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18/3/2006

Henri Matisse

Fondation Beyeler, Basel

Figure Color Space

Henri Matisse is the artist of the hour. The great pioneer of modernism, whose compositions in form and color took the potentials of figuration and, in a certain sense, abstraction, to their limits and beyond, has remained an incredibly influential artist to this day. His work, rife with breaks yet evincing continual development, is the subject of a Fondation Beyeler exhibition, the first comprehensive review of its kind to be held in Switzerland for over twenty years. It includes approximately 160 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from all phases of the artist’s career.

The underlying theme is Matisse’s revolutionary and fascinating penetration, redefinition and transcendence of the pictorial space by means of figure and color. A great many of his compositions feature female figures in an interior, with a window or door providing a view into the space outside. Figure, interior and exterior, depicted in different colors and color areas, add up to a sort of “experimental setup", the potentials of which Matisse explored throughout his career.

The exhibition begins with his early interiors of the 1890s, which are suffused with a special tranquillity and whose brown, dark coloration was still beholding to the nineteenth-century tradition. This changed radically during the Fauvist period, beginning in 1905. Matisse’s colors seemed veritably to explode, even though the quiet arrangement of the objects depicted was retained. In the years leading up to the First World War, Matisse established his avant-garde reputation. His compositions grew flatter, their color fields increasingly expansive and abstract, and their motifs more daring. This period saw the emergence, on commission from the Russian collectors Shtshukin and Morosow, of renowned compositions like La Danse and La Musique. During the First World War, Matisse’s paintings seemed to be drained of color and reduced to radically geometric forms, a development that can be viewed as a reaction to the political events of the period. His subsequent return to seemingly uncomplicated, appealing subjects like the odalisques of the 1920s in Nice is often misunderstood as a regression. Actually, it represented a liberation from abstraction, which, Matisse himself said, had proven to be a cul-de-sac.

Especially during the second half of his career, Matisse relied heavily on the models he depicted, who interested him less as personalities than as figures that served a certain function within the pictorial space. Deserving of particular mention is Lydia Delectorskaya, his favorite model, assistant and possibly also his lover during the 1930s. Her physical presence and magnetism, which greatly inspired Matisse and which he captured in many, repeatedly reworked paintings, prompted him to progressively reduce his “experimental setup" of figure, color and space to a system of signs that eventually issued in the magnificent paper cut-outs of the late period.

As this brief outline implies, Matisse’s oeuvre and life as an artist, documented in the exhibition in an exemplary way, was not free of breaks, dead ends, and turnabouts.

Nonetheless, it evinced a logical development in the direction of the “de'coration" Matisse envisaged as a perfect art form. It is an exhilarating experience to trace this development at the Fondation Beyeler.

Once again we have succeeded in uniting a large number of loans from American and European museums at the Fondation Beyeler. The lenders include the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Muse'e d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Tate, London; the Stadtische Galerie im Stadelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt; the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the State Hermitage, St. Petersburg; and the Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunsthaus Zurich, and Kunstmuseum Bern.

In addition, many private collectors and institutions, including the Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Foundation Collection in New York and the Collection Maeght in Paris, generously agreed to part with their treasures for the duration of the exhibition.

The exhibition was organized in collaboration with K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. It was curated for the Fondation Beyeler by Christoph Vitali, with the assistance of Ulf Kuster and Philippe Buttner.

The catalogue is published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, in German and French. It contains essays by Philippe Buttner, Isabelle Monod-Fontaine, and Ulf Kuster, and includes a comprehensive plate section. The volume comprises 200 pages with 135 full-color illustrations, and is available at a price of CHF 49. The English version of the catalogue corresponds to the Dusseldorf exhibition, and costs CHF 66.

Contact/press: Catherine Schott, tel. + 41 (0)61 6459721, fax + 41 (0)61 6459739; presse@beyeler.com

Image: Henri Matisse, La table noire, 1919, Oil on canvas 102 x 80 cm Private colection (c) 2006 Succession H. Matisse/ProLitteris, Zurich

Fondation Beyeler
Baselstrasse 101, CH-4125 Riehen Basel
Opening hours of the special exhibition: 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. daily, Wednesdays until 8 p.m.
New: The museum is open on all sundays and holidays.

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