Matisse made a point of establishing a rigid formula and of working within these limits whenever possible. He would make this special effort to stick by his original conception in order to give a complete vision of the whole! "A picture is like a game of cards: you must figure from the very beginning on what you will have at the end; everything must be worked backwards and always be finished before it is begun."
Once he was painting a large picture, La Musique. He kept rearranging the limbs of the four figures represented, and manipulated the entire group as though it were one single figure with eight legs and eight arms. If he deranged only one line in an arm, the whole fell into disorder and the balance had to be restored at some other place. But Matisse complained to me at this, "Notice that large green mound the figures are sitting on; I should have loved to paint flowers in there but I can't manage them. They would have no organic meaning to me, they do not apply; and painful as it is, I must renounce them!" The painter Bonnard came into the studio and asked, "Why do you do all those figures in one colour; why don't you come nearer to reality?" Matisse answered, "I know that the sky throws a blue reflection on an object, and that a meadow throws a green one, but why all these dreadful complications? It adds nothing to my picture and interferes with my expression." I am a witness how difficult it was for him simply to make plein the three colours which constituted this picture. Yet once the picture was lying on the ground Matisse gave it one glance and retreated in distress: the primitive had frightened even him.
Perhaps the art amateurs were repulsed most by the diversity of his pictures, which really do display radically different methods of approach in each of his phases. At one time he is tired of colour and paints only in tones; at another time he breaks up his colours; then again he paints with reflections, without light and shadow, or just the opposite. Nor did Cézanne remain the same all during his life; his early works are painted with large masses of light and dark, and his latest ones only in modulations of colour. Matisse thinks as an artist; when looking at a picture he forgets the matter of mere representation, and the interesting thing to him is the feeling which he is aiming at, the harmony of lines and colours in composition. He sees the sport in a choice of means. For instance, I was standing with Matisse before the picture of Dürer's brother at
