Reconsidering Matisse...

Matisse was not taught to paint; he just started doing it. His first two canvases, from 1890, are essentially consummate Old Master-ish still-lifes, the first one pretty good and the second, featuring opulent reds, a knockout. Digging this picture out of his father’s attic ten years later, Matisse said it came so close to containing everything he had done since then that it hardly seemed worth having gone on painting. The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern. For the full story - click the title Irish Art