Matisse To U. S.

At the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition in 1927, the first prize was awarded to Henri Matisse for his Still Life. Last week, according to Director of Fine Arts Homer Schiff Saint-Gaudens, the Carnegie Institute had successfully settled a second wreath on the wrinkled Matisse brow. Modernist Matisse would, it was announced, along with two other European and three U. S. artists, serve on the 1930 Carnegie jury; in order to do so, he would pay his first visit to the U. S.

The fact that Matisse has so far found it unnecessary to make a westward crossing of the Atlantic is a significant one. He has lived all over Europe, but the 60 years of his life have belonged chiefly to France. Only his pictures have crossed all borders, geographic and esthetic, so that history not only of French painting but of all the important painting that has been done this century could not be written without writing the history of Matisse, of Les Fauves (The Wild Beasts) and of their bewildering and brilliant departure from the tenets upon which all previous painting had been based.

An exhibition of modern paintings anywhere in the world might look very different had Henri Matisse, at 22, taken his degree and become a lawyer, as he intended to do when he reached Paris from le Cateau. Possibly, since Matisse has never exhibited any stubborn allegiance to the errors of the past, it would merely have postponed his entrance into the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and his training under Bouguereau, Gustave Moreau and Gerome. The tradition of these ateliers has been carried on since by such conventionalists as George de Forest Brush of the U. S. (who preceded Matisse in the classes of Gerome but it is hard to believe that the more rebellious young men who visited them through the Du Mauriesque streets of Paris found them dull or stuffy. The apprentice artists of that day, those who had brains as well as talent, were very ready to study what other men, similarly equipped, had accomplished before them. Matisse spent enough time in the Louvre, copying Chardin and other Old Masters long before he began to do his own work. But his own work, so soon as he showed it in the Salon des Independents, made him the captain of a brave and gay brigade: Andre Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Emil Othon Friesz, Raoul Dufy and indisputably first among them, Henri Matisse.

Les Fauves was a name which connoted merely an astonished and timidly inimical attitude of the public but it served as a better definition than the abstractions since invented by incoherently appreciative critics. Matisse was forbidden the Beaux-Arts studio because Parisians of that period took painting seriously. He was poor and went to Algeria where he picked up notions of design which have been clear in his painting ever since. A Russian merchant by the name of Stchoukine discovered him and took him to Moscow, to do murals in his music room.

Later, in Paris, Matisse had a school of Painting and Sculpture which he closed after a year because his pupils did nothing but copy him. Now he lives in Nice, pays frequent visits to Paris where two of his paintings have been judged fit to be hung in the Luxembourg. One of these he sold five years ago to Les Amis du Luxembourg for the nominal sum of one franc (4-c-) after he had been offered $12,000 for it by Manhattan Art Dealer F. Valentine Dudensing. In Russia, in the Scandinavian countries, his work is more enthusiastically collected than in France. It remained for a country in which he has never traveled to provide Matisse with his first official award, the Carnegie Prize, an honor for Paris from Pittsburgh.

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