Notes
1. Henri Matisse, quoted by Serge Guilbaut, in the introduction to Matisse and Courthion, Chatting with Henri Matisse.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Matisse on Art, ed. Jack Flam, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 40.
6. Matisse, quoted in Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869–1918 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 374.
7. For detailed discussion of these polarities in Matisse's artistic and discursive practices, see Todd Cronan, Against Affective Formalism: Matisse, Bergson, Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
8. Walter Pach, “Why Matisse?” Century 89 (February 1915): 634.
9. Matisse, quoted in Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, “Ignoring History,” in Chatting with Matisse, p. 239. “I do nothing but work,” is a phrase that recurs throughout his letters (ibid.).
10. Not surprisingly, Matisse saw himself in the same terms: “I hope I can manage a few more years . . . so that I can conclude my lifetime's work with a few paintings that will clearly show what I wanted” (p. 132).
11. For an account of absorption and its vicissitudes in the art of Manet and his generation, see Michael Fried, Manet's Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
12. Matisse offers no stronger insult than to say someone is “without conviction,” willing to accept “anything at all” (quoted in Dorléac, “Ignoring History,” p. 238).
13. Matisse on Art, 89.
14. Ibid., 285.
15. It is difficult to locate the source of inspiration here. Does it precede the composition (as the language of assemblage might suggest) or is it dictating the artistic process from within the act of creation?
16. The idea could be read two ways. It is a (physically rendered) evocation of the “shock” of experience the painter attempts to render. But the episode could be seen as the shock necessary to break absentminded viewers out of their dulled perceptual routine.
17. Yve-Alain Bois, “On Matisse: The Blinding,” trans. Greg Sims, October 68 (1994): 61–121.
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Todd Cronan
TODD CRONAN is associate professor at Emory University [Art History Department, Emory University, M27 Carlos Hall, Atlanta, Ga. 30322].