Evening Canal Sketch

Here's a key passage in the Schneider Matisse book describing the work of the 1920's in Nice: "The difficulty was that a return to realistic representation was at once necessary and impossible. Unless--and this was the solution Matisse was looking for--the abstract image could be made to look like a realistic representation. For Matisse was no longer satisfied with merely combining the two- and three-dimensional space to create effects which had so far been produced by three-dimensional space. It was no longer a question of skillfully combining realism with abstraction, but of getting abstraction to simulate realism."