Young Sailor II

In the interview with Pierre Courthion, Matisse identifies the African artist as approaching her work “from the point of view of sculptural language” and “in terms of [its] material, according to invented planes and proportions.” Matisse compares this to the European sculptor, who begins by focusing on “musculature” and the visual “description of the object.”  

From this commentary, it becomes clear that Matisse interest in African Sculpture is primarily concerned with communication of form. Whereas the European approach to communicate form is to describe an object realistically in terms of its anatomy, Matisse poses that the African approach is to translate form into a “language,” abstracting the actual curvature of surfaces and their sizes into an imagined representation.

In Young Sailor II, Matisse attempts to access this mode of seeing to re-read his portrait subject from Young Sailor I. Here, Matisse translates his Fauvist portrait of the young fisherman into a planar, confrontational study in human abstraction.