Almost every writer
on aesthetics who has dealt with Matisse's work admits that
no great master's art is harder to analyze and expound. Yet
actually, few painters have had so much written about them -
which suggests that writers on art have a predilection for the
practically inexplicable. The truth is that a mystery lies at
the heart of the matter; that of the origin of the tremendous
power of light and color present in all Matisse's work. And
here a distributing memory well may cross our minds - of those
great color magicians who, after having given proof of an almost
incredibly keen eyesight, became all but blind: Pissarro, Degas,
Monet. Matisse has, one might say, forestalled this danger;
he has been short-sighted from his earliest days. And perhaps
the secret of that amazing alchemy of color peculiarly his lies
as it were midway between his spectacles and his imagination.
