A,RT CHRONICLE
"FEELING IS ALL"
We cannot be too often reminded how decisive honesty is in
art.
It will not guarantee success-the artist has to have something to be
honest with and about-but it is not entirely separate from the procedure
of talent. Honesty and talent elicit each other. Without talent honesty
is
left incomplete, as can be seen from the example of the naive or
"primitive" painter, which is not altogether attributable to lack of
culture. Integral and honest talent makes the artist aware of what he
omits, and makes him signify it. Without honesty talent is, of course, left
in a void. But the honest artist is not pure
in
heart-<>r if he is, he bores
us, as even Rousseau
le douanier
has lately begun to do. The truth is too
full to be pure.
Matisse's early work, as seen in his large retrospective exhibition at
the Museum of Modern Art, offers a lesson in all this. Like any young
artist, he worked at first in manners acquired from others, and appears
to have proceeded slowly, but just as much because he was afraid to
traduce his feelings as because of lack of confidence. He did not want
to be original, he wanted to be true. The only reason for striving for
independence was that other painters' styles required that he feel al–
together the way they had, which he did not. He went on doubting
himself, unwilling or unable to be facile, for ten, fifteen years after he
had begun painting. He was plagued by hesitations long after he had
broken with the Impressionist canon of the well-made picture and had
gone into quite unknown territory-and the hesitations were open, not
dissembled like those of Picasso.
The Museum of Modern Art's Matisse show is not as large as the
one at the Philadelphia Museum in 1948, but though duplicating a
good deal of the latter, as it must, it strikes one as better chosen. It has
the benefit, moreover, of several of the series of brilliant interiors
painted late in 1947 and early in 1948, which are Matisse's strongest
work since the 'twenties. In addition, it contains some of his recent
designs for the decoration and objects in a Dominican chapel in Vence,
in the south of France; and, even more important, presents us with the
