Matisse: “For Me It’s Always New”

please join me in welcoming dr. Hansen Thank You Kristin and thank you all of you look at you for being here this afternoon to think about my teeth when I was asked to contribute to this course by presenting on Matisse's work from the 1910s 1920s and 1930s I honestly wondered how I could limit myself to 90 minutes on 30 such advented inventive years a few key ideas immediately came to mind for me Matisse was an artist who regularly questioned himself and revisited his ideas his methods his compositions there's a strong thread of artistic self-evaluation and dialogue within his body of work certain motifs and right now you're looking at this little ring of dancers recur throughout his career other motifs workers almost obsessively for one single decade in this case the 1920s and sometimes the changes are quite subtle well in others they're radical in their stylistic divergence also admittedly some of my very favorite paintings by Matisse come from this period and really attest to his experimentation with the basic materials just oil paint and canvas as he worked and sawed and reimagined and then of course the artists own voice for me it's always new and I'll put those exact words into their context momentarily but they resonate broadly in my thinking about his art it wasn't just that the same subject seemed new to him each time but seemingly that the means of making a painting were ever new ever open to experimentation and revision or reimagine ation and it's that openness that some of the novelty of serious playfulness that is for me at the heart of Matisse's work so now that quotation for me it's always new in 1919 a Swedish art historian Ragnar hope came to visit Matisse in his Paris studio he climbed up the stairs got to the studio and he looked out the window and remarked to Matisse gosh that looks familiar from his paintings and Matisse replied I never tire of it for me it's always new and just now it is more dear to me than ever before the fact is you see that I was down by the Mediterranean for a couple of months and that enabled me to look again with fresh eyes at Paris which is always Paris that is something indescribably glorious to be sure this little apartment is inconvenient but I have lived here for many years I've grown attached to it and I can't be without the view now if you've ever lived somewhere with a really great view you really love the sunset there you know how he feels right you just can't be without that view Matisse had been living on 19 case and Michele from 1899 to 1907 and he painted about 12 oils of the view from his studio window more or less the same view he also could turn his head and paint other views but at least a dozen times he painted this particular view from his studio window you'll notice that certain parts are are the same and recognizable the west work of notre-dame Cathedral the san michele bridge descend staircases going up and the space in front of the cathedral with crowds of people and it took me a minute to recognize that these were people walking on the sidewalk helped me to see them over here I couldn't quite figure this out um and this is the open shutter and the wall of the studio window as he sees them you'll also notice several things that are quite distinct between these two paintings one might be that they aren't the same size one's 18 inches tall the other one 28 inches tall and then the manner with which he's portrayed on that view from his window so in the one on the left from the tape a little bit more impressionistic you get a sense of a bright kind of sunny day in the one in the elbe right knocks maybe a day a bit more like we've been having with a sort of gloomy and overcast misty kind of weather but also the application of paint that kind of impressionistic touch in the one at the tape and a broader sort of blockier on application of paint in the one at the Albright Knox and you know with the benefit of hindsight that he's working through thinking about Impressionism and post-impressionism as he's working toward his own what would come to be called fauvist idiom so this important moment in Matisse's development in his own career so those those changes in the in the kinds of brushwork in the way he's thinking about color as he's looking at something so familiar as the view from his home in studio he got rid of the studio and got a different one in the suburbs of Paris in 1909 something that was less inconvenient you recall him saying about this apartment on something more convenient and but I 1913 he rented this studio this one again and he had the one in the suburbs and this one as a little pied-à-terre right in the center of Paris I envy him this enormous li and he just couldn't get enough of a view so he had to paint it again he had to be with it again and he kept renting this studio through through the 19-teens so what you're seeing here are two more much larger scale paintings that he made of that view from his win No presumably this one may be made first more naturalistic more recognizable and maybe this one a bit more abstract made made second but we don't actually know and we see that motif that familiar view that familiar cathedrals start to be mysteriously transformed in the process of making a work of art I love to think about these two particularly with this photo from the window of his studio because you see that there are some some complexities the river bends a little bit just at this moment which he plays up in this particular one but you can barely see the I keep wanting to say par Vieux Dimetrodon the the pavement in front of the cathedral in the photograph he helps us he makes it clearer here and he doesn't help us so much here all of a sudden there's this there's this confusion and complexity as you're looking you might notice that the sámi shel bridge he he helps us in this painting by putting it off to the side more but in the photo you notice there's they seem to be stacked right on top of each other and we're seeing that a bit in this painting here that complexity of looking had we not seen the 1902 painting we might not recognize this stripe on the left or on the right perhaps the shutter and the studio window but he's not adding it all up for us he's a vocal some components of that view but not clarifying it not making it simpler for us and he worked and reworked the surface of the MoMA canvas before covering it almost entirely but not entirely in blue and he leaves elements of that work of that composition visible in the paint accentuating the duration the making of the work of art over a period of time and so one stimulus obviously is the view from his win that familiar view that he saw but I wanted to think about some other stimuli that he might have been working through as he's thinking about that familiar thing outside his window so I offer you some works by Picasso and by Cezanne and artists with whose work Matisse was quite familiar and who were also thinking about ideas of duration of making the process of making a work of art visible and also that sense of duration the process it takes us to look at a work of art that it doesn't just give itself freely that we have to we have to think and work before we find it and certain simplifications the ways in which this sort of bifurcated rectangle stands for notre-dame Cathedral much in the same way that this oval stands for the top of a cafe table your mind has to fill that in and make that make sense for you and then certain spatial complexities the way that we understand with a cubist painting that were we have to work to find the body within the space and we have to think about seeing the top of the table at the same time we're seeing the glass from the side so top and side at the same time we get that with Cezanne too if you've looked at this painting you note with me before you know it's one of my favorites and following the sense that stands up as we look at areas here which I can never decide if it's the ground laying down in front of the white building or the continuity of the fence standing up those complexities of space Matisse is playing through that that's that thought process as he's making his own composition which we wouldn't mistake for Picasso or for Cezanne but he's thinking about their way of making a work of art they're what their process in making a painting using some of those ideas some of that thought process as he responds to the view outside his window speaking at the MFA I would be remiss not to mention another great painter of cathedrals and our friend monet painted these all all of these during the years in 1893 in 1894 and he exhibited 20 of them in 1895 in Paris at the Galerie of Paul de rigueur well Matisse was a student in Paris in 1895 when that exhibition took place do I know for sure if he saw it I don't but it would be hard-pressed to think that he wouldn't have checked it out and it was a great success for Monet in 1895 so Monet of course is explicitly making a series he's attending to different effects of light and weather and times of day on the same surface that is the Rouen Cathedral and Matisse isn't making an explicit series but he certainly might have had this kind of idea in mind another thing I find really compelling and I love about having all of these on view together on one slide is that Monet worked on sight in Rouen looking at the Cathedral but he took all these canvases home to G Verni where he was living and he reworked them in the studio in G vernier and he used light blue as a sort of unifying color to sort of help the compositions coalesce and so I think with that when I'm thinking about Matisse and his choice to use blue of course it's the sky and water and all of these things but that unifying color that he comes back to on his own I love art artists quotations and this lecture will be full of them I promise you and this is one in Matisse talking about making a work of art he says there are two ways of expressing things one is to show them crudely the other is to evoke them through art now I'm not suggesting that one of these is one and of these as the other I think they're both evocative paintings but we want to continue to think about that when we're looking at Matisse's paintings that he doesn't mean to show us the thing itself he doesn't mean to represent it crudely he means to evoke it through art and that sense of of image making as a goal rather than strict representation and that making a painting is not a faithful representation in either case here so these familiar surroundings this familiar view was for Matisse a spur for formal and technical exploration and experimentation he looked at his familiar surroundings with unfamiliar eyes in his other studio as well this is the on studio I was mentioning in the suburb of Paris that he had starting in 1909 and he was starting to have some great financial success which was allowing him to have a bigger more convenient studio for himself and I know that you saw this painting with Marietta when you talked about sculpture and that she would have mentioned to you that it's a small retrospective of Matisse's own work his paintings his ceramics his sculptures in his own studio um one of the things I loved in thinking about this painting is how much the works of art are represented in detail that they have a sort of presence and solidity and that the room and its furnishings are a bit sort of ghostly or or a serial on not so fixed and this is in part achieved by the manner in which he makes the painting so the furnishings are made by gaps in the surface of the red pane he was playing with color it was yellow it was a yellow studio it was a blue studio before it was a red studio right it actually was a white studio in real life it wasn't any of those colors he was playing but he achieves he make this chest of drawers these are not outlines painted on top of the red they're opening between spaces in the red showing you a color that's underneath the red and for me this creates a really interesting effect and he it creates the effect of the furnishings for example seeming a bit like they're they're floating rather than being solid on that outline which we know isn't in an outline it's an opening but that outline it doesn't solidify the representation it doesn't solidify the object and make it there and present instead those openings make the paintings spacious and they give a sort of unfixed a little bit ethereal or ghostly kind of quality they they give the the painting breathing room when asked about why he did this Matisse said where I got the red color to be sure I just don't know I find that all these things only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red so that kind of playfulness I was mentioning before and then having the the whole composition up again on this sense of a playfulness between a sense of depth into space and a sense of flatness and and decoration so if you're looking at something like the tabletop you get a sense of recession those parallel lines receding into the background but then you might also notice that there are other places where you expect there to be a sense of depth and and you don't get it and so angled lines suggesting depth this kind of blue-green giving you the window outside intensifying that interior space but then you see this the window the way it's obviously flat on the wall is the window and then this painting which you understand is leaning against the same wall but they're not eating in the same way there's something wonky about the space over there and you follow the line where the floor meets the wall there and there and you assume it should be there's no corner right so it's quite flat but it's also spacious and so those kind of at that play of the complexity right it's not a representation it's an evoke ation through art so it doesn't have to give you all of those details he doesn't owe us that and I think it's a better picture for it so this this sense of the studio and it's kind of subtle spatial discontinuities these things that make it an Evoque ation they make it Matisse's vision Matisse's private universe Matisse's studio are part of the picture making and that the art is more real more present more permanent and fixed than the space or the furnishings surrounding it I offer you Matisse's words and also that sometimes the studio is pink and he says modern art spreads joy around by its colors which calm us and I offer also a photo of the interior of the studio so when I was saying that this is a window I know that in part because I know it's this window it doesn't otherwise and logically read as a window necessarily uh so that that sense of the familiar spaces for him being spaces being things that he could he could innovate with and this happened with people who were familiar to him as well not just the spaces this is a painting he worked on for basically all of the summer of 1913 he finished it just in time for it to go on view at the salon Doulton literally the autumn exhibition in in 1913 it created a sensation at that exhibition the poet Guillaume Apollinaire said that figure he exhibits charged with voluptuousness and charm inaugurates so to speak a new era in Matisse's art and perhaps even in contemporary art is pretty radical in that moment another critic Andre Salman Matisse whose participate who participate in was decided at the last minute has brought a portrait of a woman it is a work that can status satisfy those whom he satisfies the least often exempt from his ordinary faults out or almost it sums up the most beautiful qualities of this artist who is so dangerous and Master Yi if this sounds a little bit like a backhanded compliment your understanding correctly and Andre Salman preferred cubism he was a he preferred Picasso over Matisse and so that's part of what he's reacting to here is the riots of color made Matisse a dangerous master and this slightly more subdued painting could satisfy him one who is satisfied least often by Matisse so Matisse takes his abstraction or if you're thinking back to last week's lecture with Catherine gunch the distortion of the thing he's looking at quite far in this portrait of his wife and I offer you a contemporaneous on photograph of the two of them in the studio so that you can see what she looks like and I know I told you there'd be a lot of quotations as though his his voice is emanating from his photograph here's Matisse telling us how portraits work likeness comes from the contrast between the face of the model and other faces in a word from its particular asymmetry so I like thinking about this portrait of her which is quite abstract 'add next to this photograph of her because you can start to see the parts of of that portrait that painted portrait that are still her so the tilt of the head that characteristic way that she holds her body that little tilt of the head the set of the mouse the proportions of the eyes brow and nose to one another so for as much as there are masks like elements and I stole these from Catherine's lecture and Matisse is modifying those to serve his own purpose which is creating a likeness of his wife and so he's taking certain parts of the unseeing eyes and the continuous brow and nose line that he and the even the sort of treatment of the mouse that he admires in these masks the oval shape of the head overall but then you look at Amelie Matisse and you see that she also looks like that so he's found this beautiful balance between the stimulus that he's seeing in these masks and the stimulus he's seeing in his beloved companion and finding them together in the evoke ation that is making a painting there's another important stimulus for Matisse as he's working on this portrait of his wife I know it's ours and he's thinking about Paul Cezanne our particular the MSAs painting what you're looking at right now was in Paris at the Salon de ton the same autumn exhibition but in 1907 rather than 1913 so he would have seen it then it was reproduced in lots of publications he knew other portraits of Madame Cezanne by Paul Cezanne as well the one of Madame Cezanne with the yellow armchair and was in the salon and the Salon de May the May exhibition of 1912 so very soon before Matisse was making the portrait of his wife and the one at the bottom there of her in gray was in the collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein who were also important patrons of Matisse it was in their home so these were things that he knew that he was familiar with and in fact one of his own paintings hung right above Cezanne is painting in the home of Leo and Gertrude Stein and I like to think about this on this idea and this is really important in French art of artistic training including the idea of emulation and emulation isn't a sort of particular thing in in French art and French training and French locution and so to emulate is to work in the style of someone else rather than directly copying so building on prior examples in a spirited kind of competitive intentional fashion so the borrowing has less to do with copying a pre-existing example it's not about making it look the same but xplit it's about exploring one's own vision through the vision of a revered precedent so taking something you admire and challenging your own personal vision by borrowing something from that model that you admire so this is a spirit of emulation and you can imagine how Matisse might be inspired to that spirit seeing his painting hanging beside on one of a revered precedent and you can imagine why he might have been inspired to take Cezanne as an example the riot of his own color and the restraint of Cezanne side by side and you can imagine also as you're looking at all of these paintings of madame Cezanne a certain between the way that Cezanne portrays his life and the way that Matisse portrays his own wife on this sense of a sort of mask like quality in the face for both of them and imposing and somewhat inscrutable countenance you can't quite read what you don't get a sense of what she's thinking you're sort of waiting and that knowing that this was a favored and recurring kind of subject for Cezanne might have been interesting to Matisse and thinking about it lest you think oh she was subjected to lots of stylistic innovation some of these looks familiar to you from other lectures I hope and lest you think that Madame Cezanne was madama Dee's I did that Madame Madame Matisse was not the only one and subjected to these kind of stylistic explorations other sitters were treated to quite abstract representations of themselves as well and I'll note to you that when our Matisse exhibition is open to you in the guns galleries quite soon and this particular painting is in the exhibition this one is not but but I wanted to give you some things that would be in the exhibition and lots of things that you could sync with while you're in the exhibition on the sort of same ideas similar kind of forms and we associate Matisse so much with that vibrant riotous kind of color that I wanted to pick a few much more chromatically subdued paintings and to challenge our expectations a little and also because these are these are quite characteristic of his work during the nineteen teens on the somberness and a bit more of skier than what we might think of normally with him but this incredibly daring pictorial innovation that he that he took on I'll talk first about the woman on the high school German right now and as we're looking at this and we'll get a real sense of duration a sense of the making of the painting and huge alterations that took place as he worked on it and so you'll see these sort of vivid blues and greens some orange here and that's laid down first and he comes back with this gray over top almost all of the painting and sort of unifies it and then this heavy contouring - unsolicited be there without those lines the sort of dimensionality of the knee and the leg wouldn't be there without those heavy outlines that he comes back and adds later and of course we we've already thought about that he's thinking through cubism he's thinking through Picasso now you'll be unsurprised to discover that Sherman raynelle husband was a cubist critic so he's sort of thinking through the person and the means of representation at the same time and Yvonne Landsberg was a very young woman coming from an affluent resilient families who were spending time in Paris and her brother unn suggested to Matisse that Matisse might draw Yvonne Landsberg and he did that and then after he drew her he was kind of taken with her and her presence and asked if he might also paint her portrait which took sitting after sitting after sitting after sitting like the whole summer worth of sitting and and it's this evolution over time and was is something that you feel in looking at it but it wasn't until the very last sitting that Matisse turned his paintbrush the other way and used the hard end of the brush to etch into the paint surface these lines to etch away the color on her face so he's digging back to the surface of the fabric to create those lines they're not painted on top and I I didn't include it in the lecture today there's a there's a painting with incredible scruffy toe in it the exhibition so you'll have to keep an eye out for that for yourself when you're in there but this happened at the very very end and you get this sense with this young woman that there's something at odds between the prim way she sits with her hands in her lap and these bold black contours sort of hold the body together and then these incredible lines coming out from it as though her energy can't be contained by the primness of the way she's being seated that sort of youthful vigor you get a sense for that energy coming out from her like a blooming flower or a sort of insect or something something more than representation that Eve occasion that we've been thinking about her brother said at the end of the first sitting the oil portrait was a strikingly recognizable portrait of the sitter but it was more abstract with each sitting and more I then thought like a Byzantine icon at each sitting the portrait became less physically but possibly more spiritually like my sister beautiful things seem to be a little too much spiritually like her than physically like her for the Landsberg who did not buy it totally fine for Matisse he sent it to an exhibition in New York in 1915 and it was snapped up right then and now it's in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and also thinking about this playfulness with materials he's experimenting during the 19-teens in printmaking as well and one of the one of the modes of printmaking that Matisse is using is monotype and on this particular monotype is in the MFA zone collection I'll have you noticed that it is five by seven inches it is itty bitty on how you make a mono type like this one is to take a rigid surface like a copper plate and cover the whole plate with black ink and then how you get any of those white lines that you're seeing is by taking something stiff like the back of a paintbrush and scratching away the the printers ink that's on the plate he's not scratching down into the copper plate marking it permanently at all it's just right in the ink itself and this mono one print it's unique so thinking about him working in printmaking making something by reduction and then also applying that same thinking to working with the surface of an oil painting it's an unusual way of working and I think really exciting I took these photos with my iPhone so you can see you can do this too you can see this much detail when you're with the painting in person is why I am Telling You of updates being iPhone photos and so you can see in this painting of Sherman right now on what I'm saying about this scratching you see he's scratching away the black paint to reveal orange paint beneath you can see that scratching to get back to a previous layer so it really plays also with our sense of dimensionality of flatness and depth to have things that are underneath physically but conceptually in our mind we understand that they should be on top that sort of playfulness and I think it's really interesting and I know this comparison you're thinking she's lost her mind I promise I haven't Matisse had on he worked briefly with um with Bouguereau who you heard about from Catherine last week but he also had an instructor called gustave moreau and I'm showing you this Morel painting and you're thinking oh my gosh what is she talking about Mauro was um Laura with a teacher that Matisse really admired and he admired about Morel that Mauro respected and wanted to get to know each of his students as an individual he wasn't just trying to teach them to all be carbon copies of himself he wanted to know each individual and Matisse also admired about Moreau that Moreau was really exterior mental with his materials so I'm going to show you a super close-up detail of right here he would do little things like scratch back into the surface of the paint to help create patterns within the sort of ornate garments that he's painting and when you're with omoro painting in person the light plays off of the scratching so Morrow's doing it for a different purpose to a different end than Matisse is doing it but he learned that he learned technical experimentation to be willing to be sort of inventive with the basics of your materials with the brush itself using the back side from his teacher but took it to an unexpected extreme even thinking about playfulness with color and with texture with sort of void spaces or things that he saw in Mauro and then took to his own individual ends and this particular moral painting is just across the river at Harvard should you wish to see it in person and I also should mention to you that on when gustave moreau died he left his studio the building and the contents to france and it was opened as a museum a moral museum it's still there in Paris should you wish to go tomorrow and you can't get there yet today slice is going to take too long and so a lot of Moreau paintings would continue to have been available to Matisse to see even after his time in the 1890s in Morrow's studio and I just wanted to make make that a point and Matisse was deeply deeply interested in traditions in French painting and in his relationship to his predecessors he said I have never avoided the influence of others I believe that the personality of the artist developed and asserts itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities if the fight is fatal and the personality succumbs it is a mess of Destiny beautiful thing and so this sense that I'm seeing him take something he's learning from someone and then with his own personality his own individual spirit take it in a new direction is is why I offer you this quotation is that want to give you a sense that he's aware of himself doing that I'm giving away the next part here by telling you he went on summer vacation he did not sometimes on in 1920 unto etretat on the Normandy coast why did he pick to go to etretat well for one reason his daughter had had some operations on her larynx and they were going to have the fresh sort of sea air as a curative for the summer that was important but also why did he pick after topic in particular it has these amazing chalk cliffs and chalk on the formations of these opening open arches and the needle and it was a favorite motif of 19th century painters as well and he knew that it's the reason I went there on vacation too and that sense of going wanting to go and see the thing that inspired people who inspire you and so he's thinking about corbeil and he's thinking about Monet as he's going on his summer holiday and he he made loads of paintings he made about 30 paintings from the beach at etretat showing the the chalk cliffs and the you know catch of the day and the debt reduce and all sorts of things on as he's working in after taught during that summer the particular Monet that I've selected here excuse me um was was owned by Sergey Xu keen who was an important patron of Matisse as well and Matisse had visited Xu Keens home in in Russia in 1911 and would have seen this particular painting there so that idea emulation he might have it in mind and much in the same way that he might have had the season in mind that was in the collection of the Stein's who were also his patrons and I should mention that Matisse was interested in meeting some of his idols some of the people he admired and he had an opportunity in November of 1916 to meet Monet and they were in in contact for for for a duration he went out to see Bernie in May of 1917 to talk to Monet there and so thinking about that this is not just a work of art that he knows but also a man who he's talked to and whose studio he's been to and and who he Revere's and admires I should also mention that in in 1920 and he when he finished the 30 canvasses Matisse that he would make in etretat he showed them at the gallery of Bernheim Jean in Paris and I should also say that um Baron I'm John the owner of the gallery was the one who introduced him to Monet in the first place but when he when Matisse showed his own etretat paintings at the gallery of their intention and they sold out within a matter of weeks and it was a huge a huge success it was heralded as the event of the seasons it was a pretty exciting thing for Matisse when he wrote to his wife and Matisse wrote to Amelie Matisse and he said to her green topped white cliffs beside a tender blue and turquoise green sea from which I see emerging suburb superb excuse me creamy white turbot iron gray dogfish lesser spotted dogfish and skate skate all over the harbor that's what he's seeing he's describing it in words and that's also what I see when I see his paintings I'm seeing I wouldn't have known what kind of fish they were but I'm seeing all these fish that he's catalogue and the green topped top cliffs and that turquoise green blue sea so that beauty that he's finding in the stimulus with his eyes and then keeping in mind that he's also thinking about our historical precedents and for me this is sort of landscape on the top and still life on the bottom so I've made it landscape Monet on the top and Renoir R still life on the bottom Renoir was another artist who he admired very very much he met Renoir for the first time on December 31st his birthday of 1917 it was his 48th birthday so if you're thinking about you know here's a mature man an artist you know who's already greatly successful and who is meeting some of his you know his idols and he's still thinking through their examples and he said to his wife and oh I should say after Renoir they've stayed in touch regularly Renoir and and Matisse until Renoir died and after Renoir died Matisse was given the keys to his studio so he could continue to go be with Ren Mar even after Renoir died so he wrote to his wife the visit I made to run Mars last week to the studio where I leisurely looked at his paintings helped me greatly I'm not very moving and he's really thinking about picture making as he's thinking about these great precedents and so he says about Renoir the work of Renoir after that of Cezanne whose great influence has been manifested among artists saves us from whatever drying effect there is in pure abstraction whereas the continuous tension of the mind of Cezanne his lack of self-confidence prevent him from giving us giving him giving prevent him from giving himself to us entirely even though he shows the evidence of his Corrections from which are easily too easily deduced rules that have mathematical precision the mind of Renoir through his modesty as well as his confidence in life once the effort is made allowed him to reveal himself with all the generosity he has provided stripped of reconsiderations this aspect of his work makes a Sein artist upon whom the greatest gifts were bestowed and who has had the gratitude to respect them I know this is a really long quotation I thought it was important in thinking about a moment where we've just been looking at Matisse showing us the evidence of his own correction and a moment where he's thinking through Faison and now we're going to see him take up that great confidence and reveal himself with generosity but without showing us all the corrections and he's seeing that as he's working through Cezanne and working through when Mara and will see him and make that shift himself I love this passage because it talks about it really highlights Matisse thinking about how the artist he admires made their paintings the means of the making and not just the subject that idea of emulation that I mentioned earlier I should also mention that Matisse was a collector that he had a collection of paintings and allegedly he had to barter his wife's ring to pay for one of the Cezanne he bought and she wasn't real happy and he also bought this yoga which boggles my mind that he owned this painting by de gallo God kept until his own death in 1917 and Matisse had it from about 1920 to about 1937 so the period that we'll be looking at next he owned this painting in his own home and I like to think about some of the some of the moments where hair background and share kind of become indistinct and the ways that Dougal would come back at the end and put these kind of blue black outlines to solidify forms also the sense of you know the face wasn't really a face until he came back at the end with that blue black to mark it in and this this chromatic intensity of an interior space of women kind of self image self involved so self absorbed shall we say in their in their own in their own actions was something that that Matisse had and he owned this particular painting also boggles my mind that he owned it so far after his own red painting but you can imagine like he might have been drawn to this radiant red and painting by toga a mess something to to purchase for himself so we will now turn to some radiant interiors by Matisse made in the 1920s and he made over thirty and I didn't bring all thirty of them just six for the moment just and he made over thirty canvases of odalisque sitting or reclining in patterned interiors and if the word odalisque is not familiar to you it it's both the word for a woman in a harem and also for the artistic representation of such a woman so odalisque and and he's building again on nineteenth-century precedence this was a favored subject treated by artists here he admired in the previous century and and Matisse recognized that there might be on some you know colonial or chauvinist implications in his making of these paintings and he said we belong to our time and we share its opinions its feelings even its delusions so he's he's cognizant of him himself and his place in this and and he's also thinking not just about artists like Renoir and who treated this kind of subject before and made these kind of compressed and highly patterned interiors with these lounging and recumbent figures in them he's also gone to see an exhibition of Islamic art and Persian miniatures that he was really really excited by excited by the sense of space and the complexity of space in in a Persian miniature achieved by the patterning that he saw in that he went to Munich in 1910 to see this this exhibition of Islamic art and Persian miniatures and as we've already seen sometimes it took a very long time for something he saw to really be absorbed into him and then to reappear in his own art the the sort of gestation between an encounter and the realization of an influence he said Persian miniatures through their accessories suggests larger space a more truly plastic space they helped me go beyond the painting of intimacy thinking broader thinking thinking larger thinking of pattern and space and not just of objects I'm thinking about the formal qualities that he's admiring in this tiny illuminated manuscript as he's making his own paintings and he had gone also to Morocco in 1912 and 13 and he visited harems while he was there he went to a brothel and he said to his companion we have to go like doctors making a house call did I paint too many odalisque s' as I carried away with excessive enthusiasm in the happiness of creating those pictures a happiness that swept me along like a warm ocean groundswell I still don't know I had to catch my breath to relax and forget my worries far from Paris the odalisque s-- were the fruits of a happy nostalgia of a lovely lively dream and of the most ecstatic exchange chanted experience of those days and nights in the incantation of the Moroccan climate I felt an irresistible need to express that ecstasy that divine nonchalance in corresponding colored rhythms the rhythms of sunny and lavish figures and colors it doesn't sound like a doctor making a house call I also caution us that he made these 10 years or more after that trip so maybe in the moment he needed to be a doctor making a house call but with with the benefit of some space and hindsight he started to remember that experience differently so the census of him he's telling us what he thinks of these when he's making them that they are the fruits of nostalgia and that they are these beautiful colorful rhythms lavish figures and colors he's creating something that should have that kind of energy of an enchanted experience and I like enchanted experience when I'm looking at these because and I'll show you a photo of him in his studio in a minute don't worry but for all that I know he's making this up in his studio and now he has a studio in the South of France lucky guy and for all I know he's making this up in the studio I know that I see him do it there are pictures and I also get this sense when I'm looking at the use of that sort of energy that vibrance and and there's something a bit otherworldly about this riot of pattern this pattern next to pattern next to pattern that makes a space that is really visually hard to sort out and so you do sort of lose yourself perhaps or maybe it's just me I mean looking at these surfaces from the immediacy of something in front of you to something that and that is quite evocative and that word that I keep coming back to I do otally sk's in order to do nudes but how does one do the nude without it being artificial and then because I know that they exist I was in Morocco I have seen them so that sense that he you don't see people lounging about me all together on a data day but maybe he did once upon the time when he was a doctor making a house call and so he remembers that and it reminds him of a thing he hated about whoo girl making these artificial like these paintings of you know there's this realm of Cupid's flying babies this is so unreal and sort of you know overly perfected kind of Grecian body and so he doesn't want to do this this is how do you do a nude without it being artificial perhaps you acknowledge the artifice of it the may dismiss of it by making it something that is explicit about it being being a constructed work of art and then I also think about Moreau the teacher he did admire and how many of Morrow's paintings have biblical subjects which are morose own imagining of the Near East and these riots of color and these compressed spaces filled with different kinds of patterns and some errata sysm and so Moreau is trying to tell us a story he's trying to tell us about the story of Salome dancing before Herod to get the head of John the Baptist Matisse isn't trying to tell us a story he's trying to evoke a feeling or a space so he's not doing the same thing as Mauro but I can't help but think he might have had Mauro in mind and as he's making his own highly patterned interior spaces with these erotic sort of sensually charged nude bodies in them and this is what I was alluding to we know that they're made up in the studio he gets a favorite model to put on a costume and he hangs a bunch of different you know fabrics patterned fabrics put some still life elements and then here he is looking very much like a doctor making a house call I'm painting at his easel I like some of the sort of some of the sort of oddities of space as well when you think about his proximity to this model and also if he were to make the easel higher and stand up he'd be looking down at her at a weird angle and you see that sometimes in the odalisque so you can imagine that voice for me it's always knew he can set this model up in the same concoction or a slight variation on that and move himself side-to-side add or subtract a hanging fabric or a still-life element and have it be ever new for him as he makes it with the ODA weeks I don't renounce that which I had recently gained those plastic advances you speak of but I return to a more profound resonance I again accept a certain kind of model and once again I take possession of a space where the air circulates freely again in them I was posed this problems in them was posed this problem for me to attune and balance pure colors and half tones so as to assure the paintings harmony and rhythmic unity against the possible danger of chromatic shrillness what does that mean so I think about what he's doing here he's making something that's highly colorful highly patterned and and that has a bit of degree of sort of shading and modeling and I think back and it's pretty hard when you're looking at this you might think okay I meant to look at the body try as I might to stay looking at the body my eye jumps here and here and here and back here and over here I can't I can't focus when I'm looking at that painting and similarly in a much earlier work which is also highly highly chromatic lounging nude bodies without quite some little shading and modeling but I also find that I can't I can't stop my eye I'm looking I'm looking looking looking looking looking looking looking here there there there so that sense of him taking a thing that he's been thinking about for decades and now he's trying it on a different subject in his studio he's trying it on with with the odalisque and is something I like so that that sense of bold color that sense of not some non-naturalistic elements the space in here doesn't make sense to me and I feel like she should be sliding off the front of this it doesn't seem like it's it's still the space in here doesn't make sense the scale of these bodies to these bodies right he's not he's not making us a representation he's Avoca something through art he's making a picture and he says for me the subject of a picture and it's background has the same value or to put it more clearly there is no principal feature only the pattern is important so that all over nosov composition he's not telling us where to look he's not telling us what's important he's creating an overall feeling and overall experience and that that fascination with the relationship of the human body and the space around it occupied his mind and his art throughout his career and it goes to how highly abstracted here this is a very flat body but you see those basic component parts again the sort of high high keyed color the interest in pattern that sense that your mind understands without this being a naturalistically rendered body that it's a body reclining in an interior your mind also might do the math about that being some sort of vase with flowers some sort of still life element this is another one that he worked and worked and reworked and we can't see although you can see a little evidence of that on the surface he also had it photographed 22 times while he was working on it so we really can see him working and working and reworking and rethinking and one of the things I love about these photographs is and you see him getting starting here and then he gets increasingly abstract and then he kind of pulled back and gets a little more naturalistic and then a little more abstract so you see him going from naturalism to abstraction not a sliding scale right the other thing that's really fun and I won't get into very much because Helens going to talk about the cutouts and Jodi Heaven is going to talk about the cutouts at the boarding ham lecture but look at number six he's pinning paper to the surface as he's questioning the balance between the body and the space around it he's using pinned paper there as part as the part of the means of making the painting you also see that he started without the pattern it's a much more sort of you get the corner of the room the sense of that being a bouquet we don't have the intense patterning and by the time you get to the end you don't have any sense of depth into space other than the sort of the vase of flowers which doesn't look like a vase of flowers anymore floating above the body but your mind understands its behind it I should tell you he sent all of these photos on to etic own in Baltimore on the cone collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art he sent all these photos to etic own hoping that she would buy the painting once it was done and he said to her that he hoped that these photographs would give her a little amusement if they did his mission was accomplished I think it's sort of sort of cute thinking thinking about you know when he was a contemporary artist and he was you know talking to a patron okay so my last grouping as I'm aware of the time we'll finish a bit where we begin so Matisse what interests me most is neither still-life nor landscape but the human figure it is that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life that feeling of energy and exuberance inside of the work of art as inside of Matisse himself that religious awe toward life so the work I'm ending with is the mural in the Barnes Foundation and when he started working on this he acknowledged and those are his words right there the Barnes Foundation used to be in Merion Pennsylvania you might know it's in Philadelphia now but he said the Marian decoration carries on the idea contained in the Moscow panels he's talking about these and that was already present in an area of my picture in the Marian Museum the joy of life you might remember that this painting had been in the collection of Gertrude and Leo Stein earlier they sold it to a Danish guy and then it was sold again in 1925 to Albert Barnes who took it to Pennsylvania and Matisse knew that and so on so he's telling us already that this theme this this thing that had already been present in a painting in 1906 was going to be present in this major decoration that he makes in 1933 he's ended and this you know intervening step of the use of these paintings that he made he calls them the Moscow panels because they were in the home of Sergey zucchini in Moscow they're in st. Petersburg now at the Hermitage and and I offer them to you like this because they were in his staircase and so you would encounter them as you're walking up and you'd see this one from this side before walking by it and then up to the next one which was music I will let you read that onto yourself if you wish but this this group of paintings that he made that were meant to be evocative of the spirit of the home that they would be seen in where there was jubilation merrymaking music-making that was that was taking place there and so having these in in his mind's eye as he's starting to work and in 1930 Matisse was 61 and he met um Albert Barnes who was an American millionaire and Albert Barnes and was a major collector of modern art and he asked Matisse to make a decoration for his foundation in Merion Pennsylvania the so the idea to make a mural was mr. Barnes's idea but he left the subject to Matisse's own discretion I'm free to choose whatever subject he wanted and between 1930 and 1933 Matisse worked almost exclusively on this project for the Barnes mural I offer on to you that an early drawing on small scale drawing for the Barnes mural where you can see that his initial idea was for a ring of dancers very much like this ring of dancers that he had made 20 years earlier he discovered though because he knew he'd gone to Pennsylvania he'd seen the space with its three architectural Bay's where his decoration would end up he was finding that a ring of dancers didn't distribute itself very well across on the three bays so ultimately he came up with this alternative on which for me looks a lot more like wrestling or tumbling than dancing and he called it a loving struggle but because the circle of dancers just didn't distribute itself and kind of keep across the three bays very well and he he also knew he was thinking back at 61 over his career and he he also recognized that this might be an age when it is advisable to take counsel from one views and that useful moment of success that he's thinking back to in his mind so not just the form but also the moment and the the youthful spirit and you might know that there are three versions of the dance and he stood these two are on view at the modern art museum in Paris the musee d'art moderne and the other party and this one's at the barn in Pennsylvania now and so he starts he's never worked in an architectural setting before so he takes all the measurements and he gets to work and he's trying to do small scale drawings and finding that it just like it's not conveying the overwhelming architectural sense of space so he starts working full scale and this is a full-grown human this is how big the unfinished one that he abandoned is so he's working full scale trying to figure out the disposition of the bodies the sort of overall composition that's going to feel right and and this just didn't this one didn't work so he started again and when he started again on what is the second version of the dance he um he's realizing that it's really problematically time-consuming to paint and repaint something that's that big so he comes up with this amazing alternative way of working and this is him in his studio in the South of France in Nice and with a big bamboo stick with charcoal on the end so that he can draw full-scale what he thinks the composition is going to look like just cute and then these photographs hopefully they look kind of wrinkly to you do you see that it's pinned paper so he's cutting colored paper and having his studio assistants help him move the colored paper around because it's an easier operation for trying to figure out the composition than having to actually paint on that huge scale and then repay and then repaint and repaint repaint which is what he's want to do and so he comes up with this as an alternative means of working that sort of experimentation that I've been talking about this whole time and and so ultimately he decides that this is this is it this is successful this is achieving what he wishes and what he wishes is it must give the space enclosed by the architecture the atmosphere of a wide and beautiful Glade filled with sunlight which encloses the spectator in a feeling of release in its rich profusion so he wants a sense of bodies dancing in the outdoor that sort of sort of joyous jubilation that religious awe of life that I quoted before he wants that feeling and he thinks he's got it here in the pink and blue and black and these kind of great own bodies which are sort of spread across the three bays awesome right and a ton of work a ton of work to get there and then he discovers he's gotten the measurements wrong oh no oh no so he just head down does it again third time's the charm thankfully and you can see how big these are 133 by a hundred and seventy three inches each they're gigantic and he but he comes up with this solution and he's so pleased with how it turns out and he talks about and the genius of this knowing where the architecture would sit and then creating these black portions where the architecture sits and where the windows are is where the color is behind the figures so it helps it stand out so you don't forget to see it when you're in the space but it also sort of plays with that sense of of an e vocation and of the sort of light and shadow of the room itself he also knows and has to be psyched about the fact that he knows that in this room in Albert Barnes's Museum they're going to be works by Sirah works by Cezanne works by Matisse himself it's going to be this amazing you know combination of art by him and our key admirers which is pretty exciting was he happy he was happy it is a splendid thing which one can have no idea of without having seen it since the whole arch ceilings radiates re out and this effect even extends down to the ground I am extremely tired but very pleased having seen the picture in place I now feel disconnected from it I feel it has become part of the building and I no longer think of the work that has gone into it it has acquired its own personality seeing the picture again was a real birth relieving me of the labor and pain that led up to it plus it's hard right three times it took before he got there but I love this the sense that it's become part of the building and he's tired they're so pleased that sense of activity the energy of the dance and the implication of that sacred grove with the play of colors and the relationship to the architecture and the windows around it and that sense of achievement that he had that religious all of life that he found in representing the body so hopefully some of the themes and ideas that we've seen today the opening of surfaces the play of depth and flatness the increasingly abstract but still recognize recognizable bodies in motion will set the stage for your exploration of our own exhibition here at the Museum and also Matisse elimi pieces final phase in the cutouts when you get to the cutouts you'll see the crouching figure [Music] come back and the tumbling bodies again in a new medium where Matisse literally cuts into color to give his forms gives his forms their shape their breath in independent works and in architectural large-scale decorations you have one idea you are born with it and all your life you develop your fixed idea make it breathe for me it's always new [Applause] [Applause] we have time for questions so if you have a question please raise your hand and we'll pass the microphone to you thank you very much thank you very much just a clarification what did he mean by the term plastic advances oh I got question about the red studio okay when they when you said that he used the paintbrush to cut in and see the Elven II where did the yellow come from does he paint the entire canvas yellow and then scrape it off or does he just I mean how does that work so in in the case of the red studio there are too many fights hold on one second in the case of the red studio it's actually yes it is yellow underneath oh this is the perfect slide for then and it's yellow and blue underneath the red he's tried different colors of the studio before he decides to make it a red studio and what the yellow that you're seeing in this case he's not scratching the paint off which is how he's doing it here he is indeed scratching the paint away on his on Landsberg but on the red studio he's leaving he's leaving opening he's leaving gap and then he's filling them in with the yellow no the yellows underneath and then when he oh I see he's yeah when he puts the red on he just is careful to leave an opening where we would expect an outline on so the yellow is under the red it is it's soup it is facially confusing and super satisfying but when next time you're in New York when you see it at Museum of Modern Art you'll you'll get that that there is yellow underneath the painting underneath the red hi thank you very much what did he mean by the term plastic advances and he uses the word plastic in the same way that we might now use the word slum --all so thinking about the forms that he uses thinking about the means of picture making so the things like the way that he the way that he renders or does not render depth into space the way that he and thinks about shading and modeling the way he thinks about line and color for him those are all the plastic elements we tend to now refer to those as the formal properties the forms of a painting he used the word plastic I should have mentioned that them thank you for asking could you talk about his wanting to have order in his paintings because when you look at them at least I do it's so different that never crosses my mind that he's creating order do you know what I mean and yet you said that was something he thought was important so the sort of energy versus order yeah a kind of question and I think that's part of the satisfaction in them is this the sense that he's you know when you're looking at a Matisse painting that it didn't just happen but that there's also something exuberant something chaotix not the word I want there there is a sense of it being of it being very thoroughly thought out so even when the space is confusing it's something that keeps you kind of coming back and looking that sort of orderliness of the making of it but that ultimately it adds up to something that has these on these kind of spatial discrepancies these kind of push-pull between depth and flatness that create something that has an energy and a movement to it that if you just put that corner in it would be less satisfying of a painting and it so it might be more orderly but it would be less satisfying in that case I find that with the with the odalisque as well that sense that there's some there's a sort of riot of color here and there's a way in which the space doesn't add up and this sort of this feels flat right on the surface of the painting but I also my mind understands the order of the painting that he's created a and a backdrop but there's a there's a push-pull when I'm looking at it that my my eye keeps moving around so there's something there's there's an energy there and there's also an order in the making so it is a dichotomy yeah other questions do you were they able to move the murals when the Barnes Foundation went to the new building if so how would you know how they did it they're on canvas and he made them in nice in his studio in France and then they were shipped to Pennsylvania for installation which is awesome because then they can also be moved from Marion to Philadelphia when when the Barnes Foundation was moved from Marion to to Philadelphia and so they in moving the Barnes Foundation they recreated the exact dimensions of the original room that the the murals were meant to go in this is kind of a science question or the chicken which came first the chicken or the egg okay it seems like Matisse and daga and Monet were all thinking way before their time in terms of what science now tells us about the way that our brains work to let us see what it is we do see and so science was not that advanced in the 1890s and the 1900s I'm going to answer this in a variety of ways um one of which is that they they were certainly men of their moment and so there there are people who were widely conversant in their communities and they're certainly artists who are thinking about things like art theories that at the time we're attending to the way that your eye and and your mind understand color for example so and so thinking about they are thinking about that is it the same is a science the same as now I can't tell you I'm not history of science person but I can tell you that that they're aware of those kinds of concerns and issues and so and certainly thinking about the way that you're the way that your mind and your I understand complementary colors on a color wheel for example was something that they were very familiar with also thinking de gAHS for example is reading about how artists of the past made paintings and he reads about how aundrea Montaigne allegedly would use you know bold reds and greens as a as an underlayer rather than sort of sepia Browns as an underlayer so part of what the guys doing with something like the the woman getting her hair combed with the red is is not so much scientific as art historical and he's sinking through a precedent of his own and so that's my sense of answering in a variety of ways but they are people who are are responding to things that they're reading as well as things that they're that they're seeing and then you know thinking through something like that you know the early 20th century were at a moment where you were thinking about about relativity and now you know these artists are also thinking about how the way that you look at a body is relative you know are you looking at it only from the front or you can you see it from the front and the top and the side all at the same time and so are those one-for-one in their in their science probably not immediately but that sort of sense of them being of their moment and sort of thinking largely about you know about ideas that are at play in in their in their moment is is absolutely important in the way that the works of art look yeah when I came in today I was hoping that I would see some images with a lot of vivid radiance and you certainly have shown some today so thank you so much for that I mean vivid radiance and then when I was noticing the Reds dancers dancing in circle into dancers it made me think in a more three-dimensional idea that they looked a little bit like the figures dancing around a Greek vessel and also I was thinking with either before you mention that the dancers on the bottom looked like wrestlers they were reminding me of the wrestlers that you sometimes see in red and black around the Greek vessel so I was wondering if if you have any thoughts that he might have had that in mind thank you thank you great question and also I was happy to show vibrant colors and what's going to gloomy weather week so thinking about Matisse and and ceramics and an ancient art certainly you know he's he's a museum goer like we are I think that most of the artists I love are also museum goers so I'm always on the lookout for things that they might be looking at and thinking about and even thinking that he reuses these these dancing bodies on ceramics himself so I I can't sort of give you an exact I know he looked at this vase kind of moment but it would surprise me if he wasn't thinking about that that kind of art in his heart making as well as he's also thinking about ceramics and for one more question didn't ''tis have any thoughts about where his paintings should be and who maybe should or shouldn't buy them as some artists do so he was fortunate to have have collectors during his lifetime and so to be able to in some cases make a work of art like this one and then have it have it purchased subsequently and to also have works of art commissioned so he was asked to make a painting of the dance and and thus he made it and so those are two different sort of ways of working one the artists sort of generating what he in this case wishes to make and in other cases you know being asked for a particular thing and then in this case you know being asked by a great collector to make whatever you want to decorate this space so so in those in those sensibilities yes and he also is an artist and we want to think about you know this moment in the early 20th century where artists are represented by galleries in a very similar way to the way that artists are represented by galleries now and so for Matisse to be able to make 31 paintings at etretat and then send them to the Baron Himchan gallery in Paris and have them exhibited and they sold out in the matter of weeks he wouldn't have had a say in who the buyers were in that kind of case but he'd be pretty psyched I'm sure to be able to sell 31 paintings and you make a make a handsome profit on there so he's he's an artist who's working both in the gallery contact and also directly with with important patrons like Sir you keen on like Albert Barnes and then he's also making paintings that are being purchased by by the Stein's so so he's he's enjoying the benefits of a variety of different kinds of sale opportunities I will say what I didn't attend to here is he's also a great print maker so in addition to making oil-on-canvas in addition to making sculptures he's also making prints and some of those are you know independent sheets and others of them are illustrations for books so he's also thinking about the way that his images relate to words and a way that you might consume an image when it's bound into a book rather than hanging on your wall in a frame and I also always think with printmaking in part because I don't own paintings by my artist I can't afford them but sometimes I own print by my artist things that they are made and I just by way of saying there are much more inexpensive they are much more approachable for a broad spectrum of potential collectors and so I think about that and I offer that on to you with Matisse as somebody who's making works of art that are at a variety of kinds of price points and that prints by and large exist in in duplicate and so a print could go to lots of owners unlike a painting which might just go to one thank you thank you [Applause]

Channel: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Views: 49,276

Keywords: matisse, lecture, course, art, art history, modern art, modernism, art of france, art of europe, french art

Id: B7D08Qj3MvY

Length: 88min 37sec (5317 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2017