Matisse Mural

In 1929 hard-boiled Dr. Albert C. Barnes of Merion, Pa. sold his Argyrol rights to Zonite Products Corp., pocketed his millions and concentrated, in his French Renaissance chateau behind a loft. fence, upon the finest collection of modern art in the U. S. He never lends pictures for outside exhibition, sometimes handpicks a few visitors to look at them. His guards manhandle enterprising reporters. Occasionally he buys a painting by an unknown painter. The canvas disappears behind Dr. Barnes's fence, but the painter is made. As a judge of art, Dr. Barnes is brusque but no booby.

In 1930 Dr. Barnes had an idea. The one living painter for whom he could do nothing was in the U. S. as a juryman for the Carnegie International Exhibition (in Pittsburgh): Henri Matisse, greatest survivor of the Post-Impressionists.sb Matisse is famed, rich, old (63). The climax piece of any modern collection would be a mural done especially by Matisse. He had done no decorative figure in action since 1910. His only two murals hang in Moscow. Dr. Barnes asked Matisse whether he wanted the job. Matisse did. In 1930 he went to work in his Nice studio on a big mural (42 ft. by 15) to fill the spandrels over three windows that open on Dr. Barnes's garden.

The space was difficult. The problem of relating the color to the living greens outside was difficult. A master at color problems, Matisse produced in April, 1932, after two years' work, Danse Heroique, six grey nudes dancing against vertical bands of pink, blue and black. As it neared completion, he called it "the goal towards which I have been striving, and I think it will illuminate the whole path along which I have come." His friends rated it his greatest job, demanded a preview in Paris. M. Matisse and Dr. Barnes agreed. Then Matisse, no master of space problems, discovered that his mural was three feet short. On a new canvas he painted it over again the full 45 ft. long. The short one he kept. And last month Matisse went straight from Nice to Merion chateau without stopping to show the final mural to anybody. No one explained why the exhibition had been canceled.

For nearly two weeks Matisse stayed in Merion with Dr. Barnes, helped fit his mural to the wall over the three windows that opened on new, green spring in Merion. He admired the pictures by modern Europeans on Dr. Barnes's walls. said nothing of the few U. S. pictures. Last week he went to visit his son Pierre who runs a Manhattan art gallery. Wagging his white British beard, staring out of spectacled grey eyes, he told reporters who wanted his reaction to the Rockefeller-Rivera fight (TIME, May 22), "Art is above politics. . . . No one need look at a picture unless he is interested in painting. For information he can go elsewhere." Then the great Henri Matisse sailed home for Nice and the short mural he had kept for himself.

sbThe Matisse group, called in derision Les Fauves (The Wild Beasts), included Andre Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Maurice de Vlaminck, Othon Friesz.

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