 Thank you. And I would like, first of all, to thank very warmly C.V. Patry for her invitation and all those who have participated in organizing this symposium, especially Elia. This communication is partly based on my current thesis, which I am conducting at the Université Paris-Ouest, Nantes à la Défense, on Matisse's writings and statements. Since we are examining today the current state of research about the artist, I would like to, I'm going to, so is it better? A little bit? Sorry. Yeah, it's okay? Perfect. So since we are examining today the current state of research about the artist, I would like to look at Matisse's writings and statements and revisit its making, revisit their making, that is, their making as an object of study, shaped by various publications, and their making as a discourse, shaped by the artist. So writings and statements act as a generic term to refer to all the notes and interview that accompanies Matisse's artistic production from 1907 until his death. The nature of this text seemed to have been imposed by the different composers that drove Matisse to write or speak, whether in response to external demands from critics or the incessity to refine his own concept of art. For Matisse, refining his own concept of art did not mean imagining a potential work as a distant horizon, which is written as spoken word would give access to. It was more about reflecting critically uncompleted artworks in order to enrich future works. And like Konzinski, Klee, or Glaise, Matisse had no ambitions for his writings and statements to be recognized as an independent body of work. As a result, it is difficult to determine the exact volume of these productions. Since his written and spoken words have been collected and scattered in many books, newspapers, journals, and archives. These few observations help to give a broad outline of an output which does not appear as a self-evident coherent whole, but exists only as a result of the efforts to collect and organize those scattered elements. In the 1940s, Pierre Matisse and André Le Jard put their energy behind this project. In April 1945, Pierre Matisse mentioned in a letter to his father the possibility of a publishing notes of a painter of 1908 in a book with illustrations. Matisse replied a few weeks later, reacting less to the question of republishing this text and more to the questions of their reproductions, the quality of the paper, and the terms of his remuneration. On June the 5th, 1945, Pierre Matisse broadened this initial idea by proposing to insert in counterpoint to this funding text of notes of a painter extracts from Matisse's current correspondence. The project delayed by the war and counter further complications because Le Jard, director of Les Editions du Chêne, shared similar ambitions. At that time, Le Jard spoke to Matisse about his wish to collect, and I quote, all of your writings that I can find so far in various magazines. To stop this emerging competition, Matisse decided that Le Jard would carry out the front version of his writings and statements, while his son would carry out the American version. However, the format of the work was not clearly defined. Should it be a general publication, including writings, drawings, and paintings, or a publication exclusively dedicated to Le Jard's writings. Matisse replied on January the 25th, 1946, to Le Jard's suggestions, and I quote, words on their own are insufficient and must accompany zero productions. Neither of these projects, however, would ever see the light of day. The making of the Leda panels, the publication of numerous illustrated books, as well as the work for the Venice Chapel, seemed to have taken up all the artist's time. But Le Jard did not give up. On July the 5th, 1976, he wrote to Madame Matisse to remind her of his desire to publish a book of all of her husband's writings. If this last attempt remained unfulfilled, it demonstrates, I think, the difficulty of compiling Matisse's writings and statements in a representative collection. It also provides some indications of how the artist approached this project. And for him, it was similar to an illustrated book, where the text accompanied the illustrations, or even became an illustration in itself. The Centennial exhibition in 1970 proved to be a decisive turning point in this project. By providing a coherent vision of the work of Matisse, and by quoting numerous extracts from his writings and statements in its catalogue, it pointed to a consistent way of thinking and avenues to explore. Avenues followed by Dominique Fourcade, who published a French version of Matisse's writings and statements in 1972, followed the next year by an American version by Jack Flamme. Both anthologies do not only form a body of reference, but also really form an object that had not existed until then because of the dispersions of the text. They may even form two objects that differ less by their texts than by their organization. The Fourcade anthology is thematic and contains no reproduction or comments by the editor, Justin Index. The Flamme anthology is chronological and is preceded by a biography, an introduction, and accompanied by illustration. It was the issue in 1995 and enriched with new text in introduction. In 1976, Fourcade's book was simply supplemented with the publication of other writings and statements by Matisse in the Macula Review. The impact of these two anthologies is obvious in that they provide a first set of clues, which, other far from explaining the work once and for all, allow a better understanding of its construction and its issues. Moreover, they draw either in their own way on two images of the artist which still persists. Fourcade's anthology highlights the organization of the artist's thinking along the principle of Flamme's Forces, whereas Flamme's anthology emphasizes progressive evolution of thought with its advances, its repetitions, and its silences. These two anthologies did not create a field of research that would put an end to further studies. The publication of Matisse's correspondence with his friends, Camoin, Bonard, Marquet, Rouvert, further enriched it. This book, this book's question, I think, the status of the correspondence in Matisse's writings and statements. Fourcade quoted some excerpts as if they were full text, including a long letter to Rouvert in 1942 on trees, while Flamme did not include them using only a few quotations in footnotes when they shed light on some texts. Although it is not possible to put the private writings and the public writings on the exact same level, I think it is necessary to show their relation, that is to say, to point out in the daily considerations the intellectual reflections that set up or take up some items of language that Matisse will use in public. In the context of the enrichment of this body of work, another problem arises with the publication by Serge Guilbault in 2013 of the interview of Matisse by Courtyen, the problem of unpublished work. These words may seem inappropriate in relation to this text while known among specialists. However, the publication of the full text rises, in addition to the controversy related to its history, the issue of this new material uncovered not just by thoroughly researching the archives, but also the newspapers and journals of that period. There is definitely the need for pursuing research to that end. For example, the front version of modernity and tradition, in which if Alain Bois pointed out the difficulties of reading in relation to its translation. However, I believe that this context of enrichment should not be done in order to achieve a kind of utopian completeness of this body of work, but to animate it, to see the movement that is inherent to it. Preliminary work has already been conducted in this direction. Shortly after the publication of the anthologies of Fourcade and Flamme, Jean-Claude Benchstein and Yves Alain Bois took up this new material in the issue of the journal Critique in May 1974. Jean-Claude Benchstein mentioned some essential facts, the issue of the delay between his writings and the practice of his artwork, the artistic silence about some part of his work. Yves Alain Bois carried out the work of cutting and pasting the texts to show in counterpoints to Fourcade's index the organization of Matisse's ideas as a spiderweb. However, their articles appear in close temporal relationship with this literary work and thus seem to be in a phase of first assimilation, which had not reached the final digestion stage. This step was fully accomplished by Roger Benjamin in his thesis, Matisse's Notes of a Painter, Criticism, Theory and Context, published in 1987. This book represents a fundamental step in the study of Matisse in that it specifically questions the intellectual basis of one of the most famous artist statements. I would now like to mention my own research which follows a line of these works. Using the writings and statements of Matisse as the object of my research, I am trying to understand the making of Matisse's discourse and to discover how through its making, its challenges and its reception, the creation and diffusion of a certain image of the artist has taken shape. I think the question of the genesis of Matisse's writings and statements is absolutely crucial and requires us to include them in the context of production and in a larger network of texts. Artists' writings and critics' articles which accompany artworks at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. If this was initiated by Roger Benjamin, the discovery of other sources now helps to enrich this approach. For example, Rémy Labruse has shown the key role of the encounter with Monsieur Pritchard in crystallizing some ideas, while Catherine Coquille has revealed the role of Mécislas Goldberg in organizing the interview with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1907. All these elements indicate the dialogical nature of Matisse's discourse. Matisse's words were linked to the words of others and this provides just as much of the language elements and context which you would rely on when developing certain ideas and expressions. Here again, it is not only a question of gathering together a relevant corpus within which Matisse's writings and statements play a role, but to consider how his discourse built itself through with or against all these texts. With this established, there arises a question of the challenges of Matisse's writings and statements. What is at stake in Matisse's discourse? I mentioned in the introduction how this literary production was both a result of an ingenious setist and external demand. Therefore, it could be argued that what is happening in his discourse is both a reflection on art and a presentation of self. Here, a work of dual nature is to be conducted. The goal is first to reveal the forces of Matisse's thinking around fundamental notions and to consider their relation with his artistic practice. It is also to examine Matisse's conscious and unconscious strategic use of language in order to create an image of himself within the art scene. I believe attention should also be given to how Matisse used the pen or words. The term writings and statements means the written and spoken words taken as a whole. However, the use of the written words is much more rarer than the spoken words which he used more at the end of his life in order, I think, both to de-dramatize his use of words and to reiterate a systematized discourse as well as an established image. The question of how the writings and statements of Matisse were received will end this reflection. Research must be conducted in order to understand the emergence of the modalities of Matisse's writing and statements in the public sphere, but also to understand how their meaning has been constantly interpreted and reinterpreted by individuals from different social backgrounds. It is interesting to note that this appropriation process creates a series of very vague and common words around him, decoration, expression, emotion, etc. How does that appropriation process work? Isn't it, in a certain way, something quite not finished, something still blurry, as if Matisse did not want to fix it with obvious words, what keeps eluding him in the fields of painting and drawing. I believe that those overused words are his way of making inroads into something deeper that he refuses to eliminate and that he asks the reader to take responsibility for in the same way that he asks the viewer to continue the energetic process that is only beginning in his painting. In this chronological study which will reconstruct the making of Matisse's of Matisse's writing and statements, there will be more focus on certain texts and interviews for which a sizable volume of material allows to reconstruct the evolution of some of his literary work. As an example, I would like to mention now the making of Notes of a Painter and His Drawing by Matisse, published in 1939, which formalizes Matisse's thinking on drawing. It is important, I think, to note that Matisse's thinking begins in his painting and drawing before being extended to his writings and statements. The beginning of his thinking about his drawing appeared in the public sphere in 1908 with Notes of a Painter, where he set out the principles of his art as well as the foundation of his graphic practice, and I quote, the drawing must have an expensive force which gives life to the things around it, end of quote. It was, however, George Levalier who in the introduction developed this concept, especially about the drawing Nudebou, the only one in the Notes alongside five paintings. In fact, Matisse did not seem to have clarified for himself this exploratory practice for which he preferred to leave the task to a third party to determine its status. The same year the Notes by Sarah Stein showed the key role of the drawing within the Academy Matisse, but they revealed less reflection on this specific medium than a general principle of creation. It was only in 1929 that Matisse will begin to clarify the nature of his drawing. He told Florian Fels that it was, and I quote, first and foremost expressive. The more lacking the means is, the more sensitivity must be manifested. My drawing represents a painting executed with limited means. Matisse reiterated this thought in 1931 in his interview with Gotar Gellica, when the meantime he began to assert its independence, because when I'm drawing I never think about the painting, he said. These comments, I think, opened the way to a change in Matisse's thinking and practice at the end of the 1930s, when the drawing acquired its independence, whether it organized paintings such as Tete Hocre, la musique, la blouse romaine, or imposed itself masterfully in the series, l'artiste et son modèle. So here for the visual context. C'est ça, l'article, Automatisme espace illusoire, published in 1936 in Calédare, played a critical role in the change of Matisse's thinking about drawing, in that it inaugurated, in a disturbing way we will see, some expressions which will come back in notes of a painter who is drawing, two years later. In view of the difficult relationship between the two men, it seems unlikely that Matisse had incorporated items of language shaped by the critic. It is more likely that Matisse was asked by Zervas to define his art. Perhaps it was part of the survey published in Calédare in 1935 in which he eventually refused to take part. However, this encounter with Zervas was decisive in that it forced Matisse to express his thinking. Reflections he would remember when he had, thanks to Claude Roger Marx, to formalize and assume them in his own name. This contact, or rather this shock, occurred at the end of 1938 when Claude Roger Marx was asked by Georges Besson to preface a collection of drawings by Matisse, published by Brun. The son of Roger Marx, one of the first defenders of Matisse, Claude Roger Marx, I will call him Marx for simplicity, is quite an interesting choice when one knows his articles were very reserved in respect to Matisse's work. And the inevitable soon happened. As soon as he had read Marx preface, Matisse sent a telegram to Besson asking him not to print it. Two days later, on December the 1st, Matisse explained at Critterlands that he usually let people write freely on his work but he felt forced to react due to the status of these texts which he found inconsistent and in contradiction with its intention. One cannot but smile at this statement when one knows how controlling he was about comments on his work. However, this time he did not merely send a few corrections to the author but sent to Besson a long series of observations which responded paragraph by paragraph to the development of Marx's criticism. And here is a page of the draft of this letter addressed to Besson held at the Matisse archives in Ysselimolino. So Besson was caught between Marx who refused to change his preface and Matisse who opposed its publication and he authored to publish the artist's comments. The desire to clarify the interpretation of his work, however, did not overcome Matisse's reluctance to express himself other than through his painting. The next day, he replied to Besson and I quote, The artist does not have to open his mouth to be better understood because if there are people who cannot see, there are ears that hear but do not understand. Furthermore, words are not our methods. On December the 7th, Matisse sent Besson a telegram asking him to publish Marx's preface without any modifications or any of his comments. However, the following weeks Matisse seems to change his mind. He perfected his observation for Besson in a number of drafts that will become his notes of a painter on his drawing where he engaged with Marx in a critical dialogue that has shaped his own voice. It is this dialogue that I would now like to explore. The starting point on this exchange was Marx's preface where he first tried to place Matisse in the world of drawing. He defined two schools, those who follow only their instinct and those who follow both instinct and reason. Matisse was placed in the second category and was deeply upset by this analogy. He translated it into his own words in a letter to Besson. Firstly, those with pure instinctive behavior, secondly, the manufactured, the confused, and the crafty ones. He also reacted to the extraordinary quality of his retina that Marx had ascribed to him by stating that the retina is only the window behind which stands the man. This image, in fact, was already present in 1936 in Zervos's work who, like I said, without mentioning the author, spoke of the eye as the window of the spirit. Matisse would eventually note this metaphor in his notes. Here he gave more scope to his text by justifying the plurality of his approach through his education and his relation to the old masters. The same movement can be deciphered in the following of both Marx's preface and Matisse's notes. Indeed, later on in his preface, Marx criticized Matisse's drawing for the absence of instinctive qualities seen in his painting. In the eyes of Matisse, this well-worn image of a teacher implied a misunderstanding of his work. In the draft of his letter to Besson, he included some items of Marx's criticism to better challenge them. But in his notes, Matisse erased, to some extent, who we see the traces of an ad hominem response, preferring to make a general response that reinstated feeling of a reason and color of a black and white. As usual, he supports his theoretical statements with his artistic practice, which define his use of charcoal and then, with a clear mind, turn to the pen. Here, Matisse developed the items of language he would use again and illustrate in demi-variations. Here, also, is set up for the first time the image of the acrobat, a late motif tirelessly used thereafter. In fact, truly claiming for himself the comments alluded to by Zervas in 1936, and I quote, all the things came to him like the bells in the hands of the jeweler. Marx also criticized in his preface the distortions of Matisse's drawings, which for him seemed to be intended. If Matisse would use again Marx's items of language, such as offenses against anatomy or perspective, in his letter to Besson, he eventually distanced himself himself from Marx's criticism to address the issue of the overall organization of the drawing paper. It is interesting to note, in his letter to Besson, the presence of a sentence that Matisse added then subtracted. I quote, I want to conduct my horse, not by forcing its nose, but by sheer will, and of course, a metaphor that has never crystallized in a Matisse discourse. So dialogue between the two men continues, as Marx evoked in his preface the niche interiors inhabited by figures, extras who be more accurate said. Marx portrayed here a selfish artist who was only interested in the volume, in the volume or proportions of shades of his models, never in their soul. Matisse would discuss the status of the model in his notes where he wrote that human figures are never just extras in an interior, playing on words with Marx's words. He indeed is addressed to Marx, barely disguising his contempt for him. It is perhaps sublimated voluptuousness, something that may not be perceptible to everyone. Marx continued in his preface with a phrase already used in many of his articles, describing Matisse as a charmer without pleasure in charming monsters, a phrase around which a short paragraph was written in the notes. Without mentioning the author, Matisse reversed the terms. I never thought of my creations as charmed or charming monsters. Above all, I do not create a woman, I make a picture. While reaffirming the independence of his work, he ironically appropriated for himself the injunction of Maurice Denis that Marx supported and defended. Marx then noted the supreme indigents in such accolades to refrain from playing with values and modulations. But noticed in Matisse's drawings are linear engravings how the bright line manages to suggest a color in itself. To this contradiction, Matisse replied with a well-constructed statement that took up some concepts introduced in the first part of the notes and formalized here the conciliation black-white color drawing painting he had already initiated in his woodcut in 1906. As we notice, the delay that exists here between his writings and the practice of his artworks, we can also, in his notes, notice a coincidence between his writings and between writings and artworks as Matisse develops there the term sign in the same time that he is working on the graphic subject of Labrador Men. The opposition between the two men goes further. When Marx discussed in his preface the model drawing, which appeared to him as analytical pages. Matisse replied in his letter to Besson, the analytical drawings are preliminary studies for my final drawings. As if this clarification was not enough for him, he added in a post-script, I, like all painters who have been willing to know all the permanent theories, but to sum up, I work with a theory. I am conscious only of the forces I use and I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the pictures. Here, a major contradiction is at stake in the Matisse discourse. When he says he works without theory, that does not mean he works without thinking. His thinking is that action must precede mental prescription, but precisely, this is something he thinks about. This is something he formulates. That is a contradiction. The contradiction, it theorizes a fact of having to not theorize. Marx concludes his preface by mentioning some successful drawings by Matisse where instinct and reason came together. Matisse was not fooled by this reversal, but seemed to have as much trouble summarizing his thoughts. He tirelessly corrected the end of his letter to Besson, in which the conclusion was less of a response to Marx and more of a concept which will restore beyond different types of medians, the human at the heart of the creation, and I quote, Making a picture would seem as logical as building a house if one proceeded on some principles. One should not bother about the human side, either one has it or one hasn't. If one has, it corrals the work in spite of everything. So the voice of Matisse, shaped by his confrontation with Marx as he first took some of his items of language to better put them to the test of his practice, here gains its independence, as if through the drafts, the dialogue opened up the possibility of shaping his own discourse. His notes of a painting on his drawing were published in 1939 in Le Point, and then published in 1941 for the exhibition in the Saint-Paronry Matisse at the Galerie Louis Carré. However, these two editions seem to have been quite confidential. In an article published for the Centennial Exhibition in 1970, Marx quoted some of these comments, Matisse's comments, as an it is quite surprising, unpublished notes. It was not until Dominique Foucault's anthology two years later that this text was uncovered. I would like to conclude with one of Foucault's footnotes, the only indicator of Foucault's presence, where he summed up the duality in Matisse's personality. Consistent in the impulse that led him his entire life to write and speak, and consistent in his repulsion to do it. I think that Dominique Foucault, here points out the burden on anyone who tackles Matisse's writings and statements. Not to surimpose the voice of the artist, but to make it stronger and louder. Not to add words to the words, but find a thread of his discourse to unveil this double movement at the heart of his writing process. A double movement, that is, by no means a simple education, but a productive contradiction, the exploration of which allows us to enter into the intimate world of Matisse as a writer, and thus open a genuine field of research. Thank you very much.