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“ Yet at the same time Matisse was acutely aware of something that art historians sometimes forget: that works of art are primary documents and can be ‘read’ and interpreted in the same way as—and perhaps even more fruitfully than—the writings that spring up around them. ‘There are so many things in art,’ Matisse told Pierre Courthion in 1931, ‘beginning with art itself, that one doesn’t understand. A painter doesn’t see everything he has put in his painting. It is other people who find these treasures in it, one by one, and the richer a painting is in surprises of this sort, in treasures, the greater its author.’
Flam, Jack. Matisse: the Man and his Art 1869-1918. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1986: 12.
