There is no label for painting of this sort. Like Bonnard's, it comes without slogans and appears to offer no challenges. Yet, if this is significant painting, it questions the need for the new routes and routines of modernism. There are histories of modern art which do not bother with Bonnard, and the Matisse of the I920s to be passed over. In his Notes of a Painter Matisse had expressly spoken of an ‘art of balance of purity and serenity something that calms the mind.' In I949 he said to his son-in-law Georges Duthuit: 'It is just a matter of canalizing the awareness of the spectator in such a way that he relates to the picture but is tree to think of any other thing than the particular object that one The wished to him without holding him back Beware of Mast through surprise.' French art easily tends to sweetness. The I920s particularly witnessed Paris being offered charm by one side and the Mode programmatic shocks of Surrealism by the other, and painting such as Matisse's was easily set aside as making no particular contribution. Yet it turns its back on nothing in modern art but subsumes elements of and of reading of Cubism in an apparently innocent process of observing and noting. In fact, only the sunlight caught in net curtains of Interior at Nice postulates something seen and recorded as scen.