Miskatonic University Press

I’m rereading the Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies, and in What’s Bred in the Bone (1985) I was struck by something art restorer Tancred Saraceni says to Francis Cornish in early 1939:

Of course, you may become something rather like a photographer. But remember what Matisse said: “L’exactitude, ce n’est pas la verite.”

That’s good, but did Matisse say it? I’m never satisfied with a quotation unless I have a source.

Happily, it’s easy to get started on this one. Wikiquote’s entry on Matisse has a quotation, crediting it to Jack D. Flam’s translation of “Interview with Henri Matisse” by Jacques Guenne in L’Art Vivant (15 September 1925).

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

Exactitude is not truth. And Delacroix! That’s the great French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix.

I got Flam’s excellent collection Matisse on Art (revised edition, University of California Press, 1995) from the library so I could see the whole piece. I like the quotation this way, including a little more of what comes next:

Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. Notice that the classics went on re-doing the same painting and always differently. After a certain time, Cézanne always painted the same canvas of the Bathers. Although the master of Aix ceaselessly redid the same painting, don’t we come upon a new Cézanne with the greatest curiosity?

Matisse is quoting Eugène Delacroix and in the same breath speaking of Cézanne. (It reminded me of something Gertrude Stein said: “I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.”)

I was curious to know how it read in the original French. L’Art Vivant hasn’t been digitized, but York University Libraries has it on microfilm, and I got it into the reader and took scans of the pages: “Entretien avec Henri Matisse” (2.3 MB PDF).

In French:

Peu à peu s’imposait cette notion que la peinture est un mode d’expression et que l’on peut exprimer la même chose de plusiers façons. « L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité », se plaisait à dire Delacroix. Remarquez que les classiques ont toujours refait le même tableau, et toujours de façon différente. A partir d’une certaine époque, Cézanne a toujours peint la même toile des Baigneuses. Bien que le maitre d’Aix eût sans cesse refait le même tableau, ne prend-on pas connaissance d’un nouveau Cézanne avec la plus grande curiosité.

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité. To my high school French, Flam’s translation handles the original very clearly. We see that Tancred Saraceni (or Davies) slightly misquoted Matisse: there is no “ce” in this quotation. That’s assuming this is where Saraceni got the line; he was speaking in 1939 and is certainly a person likely to have read L’Art Vivant.

(For more on L’Art Vivant, which in my quick scroll looked very interesting, see “From ‘Portraits d’artistes’ to the interviewer’s portrait: interviews of modern artists by Jacques Guenne in L’art Vivant (1925–1930)” by Poppy Sfakianaki, in Journal of Art Historiography (December 2020).)

In 1947 Matisse wrote an essay titled “Exactitude is not Truth” (in Flam’s translation) for a a catalogue of a show of his drawings. Flam’s notes say, “The title phrase comes from a saying of Delacroix.” The title is the last sentence of the essay, but there is no mention of Delacroix.

I wondered if Matisse used the phrase frequently, so I looked at the indexes for the majestic two-volume biography by Hilary Spurling, The Unknown Matisse (1995) and Matisse the Master (2005). Most of the Delacroix mentions are just in passing; there’s no mention of either this phrase or the essay.

On to Delacroix. The phrase appears once in his wonderful Journal, on 18 July 1850. Here is the original French in Wikisource:

« Dans la peinture et surtout dans le portrait, dit Mme Cavé dans son traité, c’est l’esprit qui parle à l’esprit, et non la science qui parle à la science. » Cette observation, plus profonde qu’elle ne l’a peut-être cru elle-même, est le procès fait à la pédanterie de l’exécution. Je me suis dit cent fois que la peinture, c’est-à-dire la peinture matérielle, n’était que le prétexte, que le pont entre l’esprit du peintre et celui du spectateur. La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art; l’ingénieux artifice, quand il plaît ou qu’il exprime, est l’art tout entier. La prétendue conscience de la plupart des peintres n’est que la perfection apportée à l’art d’ennuyer. Ces gens-là, s’ils le pouvaient, travailleraient avec le même scrupule l’envers de leurs tableaux… Il serait curieux de faire un traité de toutes les faussetés qui peuvent composer le vrai.

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art.

This is the entry from the Lucy Norton translation in The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, edited by Hubert Wellington (London: Phaidon, 1995). (See Wikipedia for more on Madame Cavé.)

“In painting, and especially portraiture,” says Mme Cavé in her treatise, “mind speaks to mind, and not knowledge to knowledge.” This observation, which may be more profound than she knows herself, is an indictment of pedantry in execution. I have said to myself over and over again that painting, i.e. the material process we call painting, is no more than the pretext, the bridge, between the mind of the artist and that of the beholder. Cold accuracy is not art. Skilful invention, when it is pleasing or expressive, is art itself. The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labour with equal care over the backs of their pictures. It might be interesting to write a treatise on all the falsities that can be added together to make a truth.

Norton translates it as Cold accuracy is not art. To match Flam we could say Cold exactitude is not art. This is how I’ve seen it translated in some other books.

Matisse said that Delacroix “liked to say” it, but I looked at five books about Delacroix and didn’t see any mention of it, which surprised me, sharp aphorism that it is. Searching texts of scanned books at the Internet Archive doesn’t turn up any supporting evidence either.

(Note: Delacroix’s Journal is wonderful! I posted about it back in 2017. In 2019 I made a field recording in the Garden of the Delacroix Museum in Paris.)

So Matisse misremembered, or misquoted, or reshaped, Delacroix. Saraceni misquoted Matisse in a trivial way, but Matisse broadens Delacroix’s “art” to “truth.” Both Delacroix and Matisse are, of course, correct.

La froide exactitude n’est pas l’art: Cold exactitude is not art.

L’exactitude n’est pas la vérité: Exactitude is not truth.