorative anyhow, if it is at all sensuous. But the results were not
happy as art, though certainly amounting to much more than decoration.
How little a decorator Matisse is by instinct is borne out by his
sculpture. That it has real quality is not news, but the consistency and
range of that quality are. How explain how the artist who did perhaps
more than anyone else since Gauguin to exclude sculptural effect from
painting should be a great sculptor too-and a modeler at that, not a
constructor? The answer cannot be attempted here, and in any case the
originality of Matisse's sculpture, aside from its debt to Rodin, requires
much fuller discussion. One would also have to explain why painters in
the nineteenth century began to tum their hands to sculpture again
