Henri Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, from evil in father – Liberation

What is under the black ribbon? Technically, as we know: a tracheotomy, with cannula, which does not heal. The daughter of Matisse, Marguerite, born in 1894 of a union with a model of the young painter, Caroline Joblaud, had the diphtheria at 6 years. His condition requires operations, care. For a long time, the child lives in this world where suffering and the health circuit forge a character and a nature that isolate you from most of the others. She faded and this moral firmness, we feel her all her life. An interview, given in 1970, on the occasion of the exhibition Matisse At the Grand Palais for the centenary of the artist’s birth, shows how firm the old lady has remained, the tongue out of the pocket. We ask her if she was « Convinced » of his father’s genius: « Genius! Genius! What is genius? When you live with an artist, you don’t think he has genius, or is that we love big words.  » Matisse was wary of school and words.

From 1901, he will make, all techniques combined, a hundred portraits of his daughter. Neither quite another nor quite the same: we cross with her the metamorphoses of the painter, we never tire of it. We see it born in the world of representation, existing in form in shape, fawn, cubist