Exactness does not itself constitute the truth.

Henri Matisse Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of color and his fluid. He is known primarily as a painter of still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists. The three artists were said to help in defining the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, and are responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labeled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s, he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His mastery of the expressive language of color and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art. Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In his piece Henri Matisse: Retrospective which was translated into English for the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he stated Exactitude is not truth. Included in the exhibition were four different line drawings of his face. The upper part of the face is the same but the lower part varies. He pointed out that the despite the differences, each are united by a common quality. His point is that inexactitude in a representation does not divert from the expression of character or the inherent truth of the personality. He believes that these little inexactitudes help to clarify and convey feelings. Expressionism is a style in which emotion is the motivating principle that gives shape to the figures. This often involves distortion in the elongation, attenuation, or exaggeration of the ordinary proportions in a manner of representation with the subjective use of colors to convey emotions. Expressionism here is allied to Fauvism. I believe that Henri Matisse creates a perfect art of Fauvism with inexactness. He only means that, similar drawings are made with elements with the same feeling despite its inconsistencies. Inexactness may lead people to truth. Inexactness leads us to a way to further analyze and find answers. Inexactness portrays the real world, the real happenings and the real people. We can find truth through the real feelings and feeling are not expressed vividly and exactly in the real world.