ABSTRACT
Henri Matisse differs sharply from P. Picasso, in whose painting the sculptural element is charged with crucial responsibilities and in some periods assumes a central expressive role. As a painter, Matisse joins a glorious, ongoing line of development. His work of the nineties, in particular, being in its essentials a critical rehearsal and personal testing of the painting that preceded him, shows us with what pains he undertook the mastery of his native tradition. But where his painting represents a summary and purification of this tradition, his sculpture reflects the more tentative and provisional victories which that fallen and only partially redeemed art had won over the long decades of infertility it suffered in the nineteenth century. Matisse produced several outstanding individual pieces: the "Large Seated Nude" of 1922-5, the "Venus in a Shell" of 1930, and the very beautiful "Tiari," also of 1930.
