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| Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Femme à la voilette, 1927. The Museum of Modern Art, New York © Succession H. Matisse © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence / DR. |
Musée de l'Orangerie
Jardin des Tuileries, Place de la Concorde (côté Seine), 75001 Paris.
This project enjoyed the crucial support of Cahiers d’Art and the Matisse Archives.
This exhibition is organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Musée Matisse in Nice.
Curatorship: Cécile Debray, President of the National Picasso Museum – Paris.
Assisted for documentary research by Alice Marsal, Head of Conservation at the Musée de l’Orangerie.
Visited on 1 March, 2023.
Musée de l'Orangerie: "There has been no lack of exhibitions on Matisse. Among those that have addressed the various periods that marked his career, very few have focused specifically on the 1930s. Matisse. Cahiers d’art – Le tournant des années 1930 (The Pivotal 1930s) is devoted exclusively to this period."
"In 1930, Matisse left France and traveled to Tahiti, so deliberately taking a break from creation, and reaching a turning point in his career. The “Matisse. Cahiers d’art, le tournant des années 1930” exhibition revisits this decisive decade. It is through the prism of Cahiers d’art, the great avant-garde magazine created by Christian Zervos in 1926, that the exhibition will be presenting Matisse’s work in the 1930s. The mouthpiece for international modernism and the aesthetic trends of its day, the magazine reported on the artist’s production throughout the interwar period."
"The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the decade with a view to understanding their major concerns. Largely excluded from the art scene during the 1920s, the painter’s work once again became a subject for the era’s debates on ideas and reflections, due to regular publications in Cahiers d’Art, highlighting his pre-1916 paintings – the most radical among them in particular – and reporting on his production underway. Articles and reproductions of Matisse’s works helped relaunch his competition with Picasso. In successive issues of the magazine, Matisse featured alongside the artists of his time: Georges Braque, Juan Miro, Fernand Léger, Wassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Marcel Duchamp."
"A number of outstanding works rarely exhibited in France have been brought together for this exhibition, including Large Reclining Nude from Baltimore, The Song from Houston and the 1938 Romanian Blouses series conserved in various American museums. The density and complexity of the decade in question are suggested by sculptures, objects from Matisse’s and others’ collections, drawings, engravings and paintings, along with recent prints of photographs of states of progress, archives, excerpts from films and issues of Cahiers d’art."
AA: The Paris leg of the internationally circulating Henri Matisse exhibition opened today at the Orangerie. The exhibition is admirably compact and well curated. Selections of cycles are illuminating, rarities are highlighted, and the Matisse / Picasso comparison is a running concept. The paintings are covered by non-reflecting glass, and the hanging and the lighting are excellent.
The exhibition satisfies a curiosity about Matisse in the 1930s, a less well known period in the life of the artist who remained active for 65 years, better known for instance for his Fauvist breakthrough or his final giant cutout years.
Having turned 60, Matisse sensed a need for renewal and headed for Tahiti where he happened to meet F. M. Murnau filming Tabu. The Tahiti room is dominated by two big related oil paintings, both showcasing a ship in the port as seen from a hotel window. Invitations to a voyage, one in the light of the sunrise, the other in the evening dusk, on display here from different collections.
Matisse was a Northerner who loved the colours of the Southern sunlight. He was one of the greatest Colourists, and many of his greatest paintings are colour-driven.
Matisse was also inspired by African, Tasmanian and Papuan art, and there is a fascinating wall at the Orangerie of sacred sculptures and totem poles from Matisse's private collections. Collections such as these are a topic today for a new critical discourse on colonialism in art museums. These collections have powerfully influenced European art. A renewed urgency is attached to these endlessly mysterious and uncanny objects.
La Danse (1909) in its different versions may be Matisse's most famous work. In the Matisse of the 1930s exhibition, a whole room is dedicated to works related to La Danse de Merion / La Danse II (1932), the triptych mural for Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia. These are studies in the grandeur of simplicity.
A wall is dedicated to a comparison of Matisse and Picasso's etchings. Matisse and Picasso were each other's greatest friends and rivals. Matisse created illustrations for Mallarmé and Joyce, Picasso for Ovid. The themes of both were mythic. Before the exhibition I was not able to tell a Matisse etching from a Picasso effort, and having spent today a long while comparing them I am none the wiser. Matisse has a stronger urge to reduction and simplification while Picasso favours a more detailed composition and superimpositions.
Judging by the prominence of the odalisque motif, Matisse's libido remained as unrestrained as Picasso's. During the current Me Too discourse, John Berger's thesis in Ways of Seeing has been revived ("men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at."). Certainly nothing would be more patriarchal than reducing a woman to a harem lady, already condemned by Mozart in The Abduction from the Seraglio. Let's also register a presence of sexual violence in The Afternoon of the Faun and the Ulysses series. But these are atavistic drives that are both transcended and sublimated in Matisse's art.
What remains is a response to the call of life (in Nu allongé, de dos, 20 mai 1935) and the joy of release (Nu au collier [Lydia], 1935). It is rare to find erotic art so frank and so refined. I wonder whether art like this is going to be censored in the current trends of cancel culture. But I remember examining a particularly uninhibited nude in a recent Auguste Rodin exhibition in the company of a distinguished female art executive. She did not seem to be in censorship mood, on the contrary.
Among the highlights in the last rooms is the rarely displayed Le Chant (1939, from The Lewis Collection). Grand nu couché (nu rose) (1935, from the Baltimore Museum of Art) is shown in the context of ten sketches. From the Blouse roumaine series is shown a stark and memorable 1940 version from Centre Pompidou (not illustrated in the catalogue in which other works of the cycle are displayed).
Thirty years earlier Matisse had already discarded depth and perspective. The trend was to even greater reduction, simplicity and flatness.
The style kept becoming simpler and the colour stronger.
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