Life in a Few Lines

When Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse were art students in Paris, they used to load their canvases into the same pushcart, hopefully trundle them off to the Autumn Salon. On one return trip, no canvases sold, Marquet lamented, "If only a bus would crash into our pushcart, we could at least collect the damages." Matisse soon trundled his own brilliant, revolutionary canvases into the front ranks of modern French art. Marquet settled down to painting workmanlike studies of boat-filled harbors and rivers, lagged far behind. He died in 1947, at 72, little known outside his native France.

Last week a Paris exhibit of unknown Marquet drawings showed that he was not always the serious, hard-working rearguard painter most people thought him. As relaxation from his more ambitious oils, Marquet had strolled the streets of Paris, doing maliciously observant sketches of the people he saw. In a few deft strokes, a blob of black ink or a casual crosshatching, he caught the posture and movement of a speeding cyclist, a barmaid scratching her head, an old fiacre driver waiting for a fare, a bemused, potbellied pedestrian.

Matisse compared old friend Marquet's sketches to those of Master Japanese Draftsman Hokusai. Said Paris-Presse Critic Rene Barotte: "It is difficult to express more life in fewer lines . . . impossible to use black and white better."

Marquet had not taken his little masterpieces that seriously. During his lifetime, he sketched thousands of them for his own entertainment, stacked them away in his studio without ever thinking of exhibiting or selling them.

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