Matisse's uncertainties

" Matisse's art, with its spectacular immediacy and its mysterious depths, poses confounding problems for analysis. The intuitive character of his structures and the elusive nature of his themes renders most art historical approaches to the study of forms and symbols pretty much useless. Picasso's themes, with their collage of traditional signs and symbols, are far more susceptible to iconographic analysis than anything in Matisse. The analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, with its thoroughgoing rejection of traditional perspective, can be studied as an inversion of Renaissance norms, using the same tools that one uses to study those norms. But in Matisse's case, the solutions that he arrives at are always confoundingly particular, and tend to be unrelated to anything like a system of ideas. Intuition is his only system."

Gertrude S.’s fine portrait of Henri Matisse’s struggle, depicted in depth by Sam Renseiw. A moving capture; Click here to view, or tickle the feet above.