Now, in his
old age, he is producing shoals of drawings the most extraordinary of
which few are permitted to see. Some selected specimens of them hang in
a long row in the Metropolitan Museum, and I assure you, upon my word as
a lifelong student of drawing, they are quite as ugly and as silly as
they look. There is not a touch in them that has any truth to nature,
not a line that has real beauty or expressiveness. They represent the
human figure with the structure of a jellyfish and the movement of a
Dutch doll; the human face with an expression I prefer not to
characterize. If they be not the symptoms of mental decay, they can be
nothing but the means of a gigantic mystification.
With Henri Matisse we have not to deplore the deliquescence of a great
talent, for we have no reason to suppose he ever had any. It is true
that his admirers will assure you he could once draw and paint as
everybody does; what he could _not_ do was to paint enough better than
everybody does to make his mark in the world; and he was a quite
undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon
his grandmother the public by shocking her into attention. His method is
to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most
grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner
of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible;
to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to
paint them in crude and staring colors, brutally laid on in flat masses.
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