Word: coloring
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Abstractions made of pinned scraps of colored paper (see cuts) cover the bedroom walls. To the hasty eye, they might seem as inconsequential as a game, but Matisse himself is deeply proud of them. "Only when one has reached complete maturity and mastery of color," he explains, "is it possible to do anything like these. They might be compared to direct carving in sculpture-the same thing accomplished in color that Michelangelo did in stone. They are the result of my long career...
...disappeared from Europe. It still existed in playing cards, tattooing and music-hall posters. They created no illusion of space or of sculptural form, though understanding some of them meant reading form and space into their flat designs. They delighted the eye through an interplay of only two elements: color and line. Matisse set out to do the same...
Music, with Echoes. Matisse's revolutionary synthesis through the years has become increasingly lucid, brilliant and gay. Now his subject matter means little; the colors are the thing. And each color, linked in loose, insistent rhythms of linear composition, sounds in the eye like a separate instrument: trumpet, cello, cymbals, oboe, harp and clarinet. Freely transforming nature, the paintings resound with symbolic echoes...
...black figure of Icarus looks as if it might have been snipped out by a child, until the onlooker comes to sense the impotent hooked flapping of the unwinged arms. The lumpish, drooping legs bewail their mid-air uselessness; the head hangs horrified over the void. By its very color, the body mourns its own impending death, which the red beating heart denies...
There is not really much mystery about green, red or other-colored rain. A quick-acting biologist could probably have proved with a few squints through a microscope that Dayton's rain got its color from algae (microscopic plants) sucked up by a tornado. Full-sized tornadoes can lift heavy objects (such as signboards) high into the clouds. Even little whirlwinds can vacuum-clean the surface of a pond and deposit its green scum many miles away as discolored rain. Sometimes small fish or frogs are sucked up (and later dropped) with the water...