Tag Archives: Henri Matisse

HENRI MATISSE: THE CUT-OUTS

Henri Matisse, “Blue Nude,” gouache on paper, cut and pasted, on paper, mounted on canvas, spring 1952 (Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris)

Henri Matisse, “Blue Nude,” gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on canvas, spring 1952 (Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris)

Museum of Modern Art
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Timed tickets daily through February 10, $25
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Near the center of “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” visitors gather to watch excerpts from Frédéric Rossif’s 1950 Matisse film, which show the white-bearded artist at work, creating masterpieces with only painted paper and a pair of scissors. There’s a smile on everyone’s face as the eighty-year-old Matisse cuts shapes out of yellow paper, perhaps a bit more sophisticated than a young child making a row of paper dolls. And that gets right to the heart of why the exhibition is so successful, and why Matisse’s cut-outs are so beloved: It seems so simple, something that anyone can do, but of course that is not quite true, as no one has ever used a pair of scissors quite like Matisse did. In her catalog essay “Bodies and Waves,” Jodi Hauptman discusses Matisse’s methods when beginning his first “Blue Nude.” She writes, “The process was arduous. Matisse labored for a number of weeks, relentlessly revising. His studio assistant at the time, Paule Martin, pushed by Matisse to work with equal rigor, describes the tense conditions: ‘Whereas subsequent forms were cut in a single movement, the first figure demanded such patience and attention on Matisse’s part, but also from me, that it exhausted me and I was on the brink of collapse. He made me pin tiny squares of paper to enhance the curvature of the thigh or some other part of the body, then remove parts of the figure to remove colour strips, then set it back in place as my febrile fingers fumbled with the pins.’ These enhancements and removals along with markings in chalk can be seen in a series of black and white photographs made by [secretary and studio assistant] Lydia Delectorskaya to document each stage, reminding the artist where he was and where he had been in order for him to decide where to go next.” The process was so organic that Matisse used pins to place the cut-outs on the walls of his studio, moving them around in different configurations until he was ready to mount them on canvas; if you look close enough, you can still see the pinholes on these marvelous works, not quite like a child pinning them onto a board in a classroom.

Installation view, “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” with (from left) “Black Leaf on Green Background,” gouache on paper, cut and pasted, 1952; “Christmas Eve,” maquette for stained-glass window, gouache on paper, cut and pasted, mounted on board, 1952; “Black Leaf on Red Background,” gouache on paper, cut and pasted, 1952; and “Christmas Eve,” stained glass, summer-fall 1952 (photo by Jonathan Muzikar © 2014 the Museum of Modern Art)

“Matisse: The Cut-Outs” consists of some 170 cut-outs, drawings, maquettes, stained glass, photographs, screenprints, illustrated books, and other ephemera related to Matisse’s use of cut paper painted over with gouache, which he began in the 1930s but became his preferred medium in the mid-to-late-1940s. This creative resurgence resulted in glorious works that combine a childlike innocence with a complex mastery of space, light, shape, and color, melding abstraction with imagery of the natural world. In “Icarus,” a maquette for the 1947 book Jazz, a silhouetted figure with a red heart floats among yellow stars. (“You have no idea how, during the cut-out paper period, the sensation of flight which emanated from me helped me better to adjust my hand when it used the scissors,” Matisse said. “It’s a kind of linear and graphic equivalence to the sensation of flight.”) Leaflike images come alive in “White Alga on Red and Green Background,” “Two Masks (The Tomato),” and “Composition with Red Cross.” A somewhat figurative element is added in “Black Boxer,” a black image over a red rectangle on a green background. Matisse displays a more spiritual side in his maquettes, studies, and trials for stained-glass windows for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. His four blue nudes, dating from spring 1952, are simply breathtaking, as blue geometric shapes and white spaces come together to form seated figures with slightly different body positions like a contemplative four-part dance. That summer, Matisse made the nine-panel room installation “The Swimming Pool,” an extraordinary horizontal swirl about which he said, “I have always adored the sea and now that I can no longer go for a swim, I have surrounded myself with it.” It was MoMA’s conservation of the piece that led to the idea of staging the cut-out exhibition in the first place, so now the work surrounds visitors from around the world.

Matisse at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, April 15, 1950 (photo by Walter Carone © Getty Images)

Matisse at the Hôtel Régina, Nice, April 15, 1950 (photo by Walter Carone © Getty Images)

An April 15, 1950, black-and-white photograph by Walter Carone shows Matisse in his bed, using a long pole to draw on the wall of his room at the Hôtel Régina in Nice with charcoal. The wall already includes elements that would become “The Thousand and One Nights.” It’s a charming photo of the artist, apparently relaxing in bed while continuing to work. Of course, just as the cut-outs themselves are not simple, neither were Matisse’s last years, much of which was spent in bed and in his wheelchair. The catalog essay “The Studio as Site and Subject” notes, “In a 1952 interview with the writer André Verdet, Henri Matisse describes a cluster of colourful cut-paper forms pinned to his studio walls as a ‘little garden.’ ‘You see,’ he explains, ‘as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk . . . There are leaves, fruits, a bird.’ As Matisse speaks, he points to ‘a large mural composition of cut paper that encompassed half the room.’” The artist is referring to pieces that he would use to create “The Parakeet and the Mermaid,” but he could just as well be describing what visitors experience as they walk through this magical exhibition, like meandering through a colorful garden filled with joy and beauty. “Matisse: The Cut-Outs” is a revelatory show, the happiest of the season, displaying a childlike wonder as experienced by an aging yet still determined artist of extraordinary talent.

THE ARMORY SHOW AT 100: MODERN ART AND REVOLUTION

Marcel Duchamp, “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” oil on canvas, 1912 (Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection)

New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th St.)
Daily through February 23, $18 (pay-as-you-wish Friday 6:00 – 8:00)
212-873-3400
www.armory.nyhistory.org

It was a seminal moment in the way contemporary art was introduced to the American public. “New York will never be the same again,” Arthur B. Davies said, while Walt Kuhn proclaimed, “We will show New York something they never dreamed of.” On February 17, 2013, the Armory Show opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave. and Twenty-Sixth St.; organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, which was headed by Davies, the show brought the European avant-garde to the America public. The New-York Historical Society is celebrating the transformative event’s centennial with “The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution,” a wide-ranging exhibition that includes approximately one hundred works from the original presentation, by such innovative and influential European artists as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, and Edvard Munch in addition to such American painters and sculptors as Childe Hassam, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, James McNeill Whistler, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Sloan, and Charles R. Sheeler. “The Armory Show at 100” delves into the fascinating behind-the-scenes battles between Davies, Kuhn, J. Alden Weir, Walter Pach, Guy Pène du Bois, and the National Academy through quotes, postcards, and letters that detail the controversial selection process and purpose of the show while also placing it firmly within the context of the sociopolitical climate and evolving culture (including literature and film) of early-twentieth-century New York City as WWI loomed on the horizon.

Albert Pinkham Ryder, “Pastoral Study,” oil on canvas mounted on fiberboard, 1897 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)

Many of the works on view, arranged thematically in clever ways, are simply sensational: Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2),” Matisse’s “Blue Nude,” “The Red Studio,” and “Goldfish and Sculpture,” van Gogh’s “Mountains at Saint-Rémy” and “La salle de danse à Arles,” Redon’s “Silence,” Bellows’s “Circus,” Ryder’s “Pastoral Study,” Eugène Delacroix’s “Christ on the Lake of Genesareth,” Degas’s “After the Bath,” Munch’s “Madonna,” Charles Henry White’s “The Condemned Tenement,” and Francis Picabia’s “The Procession, Seville.” The free audioguide adds additional insight to the lasting importance of “The Armory Show,” while the catalog features thirty-one essays, with contributions from curators Marilyn Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt along with Leon Botstein, Avis Berman, Barbara Haskell, Francis M. Naumann, Casey Nelson Blake, and others. “Criticism, both for and against modern art in the exhibition — now considered one of the most important art exhibitions ever mounted in the United States — was impassioned, and it seemed as if everyone from the most seasoned collector or established artist to the uninitiated viewer had an opinion,” Kushner writes in her piece, “A Century of the Armory Show: Modernism and Myth.” The thoughtful, well-organized show continues through February 23, with timed tickets available in advance, which is definitely the way to go to avoid the lines. As a bonus, the New-York Historical Society will be open on Monday, February 17. (Next month, the Armory Show comes back to town, running March 6-9 at Piers 92 and 94 as part of Armory Arts Week, but it’s nothing like its namesake.)

AN ANIMATED WORLD — CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF GKIDS CLASSICS: THE PAINTING

Ramo and Claire attempt to overcome class boundaries and find the creator in Jean-François Laguionie’s THE PAINTING

THE PAINTING (LE TABLEAU) (Jean-François Laguionie, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, December 30, 6:15
Series continues through January 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.gkids.tv

Jean-François Laguionie’s award-winning animated film, The Painting, has a very cool premise: The characters inside one of a painter’s works have organized a rigid class structure of the Alldunns, who have been completed and have sole access to the ritzy castle; the Halfies, who are not quite finished and are not allowed to join them; and the Sketchies, outlined figures who are terribly abused by the Alldunns. At the center of it all is an impossible Romeo and Juliet-like love story between the Alldunn Ramo (voiced by Adrien Larmande) and the Halfie Claire (Chloé Berthier). With the power-hungry Alldunns, led by the Great Chandelier (Jacques Roehrich), on the rampage, Ramo, the Sketchie known as Quill (Thierry Jahn), and Claire’s best friend, the Halfie Lola (Jessica Monceau), are on the run, trying to reunite the lovers and find the real-life painter so he can finish the Halfies and Sketchies and bring peace to the land. But soon they have fallen out of their painting and into the artist’s studio, where they meet characters from other works, including a reclining nude (Céline Ronte) and a self-portrait (Laguionie), and enter different canvases during their adventurous, and dangerous, search for the creator. Laguionie (Rowing Across the Atlantic, A Monkey’s Tale), who has been making animated films for five decades, has fun mimicking Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and other major artists, but his world-building doesn’t quite hold together as the characters continue on their colorful journey. He successfully walks that fine line between playful parable and melodramatic morality play, but things ultimately get away from him as the resolution nears. The Painting is screening December 30 at 6:15 at the IFC Center as part of the series “An Animated World: Celebrating 5 Years of GKIDS Classics,” paying tribute to GKIDS’ ongoing New York International Children’s Film Festival, which continues with such other animated works as Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba’s Chico & Rita, Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill, and Jacques-Remy Girerd’s Mia and the Migoo.

ABBY ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER SCULPTURE GARDEN: THE MODERN MONUMENT

Katharina Fritsch’s “Group of Figures” is back in MoMA’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which is now open for free every morning from 9:00 to 10:30 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Early hours: open daily 9:00 – 10:30 am, free
www.moma.org

Designed in 1953 by architect Philip Johnson, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden resides on the site that was once the town-house home of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, one of the founders of the Museum of Modern Art. A socialite and philanthropist who married John D. Rockefeller Jr. in 1901, Aldrich was the mother of Abby, John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David Rockefeller. The garden has been one of the great, peaceful respites of New York City for sixty years, its multiple levels and reflecting pools, which Johnson called “canals,” along with its birches and beeches, offering visitors a beautiful space to commune with both art and nature en plein air. Beginning September 9, the sculpture garden will be open for free starting at 9:00 each morning, ninety minutes before the rest of the museum opens to paying customers. Early risers can buy coffee and other drinks and enjoy the garden’s current arrangement of sculptures, “The Modern Monument,” which consists of old favorites as well as newer delights. Walking around the garden, one will encounter Alberto Giacometti’s “Tall Figure, III,” Jenny Holzer’s “Granite Bench,” Joan Miró’s “Moonbird,” Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk,” and Pablo Picasso’s “She-Goat.” Aristide Maillol’s “The River” still dangles over one of the pools, while Hector Guimard’s “Entrance Gate to Paris Subway (Métropolitain) Station, Paris, France” stands in its longtime space at the far east end and Henri Matisse’s stunning quartet, “The Back,” lines its usual wall, celebrating the human body. Also on view are Mark di Suvero’s “For Roebling,” Tony Smith’s “Die,” Claes Oldenburg’s “Geometric Mouse, Scale A,” Picasso’s “Monument,” and Katharina Fritsch’s colorful “Group of Figures.” The most recent addition to the garden is Stephen Vitiello’s audiovisual installation “A Bell for Every Minute,” which was created for the High Line and now resides outside at MoMA, a collection of different bells from around the city chiming minute after minute. In 2004, when the museum returned to Midtown after a major renovation and expansion (and temporary move to Queens), architect Yoshio Taniguchi restored the garden to its original dimensions, explaining that it is “perhaps the most distinctive single element of the museum today.” And now entrance to this most distinctive element is free every morning from 9:00 to 10:30.

LARRY RIVERS: LATER WORKS

Larry Rivers, “Art and the Artist: Mondrian,” oil on canvas mounted on sculpted foamboard, 1992 (courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery)

Tibor de Nagy Gallery
724 Fifth Ave. between 56th & 57th Sts.
Tuesday – Friday through June 15, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-262-5050
www.tibordenagy.com

Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, multidisciplinary artist and jazz saxophonist Larry Rivers, who died ten years ago at the age of seventy-eight, was a key influential figure in the ever-changing world of twentieth-century art, impossible to pigeon-hole into any one specific category or movement. This refusal to maintain the status quo is evident in his current solo show at Tibor de Nagy, which focuses on paintings and drawings made between 1975 and 2002. “A number of things strike me about Rivers’s late work. One is its range,” writes American poet and critic John Yau in the exhibition’s hardcover catalog. “He can go from doing a self-mocking send-up of his friend, the French artist Jean Hélion, to sensitively addressing the legacy of the Holocaust. This alone convinces me that his late work needs a longer and deeper look, and that his entire oeuvre needs to be reconsidered.” Indeed, the pieces on view deal with two primary subjects: three-dimensional sculpture paintings that pay homage to other artists, and poignant drawings that address family and loss, especially in regard to World War II. What first jumps out at Tibor de Nagy are brightly colored depictions of Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Hélion, and others at work, painted on intricately sculpted foamboard that gives added life to them without feeling gimmicky. Rivers also re-creates Matisse’s “La Danse” with a more abstract vision. Meanwhile, in the back room, such poignant color pencil drawings as “The Frank Family,” “Four Seasons: Fall in the Forest of Birkenau,” and “Erasing the Past I” and “Erasing the Past II” take on a more serious tone, the yellow stars on the subjects’ tattered clothes emerging as haunting reminders of the Holocaust. While the works might evoke a wide range of emotions, from glee and wonder to sadness and pain, they are all about one thing, a past as remembered by a truly American artist.

THE STEINS COLLECT: MATISSE, PICASSO, AND THE PARISIAN AVANT-GARDE

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Tisch Galleries, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 3, $25
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org

Like last year’s “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” exhibition at the Jewish Museum, the Met’s “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” does an extraordinary job revealing the fascinating life of a family dedicated to the love of art. In the first decade of the twentieth century, siblings Leo, Gertrude, and Michael Stein, along with Michael’s wife, Sarah, moved to Paris, where they became entranced by the work of such artists as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre Bonnard, Odilon Redon, and Edgar Degas. Although not wealthy, the upper-middle-class Steins had some extra money from the family’s old clothing business and real estate holdings, so they decided to spend whatever they could on up-and-coming artists whose work they could afford. Soon they were showing off paintings by the relatively little-known Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, hosting Saturday salons, and counting among their friends Claribel and Etta Cone, art dealer Ambroise Vollard, art historian Bernard Berenson, and such artists as Henri Manguin and Picasso and Matisse, whom they famously introduced to each other in 1905-6. The Met exhibit ranges from works that are known to have directly influenced the Steins to want to start collecting art to the many paintings that ended up hanging on their walls, complete with photographs and a site-specific video projection that shows exactly where they were hung in their Paris apartments. Leo, at one time an aspiring artist, and Gertrude, who became a famous and controversial writer, wrote often about their adventures in the art world, so the accompanying text is filled with delightful quotes that display the likes and dislikes of the siblings. “All our recent accessions are unfortunately by people you never heard of so there’s no use trying to describe them,” Leo Stein wrote in 1905, “except that one of those out of the salon [Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’] made everybody laugh except a few who got mad about it and two other pictures are by a young Spaniard named Picasso whom I consider a genius of very great magnitude.”

But Leo grew unhappy later on with the direction Picasso was taking, at the same time that he was not thrilled with Gertrude’s growing relationship with Alice B. Toklas. “Both [Picasso] & Gertrude are using their intellects, which they ain’t got, to do what would need the finest critical tact, which they ain’t got neither,” he wrote in 1913, “and they are in my belief turning out the most go’almighty rubbish that is to be found.” In the 1930s, Gertrude admitted, “It is very difficult now that everybody is accustomed to everything to give some idea of the uneasiness once felt when one first looked at all these pictures on the walls.” And what pictures they are hanging on the walls of the Met in a smartly curated display, highlighted by Matisse’s revolutionary “Woman with a Hat,” Picasso’s justly famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, Cézanne’s “Bathers,” and three versions of “La Coiffure” by Manguin, Matisse, and Picasso. The exhibition also includes Jo Davidson’s sculpture of Gertrude Stein (another cast of which sits in Bryant Park), family photographs, a painting by Leo Stein and drawings by Sarah Stein, a clip from the 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, home movies of Sarah and Michael Stein at their villa designed by Le Corbusier, and Gertrude’s handwritten will. In conjunction with “The Steins Collect,” the Met will be screening a series of related films, including Perry Miller Adato’s Paris the Luminous Years on May 29 at 2:00 and Jill Godmilow and Linda Bassett’s Waiting for the Moon, about the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Toklas, on May 31 at 2:00.

LAST CHANCE: THE RONALD S. LAUDER COLLECTION

SELECTIONS FROM THE 3rd CENTURY BC TO THE 20th CENTURY/GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND FRANCE
Neue Galerie
1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th St.
Monday, April 2, $20, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-628-6200
www.neuegalerie.org

In November 2001, Ronald S. Lauder opened the Neue Galerie, a wonderful museum on 86th St. that specializes in German and Austrian art. Over the last ten years, the institution has staged shows featuring the work of such artists as Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Alfred Kubin, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Christian Schad, and even Vincent van Gogh. In celebration of its first decade, the Neue Galerie is displaying “The Ronald S. Lauder Collection: Selections from the 3rd Century BC to the 20th Century,” which concludes its five and a half month run today. “My absolute love for and dedication to collecting art has been one of the guiding passions of my life,” Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder, explains on the exhibition website. The well-curated and smartly hung show, which features grouped tags with thumbnail images, has sections dedicated to works by Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Gerhard Richter, and Vasily Kandinsky in addition to pieces by Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Franz Marc, Joseph Beuys, and all the above-mentioned artists. There is also a room dedicated to Lauder’s extensive collection of arms and armor and medieval religious relics, and there is ornate furniture and clocks throughout. Like the Frick here in New York and Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, this exhibition offers an intriguing look inside the mind of one of the world’s major art collectors, in this case a man with extremely wide-ranging tastes who has been amassing his collection since he was in his teens.