Page 37 - Studio International - September 1970

Matisse's notes to his students (1908) he is
reported as saying 'The model must not be
made to agree with a pre-conceived theory or
effect. It must impress you, awaken in you an
emotion which you in turn seek to express.
You must forget all your theories, all your
ideas, before the subject.'
The Heads of Jeannette of 1910-11, in view of the
importance which Matisse himself attached
to them, the effort and ambition involved, are
generally regarded as his sculpture master-
piece and have been extensively discussed.
There are two aspects of this series, together
with various later sculptures, to which I
would like to draw attention.
Firstly, the connection of the Jeannette Heads
with Cubism: not that they can be said to
derive from Picasso's Head of a Woman of 1909 —
a premature and superficial attempt to apply
Cubism to sculpture—but that they demon-
strate the liberating effect of Cubism on
Matisse's sculpture.7 To artists such as
Brancusi and Matisse who had already
evolved personal and original styles out of the
elements of an existing convention, Cubism
presented a challenge to the limits of that
convention and a stimulus to make use of a
new freedom. Each responded according to
his temperament: Brancusi turning from
marble and limestone to wood, found a
medium in which the natural structural
properties opened up the possibilities of an
art more various, free and open than any-
thing he had yet attempted: cubist separation
could be achieved by using the large and pre-
determined action of the saw, as notably in
the Prodigal Son of 1915, rather than the small
and nibbling refinement of the chisel.
As for Matisse, I feel the Jeannette series is
cubist in inspiration if wholly personal in
development; it shows a transition from a
conventional treatment of the head as a solid,
unitary form with a continuously modelled
surface; the emergence of parts which tend to
take on a separate and individual character
threatening the closed unity of the whole,
making it in effect an aggregation of lumps of
contrasting character; and finally, in Jeannette
V, the invasion of the whole by the parts: so
that though a homogeneous gestalt is re-
established, the implied separation of the
features penetrates to the core of the head.
The total figure lends itself more easily to the
separation of its various components and he
had already gone some way in this direction in
the Two Negresses and the 1907 Reclining
Figure; but to separate out the head—naturally
the most unified and condensed of forms, as
Brancusi was at that time demonstrating—
14 15
The Back I c. 1910 The Back II c. 1913 into virtually individual elements was un-
Bronze Bronze
187 x 115.6 cm. 186.6 x 115.5 cm. precedented, and must be accounted Matisse's
Coll: Tate Gallery, London Coll: Tate Gallery, London most daring and original stroke in sculpture.
16 17 Of course there were precedents in African
The Back III c. 1916-17 The Back IV c. 1930
Bronze Bronze carving, but only Matisse could have absorbed
185.3 x 113.9 cm. 186 x 114 cm. such a stylized and conceptual treatment of
Coll: Tate Gallery, London Coll: Tate Gallery, London
human features into his own perceptual and
intuitive handling of form, in such a way as to