Matisse [antikvár]

A figurative painter who never stopped battering away at figuration ; a fiery temperament which made constant efforts to submit his instinct to the categories of truth; a creator of the classic tradition, of whose works each perpetuated tradition the better the more it questioned its rules. Matisse remains one of the most paradoxical, as well as the most innovating, forces of contemporary art. It is indeed easy today to accuse the painter of not having gone to the end of the trail which he had blazed ; of having sacrificed adventure to rules and balance. Before doing so one must, however, put his work back into its context. Confronted with those faces streaming with bright colours, those spatial ruptures, those vibrations of matter and those tangles, the public of the Salons at the beginning of the century was never taken in. There where we with the perspective of time decipher rich still lifes, they could only see horrid daubs. There where we admire the audacity of the means he used, they found only madness and mystification. Present day painting has a double origin. An ideological one, the heritage of Wagnerian meta-