The Misery of Not Painting like others

Peter Campbell

  • The Unknown Matisse: Man of the North, 1869-1908 by Hilary Spurling
    Penguin, 480 pp, £12.99, April 2000, ISBN 0 14 017604 7
  • Matisse: Father and Son by John Russell
    Abrams, 416 pp, £25.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 8109 4378 6
  • Ruthless Hedonism: The American Reception of Matisse by John O’Brien
    Chicago, 284 pp, £31.50, April 1999, ISBN 0 226 61626 6
  • Matisse and Picasso by Yve-Alain Bois
    Flammarion, 272 pp, £35.00, February 1999, ISBN 2 08 013548 1

Because Matisse’s work (his late work, anyway) seldom involves any alienating display of skill or aggressive degree of difficulty, he persuades us that our ordinary visual pleasures could, were they to be extraordinarily intensified, be the same as his. He is thus vulnerable to the admirer’s revenge: to an intrusive assumption of intimacy on our part. His life was not a public one but even the simplest suppositions about it – that it must have been very pleasant to sit painting the girls, the fruit, the flowers and the bay beyond the balcony, for example, or to cut out shapes in coloured paper and then arrange them – are often wrong.

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Vol. 22 No. 8 · 13 April 2000 » Peter Campbell » The Misery of Not Painting like others (print version)
Pages 14-17 | 5746 words