Art: Beauty & the Beast

(5 of 5)

Music, with Echoes. Matisse's revolutionary synthesis through the years has become increasingly lucid, brilliant and gay. Now his subject matter means little; the colors are the thing. And each color, linked in loose, insistent rhythms of linear composition, sounds in the eye like a separate instrument: trumpet, cello, cymbals, oboe, harp and clarinet. Freely transforming nature, the paintings resound with symbolic echoes of her.

The falling, cutout black figure of Icarus looks as if it might have been snipped out by a child, until the onlooker comes to sense the impotent hooked flapping of the unwinged arms. The lumpish, drooping legs bewail their mid-air uselessness; the head hangs horrified over the void. By its very color, the body mourns its own impending death, which the red beating heart denies.

Like Icarus, Matisse has flown close to the sun; his most recent pictures are so richly dazzling that beside them such bold 19th Century colorists as Renoir and Van Gogh fade to dimness. And like Icarus, Henri Matisse has not much time. Sitting up in bed, the old man puts importunate visitors off with a serene apology: "I'm very busy," he murmurs, "packing my bags for the next world."