Higher & Harder

Henri Matisse, who is 79 this week, permits few visitors. When he goes so far as to let a reporter inside his studio in the Riviera hill town of Vence, the old man is apt to have a surprise up his sleeve. This week in the New York Times Sunday magazine, one of Matisse's most recent visitors, Joseph A. Barry, reported his latest. Matisse, past master of charm and cheerfulness, was designing a chapel.

In the past, Matisse's studio had always been as gay as a toy shop, sparkling with pinned-up scraps of colored paper, polished brass bric-a-brac and bright swatches of silk. This time it was chaste and bare. The only colored paper cutouts that remained looked like designs for stained glass windows, which they were.

There was not a single odalisque or flowery still life in the place. Matisse had turned to higher, harder themes. Severe line drawings of a long-robed Saint, the Stations of the Cross, and the Virgin and Child now flowed from his hand.

At the foot of his bed (which now stands in his studio so that he can work propped up in it) was the focal point of Matisse's new labors: a working model of the chapel he is designing for a Dominican home for convalescent girls not far from his house in Vence.

The chapel will be T-shaped, lit through stained glass, whitewashed on the inside and decorated with paintings done entirely in black & white. For the north wall Matisse plans a picture of St. Dominic, twice life size, and beside him the Virgin and Child in a field of stars. The east wall will be more ambitious than anything Matisse ever tried, combining all 14 Stations of the Cross--from the Condemnation by Pilate to the Descent from the Cross--in a mounting S-curve of pictures. Since Matisse cannot work for long on his feet, he will be unable to paint the pictures on the walls directly, plans to do them on tile which will afterward be baked and placed in position. He hopes that the painting will have the same sort of impact that he himself once received from Giotto's frescoes at Padua.

Matisse himself pretended not to be surprised at his new direction. "In my own way," he explained, "I have always sung the glory of God and His creations. I have not changed."

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