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Such post-impressionists as Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne wrenched the wheel further around, by refusing to paint precisely what they saw. They also painted what they felt about it, and they inclined to look more at their pictures than at their subjects. It remained for the living moderns, led by Picasso and Matisse, to give the final twist. A painting, they decided, is a painting first and foremost, and whatever it represents must be secondary. Granted that much, they felt perfectly justified in making their own rules, regardless of "appearances." Some (the nonobjective painters) chose to ignore nature altogether, but Henri Matisse never went that far.
Because Picasso's vision was predominantly sculptural, his new rules had mostly to do with form. He thought it might be interesting to break up the forms in nature and rearrange them on canvas—cubism. Matisse was most excited by colors; he did roughly the same kaleidoscope stunt with them—and took art back to the days of the Byzantines and medieval monks, whose flat, glowing illuminations symbolized instead of trying to counterfeit reality.
Ignoring the infinitely various hues of nature, pre-Renaissance and Eastern artists used the clearest colors they could find, combining them in arbitrary and surprising harmonies. They elided, exaggerated, twisted, destroyed, repeated and transposed the contours of real objects in order to draw lines with an integrated life and rhythm of their own—staccato in Byzantine mosaics and stained glass, sinuous in Chinese brush drawings, Japanese prints, Persian miniatures and Turkish rugs.
Picasso found a traditional basis for cubism in primitive African sculpture: the tradition Matisse chose to explore had never quite disappeared from Europe. It still existed in playing cards, tattooing and music-hall posters. They created no illusion of space or of sculptural form, though understanding some of them meant reading form and space into their flat designs. They delighted the eye through an interplay of only two elements: color and line. Matisse set out to do the same.
The High Cost of Rhythm. He once described himself as a seaplane which needed the old masters as pontoons for his own takeoff; it would have been more correct to call the old masters one pontoon and non-European art the other. Like Delacroix, he had visited North Africa and returned with a lasting predilection for harem props and paraphernalia. Unlike the earlier Frenchman, he found an ancient way of seeing as well.
The Hindu Pose shows how Matisse synthesized East & West, new & old. The painting makes a flat pattern, but it can easily be read as a design-in-depth; Matisse saw no reason to unlearn all he knew about putting form and space into a picture. It reflects his infatuation with twining arabesques, but they are tempered by a Northern severity, a love of right angles and straight lines. The figure of his odalisque is ruthlessly reshaped to fit the pattern, regardless of anatomy and proportion, and still has charm enough to veil every deformity.