The Innatentive Reader 1919

Matisse painted this pensive figure, called ‘The Inattentive Reader’, with oils on canvas sometime in the early 20th century. Look at the blues, whites, and pinks, they're not just colours, but emotional weather. You get the sense Matisse wasn’t trying to copy what he saw, but invent it, process it, and put it down, like a jazz riff made of paint. The surface has a flatness, the paint handled with such a casual directness, that it's easy to miss the subtle shifts in tone that give the form volume, and the odd angles which give the image its disquiet. There’s a grid on the table, and another one on the floor, but the scale is off, they do not quite align; this might be a trick of perspective, but I think it is more likely an evocation of the character's ennui, she is as ungrounded as the perspective of the room around her. Matisse is often compared to Bonnard, but where Bonnard piles on sensual detail, Matisse pares things down to their essence. He reminds us that painting isn’t about perfect representation, it's about feeling, thinking, and seeing in new ways.