Painting: Distiller of Sunshine

The mark of modern art, like that of modern science, is continuous experimentation. The results often seem to aim more at style obsolescence than at great masterpieces rivaling those of the past. But as ism tumbles after ism, the greatest accolades have gone to those artists who have painted through the revolutionary styles of their times and arrived at a style uniquely their own. Few have achieved a more luxuriant signature than Henri Matisse.

A dozen years have passed since Matisse died at the ripe age of 84, at a time when it could be fairly said that he was—with Picasso—France's most popular artist. He had had two museums (at Le Cateau-Cambresis, his home town, and in Cimiez, above Nice) devoted to his works; his oils had commanded five-figure prices for more than 20 years. Currently, the first comprehensive retrospective of Matisse's work since his death, totaling 345 works in all media, is traveling across the U.S.* The exhibition (see color pages) magnificently highlights his achievement; it also documents what a long, arduous path he followed.

Purity and Joy. For artistic success was not something that came easily to this provincial grain merchant's son. His first student efforts look as if they had been painted in a damp attic. He laboriously copied Louvre masterpieces, lasted only a few days as a student of Academician William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who told him, "You will never learn how to draw."

But the young artist persisted. He went to London to study the sunset Turners, which expanded his palette. He encountered Japanese prints, which banished shadows and freed him from tunnel-vision perspective. He tinkered with impressionism, dabbled in pointillism, and became the leading colorist of fauvism. Eventually, he discovered Matissism.

What he discovered, said Matisse, was "something that was always the same and that, at first glance, I thought to be monotonous repetition. It was the mark of my personality. I made an effort to develop this personality by counting above all on my intuition. I said to myself: 'I have colors, a canvas, and I must express myself with purity.' " Once he had found his signature, he repeated it with joy. To those who criticized his variations on the nude and the interior, he replied: "No two fig leaves are alike, yet each one cries 'fig tree.' "

Seraglios & Poufs. His performance on canvas shows that in finding his own style, Matisse had simply let his left hand tell him what his right hand should do. In 1911 and 1912, he visited sunny Morocco and, like Delacroix 80 years before him, fell in love with its Moorish seraglios and sultry colors. He let his brush line course over his canvas like an enchanted cobra. His arabesques were forever caressing a woman's contours as he painted the harem dream, the half-naked houri sprawled in diaphanous pantaloons, the odalisque sinking into an interlace of poufs, screens and rugs. To charges that he was painting erotic nudes, Matisse replied: "It is not a woman; it is a picture."