Sep 13 2005
The Martisse Peter Schjeldahl Likes Us to Know
Aug 29 issue by Schjeldahl
Read the article online.
Viewed in the context of the overall American journalistic disposition, articles in New Yorker almost always have an ghostly air of Victorial detachment. Yet every once in a while, I find myself reading something that is not only intelligently cogent, but also emotionally naked and forceful. It is as if the author wrote the whole piece without breathing even once.
Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God.
He didn’t start drawing until he was 20 years old.
Matisse said to his fiancee, Amelie, “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.”
Of the 2nd painting (ever in his life), “Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on paiting.” Twenty years later, he had the same sentiment. Only stronger.
His view on art: … a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.
He designed a convent chapel in Vence, including 17 stained glass windows and several nearly abstract murals.
His earliest sponsor and collector was a Russian textile magnate, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.”
Lenin expropriated the collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain a caretaker.
Matisse’s wife and daughter all actively participated in French Resistence.