Art: Two Kinds

No one really expected Painter Henri Matisse to bother to answer the attack that British Royal Academy President Sir Alfred Munnings had made on his work (TIME, May 9). But last week Matisse did. Sitting up in bed in his suburban apartment at Nice to talk to a TIME correspondent, the 79-year-old master gently contradicted Horse-Painter Munnings’ views on modern art in general.

“If you want to paint a tree,” gruff Sir Alfred had snorted at a recent R.A. banquet, “for heaven’s sake make it look like a tree!” Matisse’s La Forêt (in London’s Tate Gallery) did not look a bit like trees to Sir Alfred. Argued Matisse, why should it? Such “material truth,” he said, might as well be left to photography. The truth modern painters like himself are after is something else again; it “comes out of the mind of the artist . . . the sentiment of an artist moved by the spectacle of nature.”

“There are always two kinds of paintings,” Matisse went on. “First there is the kind that introduces something new. Such paintings begin by being worthless but eventually they ascend the heights of value. Then there are those which are accepted at the outset because they offer nothing new but simply flatter the public taste. They are later found to be worthless.”

The story of Matisse’s own career clearly made him an example of the first kind of painter. Could he think of an opposite example? “Charity commands me,” said Matisse with a smile, “not to name any artists who do paintings of the second sort.”