(3 of 5)
His paintings were never like armchairs, but there was something soothing in their luxurious brilliance, and they sold well enough to provide him with plenty of armchair comfort. "Tell the American people," he urged a reporter, "that I am a devoted husband and father . . . that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love . . . just like any man."
Now ill health limits Matisse's pleasures almost entirely to his work. He sees almost no one except the handsome Russian woman, Livia Delectorskaya, who has been his chief model, housekeeper, secretary and protector for 15 years. Livia rounds up other models for the master—a hard job in provincially prudish Vence. Sometimes she returns with the 26-year-old girl who is the town's one harlot, who describes Matisse as "a wonderfully sweet old man, always chattering while I pose." Matisse avoids fellow artists ("I can't see many people nowadays"). But the old man loves to have long chats with the town carpenter, who says he is "kindly and simple, but stubborn at times. The other day we were watching a sunset and I said, 'Just look at that wonderful streak of orange.' He replied, 'No, Jean, it's violet,' and he convinced me. Then I looked again and was mad at myself. It was really orange, you know."
For over 50 years, Matisse has been showering his work upon the world, and each picture, taken separately, has given some delight to some people. Have his long labors accomplished anything more than that? The answer is yes, much more, in spite of the fact that Matisse's avowed purpose has been simply to charm. He has not only enriched the history of art, but changed it.
Reality at a Click. The kind of art developed in Renaissance Italy seemed to be evaporating toward the end of the 19th Century, and at the bottom of the cup lay merely the dry brown sediment of academic illustration. Moreover, the most skillful academicians were unable to compete with photography. In painting, the illusion of reality required the laborious methods of perspective and chiaroscuro. With one click, cameras did the same thing more convincingly. For painting to compete as an art form, and to have something fresh to say painters had to find a new approach to their art.
The impressionists made a bold effort to start afresh. They went into the fields, where perspective laws barely apply, and painted in broad daylight, with the sun behind them, to shake the tyranny of shadows from their colors. The best results, done in bright contrasting dabs of pigment, shone with a fluid sparkle new to art, but surprisingly enough they still looked like windows on an illusory world. The revolution had just begun.