Status Updates From The Unknown Matisse: A Life...

He taught me that in order to find your own way you must sometimes overturn the critiques as in the art that you were brought up to learn. The school and authority were to preserve their own genius, but sometimes the future is so grotesque that they will never accept it, but that is the way a new way of seeing can sprout

His life was a season of criticism after criticism and disbelief of his work. But you must remain true to it
People will only flock to you for answers after you’ve made it, until when will you is the path you should undertake on your own

What strikes me most is still the amount of failure and uncertainty a revolutionary must have in its tracks. It is bizarre how unpopular his opinions are but HE STUCK TO HIS PRINCIPLES, and will be an example to the swift and hurtful comments you must take if you want to take up a path that is so different from others. It will not be a comfortable ride

This book was a bit lengthy and with immense amount of research down to detail of his past

It was a good reminder that it doesn’t have to be “what you wanted to do since you were a kid…”, but more of when it takes firm root. The root presupposes everything else. And then you can take off! Not bound by age!

Reading about a famous painter that I don’t yet know and about his history was inspiring, and it’s bizarre and yet supremely relatable to know that I feel the same way as he does in his younger years, and it provides a lot of faith for me as I struggle on my own path. That this struggle can lead to a place of content

He said that art should be as soothing as a good armchair

If there is order and clarity in the picture, it means that from the outset this same order and clarity existed in the mind of the painter
Or that the painter was conscious of their necessity

Perhaps even more important he had found in Picasso a rival whose phenomenally swift reactions and implacably demanding eye would challenge him to the limit
Above all he had learned to contain and channel in his work the chaotic, choking surges of ungovernable emotion that had made him a painter in the first place

For the first time in the 2 decades since he had become a painter he could propose a tentative toast to the future
However much abuse he still had to endure at the hands of the press, the public and the art establishment, he could count as always on his family, especially his wife and daughter

Relative affluence had not changed the family priorities

He talks as if he had never done anything but look and reflect
One felt in contact with a being of astonishing vigour, entirely absorbed in art

Suddenly I stood in front of a wall that sang, no, screamed a colour and radiated light
“Something completely new and ruthless in its unbridled freedom…”

Signac could forgive neither the death of treachery laid bare in the work of his former friends nor the speed with which faucism had eclipsed Neo Impressionism as the latest rage in Paris

Shchukin understood instinctively the syntax of the new pictorial language Matisse was evolving
Freshness and nobility were the qualities he prized most highly in Matisse’s work in the summer of 1908

Colour was the driving force in his experiments at this stage

Intense concentration alternated with fits of unrest
For once he could not fall back on Marquet, always a safe companion in Matisse’s flights from the demons of doubt and dissatisfaction

…who sensed rather than saw her white blouse turn green on canvas one day and blue the next, as a living harmony of colour grew beneath the painter’s hand

For the first time since he had plunged headlong into painting at the age of 20 Matisse had found time in the past 8 months to raise his eyes from the immediate struggle long enough to look back at the ground he had already covered
And forward to the unknown territory ahead

The high point was cezanne’s 3 bathers
“His silence before it was more evocative and eloquent than words. A spirit of elation and awe pervaded the studio at such times”

GOOD COLOURS SING, he would say
It is melodious, aroma like, never over baked
Painting was like carpentry or constructing a house
You can see the colours of the skirting slabs, the cornice, the walls and shutters that build a unity, a living unity, which is what a painting needs

He urged his students to analyse form, to search for harmony, to TRUST THEIR INSTINCTS, to concentrate on converting the sense rather than the incidental detail on any given subject
When for instance, you are painting a landscape, don’t end up with rain when you started out in sunshine
One must always search for the desire of the like where it wishes to enter and where to die away

“Matisse thinks like a painter…”
“There was nothing of the teacher in him, he nearly always remained a student like us”
The advice he gave based always on experience, involved him in what came close at times to a review of his own past
Contemplating his problems, re-examining his solutions, assessing the dangers he had faced and the risks still to be taken

When he school attracted growing numbers of brash young painters in search of SHORTCUTS TO A SENSATIONAL MODERNISM
“We want your colour” said one of the 2 American girls hoping to study under Matisse
“If you haven’t brought your own colour, you will never get mine”
(Shortcut to sensationalism - create your own colour! Not just steal from successful mixes!)

…days before Matisse’s visit was tense with anticipation and fear
But with joy and provide as well for we felt that a rising master was coming to bring us light and lead us out of chaos towards the right path…
(Years of exploration and failure before being noted as the right path. How ironic it is to have been ridiculed of your way until it is one day the way forward)