Henri Matisse, Protagonist of His Time

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1 n marzo 2016 Tutti i diritti sono riservati Fondazione Internazionale Menarini - è vietata la riproduzione anche parziale dei testi e delle fotografie Direttore Responsabile Lorenzo Gualtieri - Redazione, corrispondenza: «Minuti» Edificio L - Strada 6 - Centro Direzionale Milanofiori I Rozzano (Milan, Italy) Henri Matisse, Protagonist of His Time Matisse, colour, Picasso, form. Two great directions, the same supreme end. (Wassily Kandinsky) Henri Matisse: Self Portrait Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP A hundred works from the Centre Pompidou of Paris half covering Matisse s entire creative arc, half the production of those who were his fellow-travellers in the extraordinary adventure that was French art in the early decades of the 20th century at Torino s Palazzo Chiablese until 15 May at Matisse e il suo tempo. Matisse was a pupil of the great Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau, who left young Henri the freedom to experiment and to express himself in a language of his own; Matisse perhaps found reverberating echoes of his own tastes in colour in the luxuriant chromatic richness of Moreau s canvases. Acknowledging the role this training played in Matisse s future creative course, the exhibition opens with the section I Moreau : while at Moreau s atelier, Matisse struck up friendships with other pupils Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin, Henri Manguin and worked with them, even choosing the same subjects; for example, the view of Pont Saint-Michel painted by both Matisse and Marquet in His stay in Collioure in Provence in the summer of 1905 marked the beginning of that research into pure colour he shared with Marquet, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. At that year s Salon d Automne, their works and those of Georges Braque and Raoul Dufy raised a scandal; but the painters turned the derisory definition given by a critic to the room in which their works were shown la cage aux fauves (the cage of the wild animals) into the name of their movement: they were the Fauves. De Vlaminck wrote: What I could have

2 2 done by simply tossing a bomb which, of course, would have landed me on the gallows I tried to do instead in art, with painting, using colour to the limit of its possibilities ; Matissse s Self Portrait and Derain s Le Faubourg de Collioure are two significant examples of the such wild use of colour. Although he did not follow Braque down the turn to Cubism the latter took in his painting in 1908, partly in response to his friendship with Picasso of which Matisse explicitly disapproved in the years that followed Matisse s work nevertheless felt the influence of the Cubist reflection on volume and space, as we see in the Portrait of Greta Prozor (1916); it wasn t until a long time later, however, that he admitted that Cubism is the descendent of Cézanne, who used to say that everything is either cylindrical or cubical. Comparison to Picasso did not change the image that Matisse already offered to those who frequented him during his Paris years: a figure isolated in his otherness but at the same time a master whose influence was all-pervasive. This stance is apparent from his earliest exhibitions, held in the very first years of the 1900s, and it is clearly delineated by Fernande Olivier, at the time Picasso s companion: Matisse was far older than Picasso and a serious and cautious man. He never saw eye to eye with the younger painter. As different as the North Pole is from the South Pole, he would say, when talking about the two of them. He was a sympathetic character, the type of the grand master, with his regular features and vigorous red Henri Matisse: Lorette with Cup of Coffee Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP above André Derain: Le Faubourg de Collioure - Crédit photographique : (c) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP André Derain by SIAE 2015 right Henri Matisse: Portrait of Greta Prozor - Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP

3 3 Henri Matisse: The Algerine - Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP Pablo Picasso: Female Nude in a Turkish Cap, Crédit photographique : (c) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Béatrice Hatala/Dist. RMN-GP Succession Picasso by SIAE 2015 beard. At the same time, behind his big spectacles, he seemed to mask the exact meaning of his expression. But, she continues, he spoke at length when the subject was painting. He discussed, he pronounced ; he wanted to convince. He was already almost forty-five and he was much more sure of himself than was Picasso, who was always a bit sullen and restrained in this type of conversation. Matisse was very much master of himself and shone imposingly. They were the two artists of the time of whom the most was expected. In late 1917, Matisse left Paris for Nice, where he expanded his circle of contacts and acquaintances and the resulting exchange of experiences and interests could not but find its way into his painting: he met Auguste Renoir, frequently visited the studio of sculptor Aristide Maillol, struck up a friendship with Pierre Bonnard. In this period he painted numerous portraits and interior scenes with figures that show how the artist was rethinking the great lesson of Impressionism and was moving toward that Classicism which in the Twenties marked both Derain s and Picasso s production. His stays in Morocco inspired him to paint his odalisques in the wake of Delacroix, a favourite subject of the 19th-century Orientalists beginning with The Algerine (1909). The intense colours, the decorativism of the backgrounds and the redundancy of the furnishings in these works were long considered distinctive characteristics of Matisse s refined art; those which decreed his success with the public, creating a well-defined fashion. Picasso said, When Matisse died he left his odalisques to me as a legacy and this is my idea of the Orient, though I have never travelled there. In this perspective, the Female Nude in a Turkish Cap painted by Picasso in 1955 can be considered a tribute to Matisse, who died

4 pag. 4 Henri Matisse: Large Red Interior - Paris, Collection Centre Pompidou, Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/ Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP Georges Braque: L Atelier IX - Crédit photographique : (c) Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Bertrand Prévost/Dist. RMN-GP Gerges Braque by SIAE 2015 the year before. A turning point in Matisse s career came in the Thirties: this was the period of the great mural decoration painted for Dr. Barnes, The Dance, and the illustrations for Mallarmé s Poesies. The drawing becomes more stylised, representation of everyday objects is invested with a mysterious, oneiric aura which, incidentally, was then common to Matisse s, Picasso s, Masson s, Miró s and even Léger s graphic works and clear testimony to the influence of Surrealism, the most innovative direction in the poetic of the time. In her introduction to the Turin exhibition catalogue, Cécile Debray writes: The radical force of his painting, the surprising novelty of his work at the turning in the Thirties and, to a certain extent, the preponderant place he, along with few others like Picasso and Braque, occupies in the ideological formulation of a modern French art after World War I, explain the exceptional aura he enjoys and which so totally isolates him from the rest of the art context, which is nevertheless his. Interiors are omnipresent in Matisse s art. In the Forties and Fifties, one s own atelier was a recurring theme among painters for example, Braque and Picasso, both of whom are represented at the Turin show with paintings that express all the magic of an environment which, for the artist, is a place for reflection and concentration, a physical and at the same time a mental space. In Matisse s case, the place where he continued to rework, in his still lifes, his meditations on Cezanne s painting but also on Picasso s most recent production. As the Forties turned into the Fifties, Matisse, like Léger and Dufy, felt the influence of the modernist languages of Le Corbusier and Mondrian, of which we see reflections in Matisse s use of primary colours and a certain simplification of his line. In the late Forties, Matisse changed direction again, inventing the technique of the cut-out gouache, which permitted him to cut into the flesh of colour; from the same period, the series of twenty coloured plates, Jazz Henri Matisse: Still Life with Green Sideboard Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAMCCI/Philippe Migeat/Dist. RMN-GP.

5 pag. 5 (1947), made using the pochoir stencil process. The new techniques introduced by Matisse were regarded with attention by artists of later generations: Abstract Expressionists such as Rothko and Sam Francis, Supports/Surfaces artists such as Vincent Bioulès, Claude Viallat (who in his 1992 Hommage à Matisse offers his tribute to the lesson taught by the master) and Jean-Pierre Pincemin. The high renown in which Matisse s work is held in the United States is partly due to the efforts of his son, art dealer Pierre Matisse, but also to the master s shows in the last years of his life, when he turned his energies to creating the Chapelle du Rosaire ( ) in Vence in Provence. Matisse s hand is apparent throughout, in the architecture, the floralmotif stained-glass windows, the ceramic Via Crucis and the church furnishings and vestments. It is, in the words of the artist, the masterwork of his existence. lorenzo gualtieri