KAREN WILKIN
125
was selected. In New York, the international flavor of the Academie was
evoked by including works by Matisse's American students, Patrick
Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles, Alfred Maurer, Morgan Russell, and
Max Weber, plus the Englishman, Matthew Smith, and the Germans,
Rudolf Levy, Oskar Moll, and Hans Purrmann-the "head student"
who acted as a liaison with the master himself-along with some of
Matisse's own drawings of the period. The show was not an assembly
of masterpieces-many works on view were testimony to their authors'
efforts to come to terms with a new pictorial language-but it was
nonetheless fascinating because it broadened our view of Matisse and
introduced us to artists celebrated in their own countries, but
unknown here.
At the time he ran the Academie, Matisse was testing the limits of his
Fauve manner, freely constructing pictures by setting pure, intense hues
side by side, yet it's clear that he discouraged his students from using
unmodulated color for its own sake. Matisse's work always took as its
point of departure his intense awareness of the spatial complexity of the
perceivable world, translated into eloquent two-dimensionality, and his
teaching which emphasized free, but acutely observed drawing and the
use of tonal modeling to recreate perceptions of forms in space, seems
to have been designed both to provide a thorough grounding and to
sharpen his students' awareness of the things that concerned him most.
Not surprisingly, the exhibition suggested that while most students
mastered a robust, economical way of capturing form in line and some
succeeded in modeling with (relatively subdued) color, few managed to
construct wholly compelling pictures. Max Weber's little painting of the
Academie studio, with the cast of the Apollo Belvedere from which the
leader of the vanguard obliged his students to draw, was an exception.
It
is a firmly organized composition reminiscent of one of Matisse's own
paintings from his student days. Three studies of the same ample model
from essentially the same viewpoint by Ludvig Karsten, Henrik
S0rensen, and Alf Lundeby were also exceptional for their sumptuous
color, convincing sense of heft, and inventive relationships of figure to
setting. I'd be eager to see what these artists did after leaving the
Academie; at the Studio School, as in Lillehammer, the Scandinavian
artists were represented exclusively by works made under Matisse's
tutelage. The paintings and drawings by international artists added for
the New York showing included selections from both the Matisse years
and about a decade afterwards, which afforded useful comparisons. Not
that the "mature" works necessarily criticized the student efforts.
Matthew Smith was represented by two later pictures: a still life of
1922
