Page 13 - Studio International - July 1966

pattern and vice versa. There are obvious These paradoxes which prevent the these extremes, and which is undoubtedly
contradictions between drawn perspective composition from being a purely decorative one of his great masterpieces, is his Lady
and the treatment of the painted areas—the one stress Matisse's pursuit of the sort of in blue (1937). That painting anticipates the
naturalistic colour of flowers, for instance, extreme and excess which make no formalized solution of his Barnes mural—
and the heightened colour of the figure. allowance for modification. Someone flat pattern of moving figures against dark
His suppression of depth is stressed even said once that it was as if Matisse had diagonals fitting into painted architraves
more radically in some of the still lifes of invented a crossword puzzle and written —and his paper collages, among the biggest
the 1940's where in the middle of a in all the answers, some of which were single pictures he created, bold, simple,
completely flat geometrized composition deliberately wrong. and brilliantly coloured. In the Lady in
Matisse places one object in full perspective. A single painting which embodies some of continued on page 4

Left Right
Willem de Kooning
Henri Matisse Lady in Blue 1937
Oil on canvas 36 1/2 x 39 in. Woman and bicycle 1952-3
Oil on canvas 76+ x 49 in.
Philadelphia
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York

Dr Alfred Neumeyer, professor emeritus at Mills Anita Ventura studied painting at Art Students Norbert Lynton, head of the school ofart history at
College, California, and visiting professor at the League, New York, under Morris Kantor, and was for Chelsea School of Art, is art critic of The Guardian,
University of California, Berkeley, is author of a book a time managing editor of Arts Magazine. She also and contributes to Art International, Cimaise, Quad-
on Cezanne's drawings, of The Search for Meaning in worked at the Guggenheim Museum, and found time rum, and other magazines. He is publishing a book
Modern Art (Prentice-Hall, 1964), Der Buick aus dem to publish and edit an art journal, Scrap, in collabora- entitled Survey of 19th and 20th Century Art later this
Bilde (Gebr. Mann, Berlin, 1964), and other books. tion with the sculptor Sidney Geist. Since leaving year.
New York for San Francisco in 1962 she has contri-
J. P. Hodin, the critic and London editor of Quadrum, buted to Arts and other magazines, and now works at George Savage, a member of the council of the
recently completed a biography of Oskar Kokoschka the San Francisco Maritime Museum. British Antique Dealers' Association, has written
—Oscar Kokoschka, the Artist and his Time—which is extensively on art and antiques.
to be published this October. Jean Clay, the French art critic, is a regular contri-
butor to Réalités.