Henri Matisse

French painter (1869–1954). In "Eye and Mind" §4, Matisse is MP's exemplar for the line as structural filament rather than contour. "Matisse's women were not immediately women; they became women" — the line does not copy a pre-existing form but constitutes it. Matisse "taught us to see their contours not in a 'physical-optical' way but rather as structural filaments [des nervures], as the axes of a corporeal system of activity and passivity" (§4).

Key Points

• Line as nervure (structural filament): Matisse's contours are not outlines but the "axes of a corporeal system of activity and passivity" — they give the internal structure of the body, not its envelope
• Figuration through becoming: "Matisse's women were not immediately women; they became women" — the line constitutes the figure through its own movement rather than tracing a pre-existing shape
• Matisse represents the figurative path that achieves the same liberation of the line as Klee's non-figurative path: "to put into a single line both the prosaic definition of the entity and the hidden operation which composes in it such softness or inertia and such force as are required to constitute it as nude, as face, as flower"

Connections

• complements paul-klee in merleau-ponty-1961-eye-and-mind — Klee takes the non-figurative path (line as genesis), Matisse the figurative path (line as structural filament); both achieve the liberation of the line from contour
• demonstrates fundamental-thought-in-art — painting as ontological inquiry through the line's constitutive power