Matisse: Line, Color, Action

good evening everybody my name is John Steinberg I'm the Florence Finch Abbot director of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Joseph Allen Skinner museum welcome to Mount Holyoke tonight we're here to celebrate the opening of our fall exhibition season with the annual Patricia and Edward Falkenberg lecture series Pat and Edie aren't able to join us they're traveling in China but they send you all their best and are glad that you're here to see their lecture series first I would like to acknowledge two members of our staff who worked very hard at putting together the exhibition The Potter's tale contextualizing 6,000 years of ceramics Aaron Miller our assistant curator of material and visual culture and Lucy gong our art museum advisory board fellow worked together on that exhibition and I think did really a smashing job thank you guys thanks - as always - Paul and Harriet Wiseman in the gallery bearing their name we have just opened Matisse drawings curated by Ellsworth Kelly from the pit the Pierre and Tana Matisse foundation we are grateful to the Matisse foundation not only for their financial support of our recent educational initiatives but for providing an opportunity to access their holdings of REM Matisse drawings for this exhibition thank you to the board and to Alessandra carnelli for making all this happen really we appreciate it greatly when faced with this project of curating Matisse drawings the staff pondered how best to approach it at some point we started to think wouldn't it be amazing dizzy Arie Matisse drawings to the eyes of Ellsworth Kelly Matisse and Kelly draw very differently but they share an economy of line and a propensity to create delightful images with amazing extraordinary mastery but what Ellsworth Kelly curate a show we asked him and he said yes it's been a remarkable it's been a remarkable experience to work on this project with Ellsworth so many people ask me is it really different to have an artist curate a show yes in a word for example he selected dozens of drawings that I think many curators would have overlooked sheets with a few marks on them tracing a leg or lips or that window frame for Ellsworth they held a special attraction and I have to confess these are many times drawings that I sadly would have overlooked and they are amazing notational studies there are countless such decisions in this selection that make it both rich and personal to Ellsworth Kelly and notice the details in the exhibition itself every frame broadcasts the size of the piece of paper typically museum professionals arrange it so that they all fit into standard sizes convenient to us 1620s 2024's Ellsworth quite politely asked if we could have every matte redone so that it broadcast the size of the piece of paper and was this a change that was worthwhile yes was it subtle yes but absolutely not insignificant because every frame represents the actual objects and not our needs as professionals and finally I hope you've all had a chance to see the installation itself because as you look at that single row of unlabeled rectangles circumnavigating the gallery you can start to feel the presence of an Ellsworth Kelly composition and that's exactly what it is it's really amazing so Ellsworth thank you for taking on this project and for creating for us an amazing exhibition would you please stand for a moment so that we can recognize you appropriately Ellsworth Kelly everybody thank you for letting me put you on the spot Ellsworth also lent work to the plant lithographs by Ellsworth Kelly 1964 through 1966 exhibition which inaugurates our and Grier and Frederick big Ron's ik family gallery and is from the class of 1964 and this seems a fitting exhibition to start this gallery's new life as a space dedicated to works on paper thank you and for your great support of our museum there you are this gallery is a special place as evidenced by the wonderful synchronicity achieved by being able to see the Matisse show and then see Ellsworth drawings right next door has really worked wonderfully and now for the reason we're gathered here tonight we are honored and humbled to have one of the greatest living speakers on our history with us here Olivier Baron yay talking about art is no simple affair explaining the process can be simple one needs to be able to translate the visual into the verbal this seemingly simple task is exceedingly difficult to perform well and mr. Bernier has raised the forum to a work of art in and of itself he was trained at Harvard University and the Institute of Fine Arts he worked as a gallerist both as the director of the legendary Martha Jackson gallery and privately and since 1977 has been a prolific writer of art history mr. Bernier is responsible for several major studies including and I love the titles pleasure and privileged life in France Naples in the United States 79 70 72 70 90 and my favorite title one of my all-time favorite titles words of fire deeds of blood the mob the monarchy and the French Revolution it's just fantastic and more recently the world in 1800 that is the entire world in 1800 about 480 pages I believe really a remarkable feat he has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art where as consulted curated and lectured to great acclaim his lecture series always sell out as do the rich and rewarding trips he helps organize two destinations for the met and many other institutions and they travel all around the world together significantly mr. Bernier serves on the board of the Pierre aunt Anna Matisse foundation and it is in this capacity that he joins us to present his talk nice line color action please join me in welcoming our 2014 Patricia and Edward Falkenberg lecturer Olivia beignet when in the early 1840s the young Gustave Courbet arrived in Paris from the farce quality where he had been raised and started studying painting at one of the many academies which existed then and where young would-be artists were being trained it took him only a few weeks to realize that what he was being taught was not how to paint but how to apply old used-up and indeed useless formulas and so he thought about it and decided to do the right thing he left that Academy and went to the Louvre where he proceeded to spend a couple of years copying the old masters and learning what it is to paint well what no one realized and called a least of all at that moment was that an anonymously important event had happened real art creative art had suddenly separated from official art and while official art went down its dreary path for quite a long time afterwards real art are proceeded to reinvent in many ways what it meant to paint what it meant to use paint in ways in which it had not been used before what it meant also to create depth and space on a square or rectangular piece of canvas how to recreate an illusion which became so convincing that it was in fact very much more a very much more lasting reality than reality itself which as we all know tends to wither and die great art doesn't and so when some 40 years later another very great artist went to an academy the Academy Julian in Paris that very very talented young man found himself in exactly the same position and he was of course our him at ease now in 1942 Matty's spoke at length to a friend to whom he had spoken before this was in you during of course the occupation of France by the Germans and he mentioned in particular that moment when he first went to the Academy Julia and he said to this interviewer at Julia's I found myself looking at perfectly done paintings of male and female nudes but they were absolutely empty just a process I saw no reason why I should work like that no could I see the first step that would lead me towards that kind of painting then three months later I went to Lille where my father often visited I went to the museum in front of Goya's young and old women I was stunned and I said to myself that's the kind of painting I will do I understood I could get into that it was an open door at Julia's it was a closed door well the artist who at RIA looked at what these young men hardly any young women at what these young men were doing was a hugely popular successful painter called William buho and you see one of his works there I should add that it when Matisse first went to the Academy Julia booooo whose works were selling for huge amounts of money and what I show you is a reasonably characteristic of the wall it's incredibly sentimental as you can see and it's just about as dreary as it is sentimental and so it was that Matty's like Colbert decided that staying around to listen to Brueghel's criticism wouldn't really help him a lot and he decided to move on with I must say I think extremely happy results well for Mattie's as a very young painter it was a question therefore of taking his place into what certainly with the benefit of hindsight we can see as a long succession of our men and women who as they went tried to reinvent painting our new ways to use paint new ways to create space new ways to create the illusion of another reality on whatever canvas wood paper whatever support they used and in the case of Matisse of course we're all of us tempted to think oh well we all know about Matisse Matisse is about brilliant color and it is through color that Matisse proceeded to invent his own kind of painting and of course it is perfectly true but it is equally of course not enough we've all been this evening already in the Wiseman gallery where we have seen a few of Matisse's drawings to Matisse growing was always drawing in pencil or ink sometimes on a sheet of paper was always as important as painting with color on again whatever the support might be most often of course but not always are most often canvass and so when we look at Matisse's work I think it's interesting to try to see how these two elements come together and just exactly what it was Matty's was trying to do from the beginning until the very end and while very obviously what Matisse painted for instance in nineteen six this woman in the Hat that we see here does not look exactly at all like what Matisse was fainting while he was still painting we'll come to that later in say 1948 and arguably even less like though thrilling papaya who pays those cut paper compositions of the 40s and 50s until he died nonetheless from the beginning I think we can see that there were problems that Matty's set about solving and effects which he said about achieving now of course when in nineteen six other painters were folks were using very bright colors and certainly those colors have certainly at first are the same kind of zing that for instance this mattiece has when you first look at it our painters who in some cases went on to do very different things Park naturally being one of them all painters who proceeded to go on and on and on I won't name them without renewing themselves and by the 1920s were painting faded versions of what they had been doing ten or fifteen years earlier certainly not the case of matys soo-ah even at that very early phase and while certainly Matisse was using very bright colors and certainly like the other fools he had discovered the possibility of using color which apparently does not belong where it is up to for instance very obviously few of us have a bright green nose although I say with regret that equally few of us these days where ladies at any rate wear hats like the one we see in this particular painting but there's always hope they may come back at a great what baggage has done here very clearly at this early phase is I should say really two essential things one up large areas of color are used to create space and depth and equally a deliberate simplification of at least parts of the form for instance the hand right here or indeed elements of the face the ear as you can see is merely indicated right there or I should say deliberately suggested rather than carefully painted he is what mattis does is to use both these elements to create a new kind of space and new kinds of volumes so that this face in which we very deliberately have none of the elements of classic Vanessa's perspective this face is amazingly alive and amazingly real as we look at it in spite of the fact that it has that bright green nose or actually because of the fact that it has that bright green nose of the fact that it has that other bright green element right there because of what happens between this green and that green there and also because if you start to look we begin finding echoes of certain colors certainly the green here here they're obviously they're obviously they're there they're here right there but something else is also going on when we looked happily briefly at the Boogaloo what we saw was a very smooth surface are very carefully applied paint but look at the very different textures that we see already in this very very early mattiece from the barely indicated very pale pink over here all that very transparent purple over there to that thick red right here or again those very thick elements of paint right there all right there and so what mattes is doing is creating a new kind of reality not only by the use of color but by the very way in which he applies the paint to the canvas and and in part because he makes us see how he painted we can follow the movement of the brush right here we can follow the movement of the brush right all through the Hat and indeed in just about all the rest of the painting this is equally true of this boy of nineteen seven in which Matisse is now doing something quite different there is an almost monochrome pink ground as you can see but what mady's has begun to do is to play with different values of related color that intense red right here which is obviously related to that purplish pink with some with of course significant differences but this although once again we see the movement of the brush right there and elsewhere in the painting what Matty says done now is to use the different values the different strengths of these colors including of course the repetition of this red right here and he is now using outlines these are simply outlines or the outline of the arm right there in order once again to create what in principle shouldn't work but in fact does what is being invented here and balancing the intense use of color in some places by the mere hint at color for instance in that room right there and again you can see that the cap up at the top is made of very deliberately visible strokes of the brush now it's perfectly true that slightly earlier painters absurdly van Gogh for one season in a different way had begun to do things like this but what we see again with Mattie's as a young painter is something entirely personal and movement arm began also to be extremely important in his work there can be few greater pleasures I think than to travel although perhaps is getting to be a little more difficult than it used to be to travel from New York to st. Petersburg and to go from Matisse's dance at MoMA to Matisse's dance at the air meet our in st. Petersburg just about um not quite a year between the two of them this was of course the MoMA dance um in which Matty's discovered that the way in which to make our a subject a movement a figure more real is not to paint it as carefully as if you were doing the top of a chocolate box but in fact to take away take away take away until so little that that's right little so little was left that suddenly the very essence of what was happening in that painting is revealed and we know that this was how he worked on many of his most important paintings and in particular on the two dancers with drawing and with drawing until so much has been withdrawn that what you have is not less but very much more not I hasten to say the at the same ideas about house there's it's quite a different process it's a process of slow careful and continuous elimination in which those amazing spaces are created by the contrasts between the green at the bottom obviously right here and that intense blue at the top but also and of course the line that separates them this wonderful curving line you see that curves all through the painting but also look at the differences in texture between the green right there the hill on which the dancers are circling around are barely still holding on to the ground almost weightless in their movement as great dancers are surely whenever we go to the and we see a dancer leaping into the air or we see a ballerina lifted up by her partner what we are seeing is real weight real bodies made weightless miraculously so and this is of course what we are seeing here as well the that are thrilling impression of weightlessness that great dance gives us in this case perhaps I danced a primitive dance certainly a new dance and this is where we see you also Matisse's are the beginnings of Matisse's lifelong fascination with the female nude now in st. Petersburg at the guitar it's quite a different dance you can see that the movement has changed a great deal the colors have changed a great deal the line separating the hill from the sky has become perhaps even more visible and just as important the figures are now as you can see quite heavily outlined and this is a way we begin to see that the effect of Mattie's drawing all his life his interest in 9 his interest in the way a single lie can define an amazing space we see it in the gallery right here that is where we begin to see his use of that understanding of the line and I have to say his genius for inventing and defining that line that's where we see it coming together with an equal genius for the use of well endlessly effective endlessly pleasure giving color it's also I think great fun to then look we're now in 1911 to look at nasturtiums and the dance because the dance we're seeing is quite a different dance from the two other dancers we were seeing and it is indeed one of Matisse's characteristics that he very often reworked a particular theme inventing many variations not one variation better than the next it's not a progression it is a constant enrichment with each variation as good as the other but because it is different adding to what we had learned from variations one or two or three and we'll see a little bit later how he used that idea also in order to reach exactly what he wanted in a particular painting and I thought it amusing for you to see together nasturtiums and the dance and the MoMA dance so that you could see you can see exactly how very much things have changed and one thing you'll notice in particular is that this process of simplification is very evident you can see how this you can see very clearly where the hands are right there there are no hands here anymore it is a single curve linking those two dancers you can see how this these angles here have been eliminated here to be another curve and that is because also Macky's is thinking of these curves right there and you can also see how this dance has now become part of an overall composition in which objects are placed not we where we expect them not how we expect them like the armchair right there all for that ladder that stand right there these objects are placed so as to redefine a space which we did not expect to see and this began to happen more and more and more this is a still life of 1910 in which as you can see that is is now using this kind of astonishingly rich ground all in one color now this is no longer the old honey sauce recipe of the color getting we as it gets supposedly further away from us instead what you see is an equal intensity of color but a very different way of applying the paint you can see that the brushstrokes here are very different from here you can see also where Matti says very deliberately left empty areas and so you have the contrast between this astounding intensity this are almost well very pale blue but almost white top of the painting right there connected by these different objects and this virtuosic handling of paint and color in the VARs right here and of course that led to that extraordinary red studio in which surely we could have no doubt at all that we are looking at an extremely deep space it's an extremely deep space which ought not to work it's all the same color are nowhere are we shown the difference between the floor and the walls except that we see it and we see it very clearly in part because once again mattiece has positioned you recognize some of these objects at the table right here as well of course as the chairs and so on the stacks of paintings right there but we see exactly where that clock where that chest of drawers etc where it will begins we see the walls with the painting where the paintings hang and you notice that this has been reworked we were looking at it just a little bit earlier this is where Matisse has invented a new space we all now are able to leave where we are you sitting there me standing here and enter the space it is completely manageable we feel it we see it he has invented it by essentially using color but also because the color is so amazing we tend not pay perhaps all the attention we might oh the simple lines look at this chair it is defined only by its outline as is the stressed as is that dress over there and so on and so forth and so what mady's has done is to separate line and color an object is no longer an outline that has been neatly filled in there are now these two elements which are made to fight each other enough so that we are now able to really walk into a new space and this is something that eases all his life a little bit later of course we will come back to the pebbly a coupe a and the very late paintings but if you look at this work of the 50s you can see that although this is perhaps a little more abstract still obviously with recognizable figures you can see that mattes is really doing the same thing that all through his life there is that constant preoccupation now I thought I should show you that particular still life because it is in fact it's still life of 1910 it's a still life that Picasso bought all through their lives because when matys were very much interested in what the other was doing they exchanged paintings on occasion on occasion they made presents to each other and invariably each showed great interest in what the other was doing rossmann Bernier my stepmother told me that when she visited them both in the late 40s and early 50s she would go to see Matisse in the South of France and he'd say to her have you seen Picasso what's he doing and then she'd go and visit peek as soon because who would say have you seen that tease what's he doing and on occasion indeed especially after Matisse was really no longer able to move very much at all when he had to spend most of his time in bed which could not stop him from working on if you guess who would then come and visit him so I thought you might enjoy seeing what a struck Picasso as an entirely desirable Matisse well in 1940 in our mattes was living in Paris then and he rented a studio with a view of not Adam and this is the view from mattis's studio it was taken after the second floor as you can see from the cars but nonetheless that is absolutely the window from which Matisse painted not Kadam in 1914 and so I thought it would be worthwhile to look at the actual view you can eliminate the cause of your sleep and then to see what mattes made of it and here are two of his views of not Haddam from that window obviously you've realized already that he has carefully rearranged the entire fall round on the left because after all great art is not about giving us and especially these days with photography and exact image of what we could see ourselves what is the interest in that we are not geniuses we who cannot produce great works of art see things for ourselves all the time we don't need to be showing the same thing we need to be shown what a genius sees what a very great artist sees and of course it doesn't have to be at all realistic so what mady's has done of course is on the left to completely rearrange the view so as to have that wonderfully transparent quality which we see on the left but then look at what has happened on the right and this and the next work I'll show you is exclusive Matias ever came to being a completely abstract painter you can indeed see the Twin Towers on the hood up there and there but everything else has become color line and how that color is applied on the canvas with in particular the unexpected and I must say I think thrilling element of green that one three you see right there it's absolutely black shadow and that wonderful white that brilliant light on the bottom and the side right there I've not heard um and in that same short period he painted what is I think unquestionably his most abstract painting it's it's a view he's looking out of the window and you can see very clearly the edges of window we see nothing more than the night on the outside and I hope that I am NOT saying the wrong thing when I say that there is not very far from us another very great artist who has understood how to use simple elements of color to create very great works of art obviously in a very different way but nonetheless it's one can see that there is a certain related way of looking and thinking well by the late teens Mackey's had begun to spend a lot of time in the South of France he loved the light he loved what struck people then if you can believe it as the exotic quality of the South of France this of course is no longer true most of the South of France now looks like Queens New York but in those days it still seemed especially if you were raised in the north of France and if you had then lived in Paris as matys did it then seemed relatively exotic and of course there is that wonderful light and so here in the South of France once again we are looking through a I'm sorry this is still in Paris but after that you said started going to the South of France we are looking through a window and as you know Matt is very often had goldfish you see them there but what you are beginning to see now is Matisse's new way of dealing with light now in this painting of 1922 indeed in the the France we see him clearly are thinking of other contemporary painters one in particular who was also in the South of France and I mean of course ba da but this was not a phase with Matisse that lasted a very long time at all and when you look at this if this wasn't South of France again 1919 at this interior with window and violin you can see that Matisse has gone back to doing what he does so admirably well using line color texture showing us how the paint is applied now after the Second World War many artists began being interested in showing people and telling people that the subject of the painting was the painting itself and that the way in which the paint all other objects indeed I'm thinking France and so I don't know Larry rivets were applied to the canvas was the subject itself of the painting but here we see Natty's using texture and the way he has applied the paint on the canvas as a key element of the painting and here we are still in the France in the South of France in the early 20s 2123 ah but along with the light along with the textures a very important new element is appearing whether it's a carpet of the wallpaper on the left or the carpet and that striped material on the right Matis then became fascinated with patterns and patterns as a way of defining space patterns as a way of creating the equilibrium that keeps the painting together and you see it of course many nudes of this period but you see it in the lozenge reserve the carpet on the left not to mention of course the stripes of that cloth held by the model and you see it in the stripes of the harem pants on the model but then the lozenges of the carpet of the criss-cross pattern behind the model the crisscross I'm sorry the flowered pattern of the textile hanging on the walls and so that what you have is that whole series of patterns helping to create and define the painting and you see that as well in this painting of 1925 of the piano being played I thought you'd like to see Natty's after all and so these are photographs by poss-eye that were taken in the early to middle 1930s obviously a mistake of leave that's Betty's there on the Left wearing that sort of overall he won't paint and you see him here in the studio I chose that particular photograph because Matisse painted so many nudes and I thought it would be rather fun to see the model posing and Matisse as you notice growing a drawing as he did every day of his life as an artist now this great nude of 1935 of course once again brings what I've just been talking about together the crisscross pattern in blue and white and in green and white up there the rough work the visible brushwork in this great figure but this only happened after a great deal of taking away and here you see going upper left upper right lower left lower right through as you can see a number of months the increasing simplification of the painting more and more and more and more being taken away with interestingly enough the painting feeling fuller and richer the more is taken away and the same is true that combination of very different art textiles as list of the purple in we'll maroonish and white stripes the yellow and white stripes the great huge flowers the sort of s's on the right the flower patterns they're the flower patterns at the bottom and so on all these patterns coming together with a more and more being added in terms of pattern creating an incredibly dense rich and I must say I think thrilling space with very interesting variations in depth and the angles at which things are set look for instance at the tray with the three fruit and the VARs with the flowers and great simplification of the hands of the face and this is where you can see how much Matisse learns from drawing all the time a few lines will do it and this is 37 this is 1939 and there as you can see the patterns have almost completely taken over with these huge leaves in the background the patterns on the dress and the women to women themselves almost as patterns themselves and again these admirably simplified faces well still in 1939 there were still lives in which very obviously that teeth was using the same ideas that he used in the red studio this time in a different way a great deal has happened these huge objects against that red ground and I should tell those of you who might not be aware of this that in Nice there is of course a Matisse Museum in which most of the objects that were in the studio when he died have been gathered the Batty's family has been in many ways extremely generous not only with these objects but also giving paintings drawings one of the great Pepe deco pays but it's absolutely fascinating because you see the reality of these objects are wonderful to see because we recognize them from the painting though paintings that which are not much in themselves and to see the transformation of the object as its that sat in the studio and the object as we see it in Matisse's paintings Samiha um that is really I must say an education in itself now we all know now although it was not to be spoken of for a long time that in 1942 Matisse had to have an operation for colon cancer and he was laid up for quite a while and found it difficult after his operation to stand for any length of time and so he tends to be photograph thereafter very often as you can see him see him here sitting down on the left looking at one of the many admirable illustrated books he designed and there is going to be an exhibition of them at the Morgan Library next year and I can think of no more pleasant way to spend a couple of hours once that exhibition is on than to go and see it and I just wanted to show you one page of an illustrated book because unlike most what the French call leave hood up that books illustrated by painters matys did not read the text and then do an image here and an image there he insisted on controlling and designing everything you see so he chose the type he chose a typeface he chose the size of the type he chose the size of the initial letter over there and his drawings go across usually or often both pages with a balance here between the openness of this fleeing nymph and of this great hand and the density of the print that you see right there so that when you look at Matisse's illustrated books they are not illustrations each double page is in fact itself a complete matys now by 45 46 47 Matisse was already having to spend most of his time either sitting down in a chair or indeed sitting in bed but you will notice that although in that sense physically diminished uh none of the astonishing and I'm bound to say joyful energy he put into his paintings had disappeared at all and I must say I think the feeling of the heat from the outside the light of the South of France not to mention that wonderful combination of the density of the red with its zigzag patterns the openness of the medallion with the profile and then the completely different density of all that vegetation seen through the window and repeated here and then unexpected that wonderful oval blue table with these intensely red fruit and the combination of the Oval with that sort of amoeba shape than the shape of the VARs right here that shape you can see how this shape right here corresponds to that shape right there and allowing us to see through the legs of the table to the zigzags which continue the wall pattern on the ground all this makes this I think a very very important work and I thought I would show you this 1947 also because it is Matisse's memory so to speak of the red studio arrange may differently with very different creatures including the cat that he was holding in the photograph but furniture which indeed some of which is in the Maddy's Museum in Nice an early painting over there up at the top but again that extraordinary a blend of line intensity of color and painterly quality well by the time Matisse really could no longer paint at an easel he decided he would simply reinvent the you paint in that instead of using brushes and paints on a canvas he would use a wash that was made specially for him the colors he wanted with which he covered sheets of papers which then he got out and then he had assistants pin these cutouts on a canvas and these are of course his Becky Digby and that photograph shows you Matisse with his scissors and as you can see he's sitting back cutting out one of the many shapes there's another photograph of him with as you can see a whole series of heads pinned to the wall right there elements through Pepe they could be on the table right at the bottom of this really quite wonderful bed and that he's in bed but always very proper with his tie with his sweater busy are working on these paper elements and this was a period at which every day he and I say this from a direct report again from Rosalyn beignet he would have he would put a scarf around his eyes so he couldn't see and spend a half hour also drawing and when she asked him why he drew when he couldn't see what he was doing he explained that he was keeping his hand in training and that his hand had to feel the weight of the line when he couldn't see it as he drew and some of the result of course is what you are seeing up there well there is of course jazz that astounding series of prints and but made of course of peptid goopy and the result of this color of this cutout is what you see here they all of them dating not just ours but the other petit could be from the six years between 47 and 53 some of them almost completely abstract and yes you do see a figure right there that blue figure in the middle some of them in which Matisse is using image and text together in which what it says here is these Phaedra's are merely serving as an accompaniment to the colors just as a caster's you know that the flower are an accident in the composition of a bouquet of flowers and so you and you can see because of the handwriting it's not Matisse's handwriting it was the signs on paper are the writing as pictorial composition that he wanted on this particular page and here it's really almost completely abstract space pure color giving us space which is both completely a believable and also deliberately ambiguous because if for instance you look at that purple square with its green frame on three sides if you look hard enough you can see the purple square as floating on the green you can see the green as coming on top of the purple square equally is the blue floating on top are we looking into space at the blue you can see it the same is true of course of the rest you can see that Matisse is creating a whole series of space which are not simple spaces as they are in reality but ambiguous rich spaces which we can interpret in many different ways and find much pleasure in doing so well it was one glorious series of pappy ad Cooper's you know they're coming to MoMA any second of that we do group a is after another and when you think of the early dance the dance of in nineteen nineteen ten and when you see that figure for instance on the Left dancing or the figure on the right resting you can see how more and more cutting these pieces of papers with blue wash on them you can see where Mattie's the more he went on how Mattie's understood movement light space depth color even in what seems at first to be and indeed is extraordinary decorative but it's not purely decorative once you start to look you realizes movement in and out there is that same wonderfully rich ambiguity again right here and that this is called the siren and you can see there she is up at the top but it is now entirely about painting it is very little or in this case really hardly at all about reality and this is even truer in the chapel which he designed in verse the nurse who took care of him when he was so ill in 42 then became a Dominican nun and she came to him and asked him whether he would decorate the chapel are which a very small convent which is still around was going to be opening and he was very fond of her she'd taken wonderful care of him but he also loved the idea of using light line and color in new ways and that is what he did in the trouble inverse with you see the stained glass windows on the right projecting their color onto the ground because of course it's not very light inside the travel photography distorts and so the ground is not brown the ground is white but you get these tools of bloom and green and yellow on the ground and in contrast and that is did this by painting each little square which was then baked it's earthenware which was then baked and put into place by combining the pure color that comes in from the window and that was worn by the priests as you will see in a moment and the pure line that is on the walls and you can see here I think very well how it all comes together or again here and although these vestments are no longer worn there are two pressures they don't want them to fade they don't want them to get worn so they are now shown but no longer worn for the services but if you think of the colors we've just been looking at and you imagine priests in these vestments in these colors moving in that very small trouble open to the public you can see how being in the chapel in vows is not like looking at a Matisse it is being inside a Matisse there are very few occasions when we have a chance to be inside a great work of art there we do and there you see more clearly you can see exactly the size of the dials and the way that is drew and here are some more of his watercolors for the vestments well this is where he was working at the end of his life he could see a number of the drawings for the travel in verse and then all through his life he was drawing and you will see of course we've seen you'll see some of these drawings here drawings in which each line has infinite meaning and in which the occasional break for instance you see right here is as important as the continuity of this line right there or that line right there in which lines come together really miraculously look at the way this line comes together with the heart you see right there you can see how that single line is more than enough to define a very great deal right there or again how so little the so much with fruit or with this still life there really is no such thing as a Matias drawing which is not worth looking at but I must say I think in this exhibition there is a particular Nattie's drawing which is winking at us telling us that after all what Matisse is doing is giving us pleasure and hoping that we're enjoying it as well those eyes those mouths could you ask for more Leticia now if any of you have questions I will happily answer them at least I'll Drive in the period when he was doing the cutouts and working on his bed it looked like some of the compositions were really collages and I'm wondering if he worked in any other materials other than paper in formulating needs spaces and well yes I mean my um it's really only paper I mean it's that work covered paper cutout and then applied to the canvas but no no the no other material and it's you mentioned collage because really that's what they are and perhaps we might reflect on the fact that when Barack and Picasso and a number of others in nineteen nineteen ten 1911 etc were doing colores Matias was not um there is obviously a great difference between what Picasso and Park and then the lesser Cubist's were doing in that period and what Matisse was doing in that or any other period his was always a completely individual and separate way of doing things which as I said did not stop him from being interested in what because it was doing in vice versa hi I was also wondering about the cut paper period was he still able to work with the texture and different weights of brushstrokes that he was working with earlier I'm sorry but I couldn't quite hear okay is this better yes during the cut paper period was Matisse still able to work with the different weights of brushstrokes and the textures that he was working with earlier oh yeah later on when he was working like paper was he able to achieve the textural thoughts that he had been able to do with me yeah um no that dissertate saw that he couldn't achieve them it's that he was doing something completely different although certainly they're not flat are these worked areas and they it wasn't simply Mattie's saying okay I want that blue I want it on that sheet of paper DRO go ahead and fill that sheet of paper the surface is always exactly what he wants it to be but he doesn't use in the Pepita Kupe those differences in text Rizzo brush marks that he did when he was working in oil and in fact in some cases in 47 for instance he was working both making Pappy do base and still painting in oil so there's a moment when the two come together but the effects he was I was going to say trying to achieve he was achieving they are quite different up and always it happens these days quite often that artists have a lot of helpers who do things for them this is not what Mattie's ever did all had made question the woman in the Hat looked as if he had used almost all the primary colors in the color spectrum I wonder if that was a conscious decision with the primary colors with the woman in the Hat painting it appeared as if he had used all the seven colors in the primary color spectrum and I wondered if that was a conscious decision no I don't think that he ever said to himself Oh in that case I'll use all seven primary colors I think he used the colors he wanted in that work to achieve that particular effect very clearly mattes had a sense and understanding of color which is extremely rare although I'm bound to say that we have seen it happen again more recently and all we have to do is look in the first row right here so it's it does happen down again but that extraordinary ability to understand what that particular variation or combination of color or colors will do in the case of that II certainly was not based on theoretical considerations Oh we'd better use seven I'd better use seven colors it'll be interesting to see what happens it was it came of the necessity to make that particular work what it was and I must say I think that if we're going to talk any further about color there's somebody here much more qualified than I am it was one more high I wondered if the German occupation had any effect on his work at all the German occupation will baptise it made him move because for instance when it became clear that the Allies were likely to bomb the southern coast of France as you know after d-day there was another d-day in the South of France that he's moved from nice which was much more exposed to inland to verse which was thought to be much safer perhaps he might have been able to recover faster from his operation if they had not been so many shortages of everything during the occupation but other than that he was not himself personally affected by the occupation and I might add that whereas natus then was in the South of France during the occupation Picasso was in Paris at his studio on the hood hijos would return where he was frequently visited by German officers after he had been lavishly denounced as a decadent painter whose works ought to be burnt down since as you know the Nazis were very fond of burning culture and Picasso who was not in ordinary life the easiest of men somehow managed to go on working quite unaffected by what was after all a very risky position for him in Paris nothing ever happened to him but it could very easily have no assumption enough these great artists under these terrible circumstances managed to continue their work in the case of decay so of course one could see the subject matter of the years of the occupation a great deal of grimness which you might expect but certainly no modification in his style all the way he painted and really the same is true of betty's I'm not when he was very ill that's something else but otherwise Matisse remained matys no matter what thank you very much

Channel: Mount Holyoke College

Views: 28,270

Keywords: mount holyoke college, mhc, women's colleges, higher education, college experience, Olivier Benier, Matisse, Patricia and Edward Falkenberg Lecture, Susan B. Weatherbie Exhibition Fund

Id: NK3eAaF1vTA

Length: 65min 10sec (3910 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 01 2014