Passuth Krisztina – Szücs György – Gosztonyi Ferenc szerk.: Hungarian Fauves from Paris to Nagybánya 1904–1914 (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2006/1)
AT HOME AND ABROAD - JACK FLAM: Fauvism, Cubism, and European Modernism
Paul Cézanne: The Large Bathers, 1906 Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1937 sire for a systematic clarity in the syntax of painting (as in language) and the equally strong desire to explore the purely abstract qualities of the medium (as in music); a tension between painting that seemed thought-out and logical, and painting that was openly spontaneous and improvisatory. Another had to do with the relative value given to instinctual and scientific notions of truth. And still another had to do with whether painting should deal with the Absolute or remain grounded in the human. Matisse's most important preoccupation at the time had to do with coming to grips with the radical notions of form and space that had been set forth by Cézanne, and which had both troubled and inspired him since the turn of the century. Matisse was particularly interested in the way that Cézanne had redefined the pictorial field and made his brush marks act as abstract forces within that field, able to traverse and conflate the boundaries between objects and the spaces around them. This constituted not only a move away from descriptive painting, but also away from representation, toward abstraction. In Matisse's 1905-1906 paintings, one of his central concerns was the possibility of opening up the pictorial field to make it virtually independent of the representation that it was carrying, and of inventing a pictorial language that could operate almost independently of what it was supposed to depict. This phase of Matisse's painting was characterized by a marked ambivalence between conceiving of the canvas as a kind of window that presented a view and treating it as a dynamic pictorial field that functioned more like a wall. It also wavered between the use of Seurat and Cézanne as models. And moreover, even in the use of these two models there was the additional complication that each of the two older masters could be read in fairly opposite ways —either in terms of fluidity, light, and color, or in terms of stasis, linearity, and solidity of form. During his retreat from the intense spontaneity and subjectivity of Fauve painting, which started in mid-1906, Matisse began to emphasize the geometrical and schematic underpinnings of Cezanne's art, and by 1907 he had moved as far away from Fauvism as had Derain. He was, however, especially aware of the danger of his paintings looking too much like Cezanne's, and of being destroyed by the powerful influence of the older painter. (One thinks here of Kees Van Dongen's remark that "Cézanne est le plus beau peintre de son époque. Mais combien de mouches se brûlent les ailes à cette lumière!") 30 Furthermore, although Matisse felt that he understood Cézanne better than anyone else, his use of Cézannian elements remained subtle and rather unaggressive. He appears to have found it very important to try not to "misread" Cézanne, but rather to continue on the path elaborated by the older artist, much as he imagined Cézanne himself might have done.
