Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/67

Rh tisse said, "if he would only come to my studio how much pains I would take to help him find himself; perhaps he really has more than this nonsense to say!"

Yet Matisse had nothing of the schoolmaster about him. He was nearly always like one of the students; and those showed poor insight who claimed that he looked like a German professor, and who saw more deliberation and brains in his work than a natural creative gift. Perhaps one could easily be betrayed into such a belief since Matisse was always attempting to analyse his pictures. But a closer examination into that mixture of agitation, care, passion, transport, and sensitive restraint which marked his method of working would convince one that his talk was rather a shell for encasing the soul. Thanks to his work I saw more and more—and as a German I was astounded—that it was possible to express so many of the problems of painting in words without falling into a sterile aestheticizing. I was impressed by the order which Matisse was bent on bringing out of this chaos, yet I always found that instinct was the determining element in his approach, which in itself remained mysterious enough: "I have forced myself to develop a personality in line with instinctive promptings, and when I could not progress in my work I would return to basic principle and say to myself, 'Here is canvas and paint, and I must express myself with the highest possible purity, quite summarily, by putting down four or five splotches of colour and drawing a few lines calculated to attain a plastic expression.

Once when he was arranging a still life which he was going to paint he said that what disgusted him was his indecision: what sort of palette should he use, cadmium yellow or the much more moderate ochre? He said that he could paint this still life with three or even six colours, but that he must make his choice from the start; that previously he used to pick out colours which seemed appropriate to him with relation to the object he wished to represent, but now he determined his palette first and in this way got those equations which make the life of a picture. Here Matisse pointed to a house: "Notice the colour of the basement, the cornice, the wall, and the shutters: all that forms a unit, just such a unit as is needed in a picture. Earlier I used to return day after day to the same work with a new colour scheme. But that gave me many an hour of perplexity."