The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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СКАЧАТЬ and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.

      Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.

      Visit to America

      On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.

      Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.

      Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.

      In 1947 Matisse offered to design and build a chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, and this was consecrated in 1951. An architect built it on a plan suggested by the artist and inside Matisse painted three large compositions in black on white ceramic tiles. Last year there was an exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate Gallery, and he was honoured by the National Arts Foundation in New York as an ‘outstanding artist of 1953’. Matisse was a member of the French Communist Party, but his standing with the Communists in recent years was unclear. Criticism came from Russia of his chapel at Vence, and in 1952 the French Communist Party was reported to be considering his expulsion for not falling into line with Moscow’s instructions that art must be ‘realistic and depict Communist ideals’.

      There can be no doubt about Matisse’s technical competence as a painter, but graceful as they are, his innumerable ‘Odalisques’ in Mediterranean interiors may to some minds end by becoming rather boring. Matisse himself said: ‘While working, I never try to think, only to feel.’ That is enough to explain his distortions, perhaps also his defects. As a colourist he was something more than decorative, because he had in high degree the rare capacity to establish the position of objects in the depth of the picture by the relations between colours, without the aid of linear or atmospheric perspective.

      Sir Alexander Fleming

      Discoverer of penicillin

      11 March 1955

      Sir Alexander Fleming, d.sc, mb, frcp, frcs, frs, the discoverer of penicillin, died suddenly yesterday at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 73.

      Alexander Fleming, the son of a farmer, was born at Lochfield, near Darvel, in Ayrshire, on August 6, 1881. He received his early education at the village school and at Kilmarnock Academy. At 13 years of age he was sent to live with his brother in London, where, for the next two or three years, he continued his education by attending the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. At that time he displayed no particular scientific ability nor felt any urge to be a doctor. For some years he worked in a shipping office in Leadenhall Street, but he found office routine deadly dull and after four years in the City a small legacy enabled him to escape. The brother with whom he was living had already taken his medical degree and he encouraged his younger brother to take up medicine. Thus at the age of 20 he became a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, winning the senior entrance scholarship in natural science. He showed that he had found his true bent by winning almost every class prize and scholarship during his student career. He qualified in 1906 and at the mb, bs examination of London University in 1908 he obtained honours and was awarded a gold medal.

      In 1909 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1906 he had begun to assist Sir Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s Hospital, and this association led to his taking up the study of bacteriology. Under the stimulating influence of Wright, who was at that time engaged in his researches on the opsonic theory, he acquired great experience and skill in bacteriological technique and in clinical pathology. For recreation he attended the drills and parades of the London Scottish, which he had joined as a private in the year before he resigned from his post with the shipping company. For some years he went to the annual camp and, being a fair shot, to the meetings at Bisley. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he resigned from the London Scottish so that he could go to France as a captain in the ramc. He worked in Sir Almroth Wright’s laboratory in the Casino at Boulogne and received a mention in dispatches. At the end of the war he returned to St Mary’s as assistant to Sir Almroth Wright and was also appointed lecturer in bacteriology in the medical school. He subsequently became director of the department of systematic bacteriology and assistant director of the inoculation department. For some years he acted as pathologist to the venereal disease department at St Mary’s and was also pathologist to the London Lock Hospital. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London, the post being tenable at St Mary’s. He retired with the title emeritus in 1948, but continued at St Mary’s as head of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Micro-Biology. Though last year he formally handed over the reins to Professor R. Cruikshank, he continued his own research work there and only the day before yesterday was at the institute discussing plans for the lecture tour in the Middle East he had been asked to undertake by the British Council.

      Fleming’s first notable discovery, that of lysozyme, was made in 1922. He had for some time been interested in antiseptics and in naturally occurring antibacterial substances. In culturing nasal secretion from a patient with an acute cold he found a remarkable element that had the power of dissolving bacteria. This bacteriolyte element, which he also found in tears and other body fluids, he isolated and named lysozyme.

      A Lucky Accident

      Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when Fleming was engaged СКАЧАТЬ