The Talented Monsieur Matisse – Art & Antiques Magazine


An international exhibition on Henri Matisse spotlights a pivotal and developmental period of the master’s career.

By Lilly Wei

Henri Matisse is having a moment, it might be said, if this giant of 20th-century art has ever needed one. Still, the innovative installation that re-created The Red Studio (1911) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York drew delighted crowds all spring and summer—and rave reviews; no, it wasn’t kitsch. The appetite for the master’s art, it seems, never flags. And hard on its heels is another major exhibition, “Matisse in the 1930s”, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) where it opens on October 19 and will be up until January 29, 2023. Conceived in collaboration with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (where it will go afterward) and the Musée Matisse in Nice (its last stop), its expert curatorial team brings together Matthew Affron of the PMA, Cécile Debray of the Musée National Picasso-Paris and Claudine Grammont of the Musée Matisse.

Odalisque with Grey Trousers, 1926-7.
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, RF 1963-7. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

It merits attention as the first exhibition to dive deeply into this pivotal period of Matisse’s oeuvre, with over 100 cannily selected works accompanied by archival photographs and film—charting his experiments thematically and chronologically. We watch the artist try this, then that, in artistic real time. Expanding his technical range, broadening his perspectives, recalibrating his palette, he reconsidered the subjects that had always enthralled him: still lifes, interiors, sumptuously patterned fabrics, landscapes, and above all, women— “young,” “pretty” women—whose presence lingers even when they are not in the picture. He also questions his mediums, his materials and his processes: easel painting, decorative painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, adding new ones such as book illustration (his etchings for Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poésies (1932), say, is one such instance), coming up with answers that were often fresh, often surprising. The show is bookended by a number of earlier and later works for context, and is accompanied by a handsome, informative catalogue that analyzes this fascinating story of discovery from multiple points of view.

Matisse (1969-1954) has a special relationship with Philadelphia that began as a special relationship with its preeminent collector Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951). Barnes presciently started collecting Matisse in 1912, and by 1930, the enterprising pharmaceutical tycoon had amassed the largest and most significant body of work by the French artist in existence for his now priceless collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. While Matisse seldom traveled far abroad (the next year would find him in the United States and in Tahiti), on December 31, 1929, New Year’s Eve, he was visiting his patron in Merion. He soon would be commissioned to create a mural for the three lunettes that graced the main hallway of the original Barnes Foundation building, then located in the affluent Philadelphia suburb. It was the eve of his 60th birthday, and he was in a state of uncertainty, even crisis, despite his renown and all the public accolades he had accumulated. This was partly due the economic downturn and the dwindling of sales (the stock market had catastrophically crashed only two months earlier, its reverberations felt especially by his American collectors, his most enthusiastic.) But more worrisome was the faltering of inspiration that had plagued him of late after the prodigious outpouring that followed his 1917 removal from Paris to Nice. It was not only his critics who had doubts about his future, so did he. By November 1929, he confessed that “in front of the canvas, I have no ideas whatsoever.”

Woman with a Veil, 1927
Museum of Modern Art, New York: The William S. Paley Collection, SPC22.1990. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The commission was a challenge he couldn’t refuse. It was unlike anything he had worked on previously, and, as he wrestled with it, intrigued, it became the spark that rekindled his creative fire. The Dance (1932-3) is the exhilarating result, a recurrent theme of much significance for him. Located in the Barnes Foundation (now merely a short walk from the PMA), viewers should go there to compare the finished mural with the two enormous, somewhat more conventional studies for it in the show: Oil Study for Barnes Mural, Gray Harmony and Oil Study for Barnes Mural, Ocher Harmony (both 1930-1).

It is riveting to see how he pared and tightened his vision for the mural, the figures simplified, clarified, flattened, their tumbling forms establishing a rhythm that connects the three lunettes, the dancers emphatically foregrounded, pressed to the surface by the geometric arrangement behind them, collapsing illusionistic depth, recouping his earlier radicality. It also gives us an inkling of what he could achieve architecturally as an artist and designer that would culminate in the glorious Matisse Chapel (La Chapelle du Rosaire) at Vence, France, the masterpiece of a long, fanatically dedicated career.

When Matisse left Paris for Nice, it was because he was captivated by the light of the south and how that light illuminated and intensified everything it touched. Two resplendent paintings from this period are The Moorish Screen (1921) and Odalisque in Grey Trousers (1926-7). The former characteristically shows a lavishly furnished interior, decorated by an extravagant display of softly clashing, intricate patterns, the colors muted, the two young women (his daughter Marguerite and her friend) in gauzy, pink-tinged white dresses that added a touch of serenity, the whole a complex orchestration of sensuous delight and comfort. Odalisque in Grey Trousers was painted five years later, and is more broadly conceived, the design less delicate, the colors brash, dissonant, the space tighter, the figure, while still modeled, is pushed closer to the surface, enveloped by an interior that is losing spatial depth, becoming, as in earlier work, more abstract. Many thought that Matisse had succumbed to the merely decorative in the recent Nice years, but in retrospect, seeds of his last phase were already evident, however he skipped around. In Yellow Odalisque (1937), 10 years later, the wholly garbed woman with a coquettish yellow bow in her hair, is even more to the fore, the colorful flowers and patterns sharing the billing are enlivened by restless, wavering lines, the figure looking straight at us, the size of her hands, curiously, much exaggerated. The whole is stylish, appealing, a contemporized odalisque, its Orientalism tempered, its beauty that of the joyful interplay of hues and a paean to color by one of the great colorists of art history.

Woman in Blue, 1937.
Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen, 1956-23-1. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The year 1930 was transformative for Matisse, stimulated by novel sights and ideas—and by his galvanizing new commission. He returned to Nice recharged, and resumed easel painting, armed with new methods and new ways to create compositions, including the use of photographs to document his process and painted paper cutouts to plan his compositions. It led him to discard modeling and the illusion of space, gravitating toward flatness as well as toward bold, clear forms and pure colors as more present, expressive. Color, he often proclaimed, must serve expression, noting also that every part of the picture plane is of equal importance. He brought collage and cut paper to unparalleled heights, and after 1947, it became his primary medium.

One of the key works in this show is the well-known Large Reclining Nude (1935), is literally that, stretched nonchalantly, lithely across most of the surface at the forefront, facing the viewer in a tightly framed close-up. Her expression is mild, a schematic version of his odalisque, her bent arms and legs, except for the upper arm, extending beyond the painting’s edges, placed against a chalky grid (the floor?) instead of a cushioned divan, the interior completed by another spare grid (a window?), the colors reduced to a mere handful. The sensuousness and voluptuousness, however, remain, brushed into the fleshy pink paint, the distorted proportions, and the lines that caress the body, the erotic charge, always present but diffused, formalized, clearly so here. There is also a strange object that might be resting on the windowsill or suspended tantalizingly in mid-air above her belly, like an arrow pointing toward her sex. Matisse is not at all about repose and comfortable armchairs all the time.

The Dream, 1935.
Centre Pompidou, Paris, AM 1979-106. © 2022 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Another is the Woman in Blue (1937) which, like the very different painting above, depicts Lydia Delectorskaya, who became his principal model (as well as his secretary and studio manager, and, although their relationship was ambiguous, precipitated the breakup of Matisse’s marriage). She is dressed in a silky blue blouse and long skirt, both white-ruffled (the skirt will also be displayed). Posed hieratically, she is impassive, regal, except for a slight tilt of her torso, one elbow resting on the yellow arm of a red tapestried chair. The chair’s curved arms suggest a throne and again, the figure has been brought forward by the composition’s spatial compression. The directness and assurance of the figure is arresting, as is its lightness and delicacy, a combination that is subtly contradictory, weighing the substantive against the fugitive. And once again, the hands are disproportionately large, clumsy; around one is entwined what looks like a rosary and she herself like a worldly Madonna.

In January of 1941, when France was under German occupation and Matisse was isolating in the south, he underwent a risky operation for stomach cancer. It was successful, but his recovery was slow and left him weakened and bedridden. Only able to paint sporadically, he drew constantly, summarizing what he had discovered in the preceding decade. He must have felt that mortality was stalking him, but he was also grateful for the gift of more time, a “second life,” which turned into another 13 extraordinary years of artmaking. The exhibition closes with this body of works, Themes and Variations: drawings of models in the studio, of the bloom of flesh, fruit, and flowers. Matisse was eager to cultivate his garden once again, as well as his painted harem, as he prepared for the triumphant last phase of his career, yet unknown, that many consider his finest. The future was his, Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, Matisse’s great Russian patron once said to him, and he was right.



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