Matisse, Henri

 

 

Henri Matisse: A Retrospective

 

 

 

 

Reproducing more than 400 artworks (320 in color), this hefty catalogue of an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art documents the largest and most ambitious Matisse retrospective ever assembled. In his exciting introductory essay, MoMA curator Elderfield, who organized the exhibit, interprets the artist as a painter of metaphors, signs and analogies that pointed to an internal world of the imagination.

 

No mere hedonist, Matisse mistrusted visual sensations and aimed at a mode of representation that had the clarity of a text, notes Elderfield, who brilliantly deconstructs the artist's pictorial language. Elderfield shows that the myth of a Golden Age, expressed in images of luxury and erotic fulfillment, is a key influence on a man who decisively altered the way we look at pictures. While the focus here is on painting, numerous drawings, sculptures, prints and stained-glass window designs are also reproduced.

 

 

(1869-1954)

 

 

 

 

Notre-Dame, une fin d'apres-midi 1902

(A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon)

28 1/2 in x 21 1/2 in

Oil on paper mounted on canvas

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

 

 

 

 

Studio under the Eaves 1903

 

 

"We are in great trouble. The various problems, great and small, more great than small, of which… life has given me a share… practically decided me to give up painting altogether for a quite different job, insipid but sufficiently lucrative to live on…"

 

Henri Matisse, 15th July 1903.

Something of the despair expressed by Matisse in this letter to his old friend, Simon Bussy, found its way on to this canvas, painted at around the same time. It is one of relatively few works that the artist completed during what has been referred to as his ‘dark period.’ The adjective applies to his mood as much as his palette. The studio depicted here was on the top floor of 24 Rue Fagard in Bohain, the small, northern town in which Matisse had grown up and where in 1903 he had returned, the exhausted and depressed head of a young family.

 

http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

 

The Red Studio (Issy-les-Moulineaux) 1911
5 ft 11 1/4 in x 7 ft 2 1/4 in

Oil on canvas

Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

 

 

Porte-Fenetre a Collioure 1914

3 ft 10 in x 2 ft 11 1/2 in

Oil on canvas

Private Collection

 

 

 

 
 

Bathers by a River 1909, 1913, and 1916

259.7 x 389.9 cm

Oil on canvas

Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection 1953.158

 

 

 

Still dissatisfied with the painting in 1916, Matisse turned the blue stream into a black band, to which he added a white snake (possibly a reference to the snake that tempted Eve in paradise). He isolated the colmnar figures against vertical zones of green, black, white, and grayish blue.

 

Silhouetted against the light and dark zones at right, these somber figures are far removed from the graceful inhabitants of the original composition. In fact, the panel’s grave tone may reflect Matisse’s reaction to World War I (1914-1918) and the threat it posed to the values of art and life that the artist had originally set out to celebrate.

 

columnar (adj)
shaped like a column or other rigid, upright support

 

 

 

http://www.artic.edu

 

 

 

 

Odalisque with Red Culottes 1921

 

 

 

 

Venus on a Shell I   1930

Bronze. H. 30.5 cm
gift of Lidia Delectorskaya 1971

 

 

http://www.hermitagemuseum.org

 

 

 

 

Nymphe dans la forêt (La verdure) 1935 - 1942/43  

 

 

http://www.musee-matisse-nice.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown 1947

25 5/8 x 16 9/16 in. (65 x 42 cm)

Plate V from the Jazz series

Color pochoir

 Gift of Bruce Allyn Eissner, Class of 1965, and Judith Pick Eissner. 80.63.5

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

 

 

An early form of stencil print, pochoir was an ideal choice for reproducing Matisse's twenty cut-outs called Jazz, depicting circus scenes, folklore subjects, life in Parisian music halls, and the artist's own travel experiences.

It was in the early 1940s, when he was confined to his bed for most of the day, that Matisse began to pursue the cut-out as an art form. His assistants painted opaque watercolor onto white sheets of paper, which Matisse in turn cut into a variety of shapes, often retaining both the primary form (the "positive") and the cut-away piece (the "negative"), arranging them in vibrant juxtapositions. He pinned and re-pinned the pieces to the wall of his studio until he was finally satisfied with the overall harmony of the composition.

The two principal themes to be found in Jazz are the noise and excitement of the circus (the series was originally named Le Cirque, but Matisse changed it before publication) and the syncopated rhythms of popular jazz music. In the The Horse, the Rider, and the Clown the horse is the only distinct figure; the equestrienne is implied by her fan-shaped skirt, overlapping the horse's flank, and the clown by his vibrant costume in green, black, and yellow.

 

 

 

http://www.museum.cornell.edu/HFJ/handbook/hb155.html

 

 

 

 

Blue Nude (IV) Nu bleu (IV) 1952

 

 

 

 

The Swimming Pool 1952-53

7 ft 6 5/8 in x 53 ft 11 in

Esoteric medium

Nine-panel mural in two parts, gouache on cut-and-pasted paper mounted on burlap

Museum of Modern Art, New York

 

 

 

 

 

 

Les coquelicots; Pomeganate Blossoms 1969

The Wild Poppies

33 3/8 x 137 7/8 in

Stained and leaded glass

five panes, in frame

Formerly Private Collection Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

The Detroit Institute of Arts

 

 

 

http://www.dia.org