Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954) had a historic creative rivalry with Picasso, in which it was disputed who was the most avant-garde. While the man from Malaga concentrated his efforts on challenging perspective, the Frenchman opted for the unrealistic intensity of color. With that basis, he founded Fauvism and was passed down to posterity for its vibrant tones and strong contrasts. Therefore it is abnormal that he stars in an exhibition —Matisse metamorphosiswhich opens this Wednesday, October 22 at the Canal Foundation in Madrid—dominated by monochromatic pieces: black and gray. More unusual is that it is exclusive to sculptures, its least exposed and known facet, but which the modernist pioneer did not abandon throughout his entire career.
Popy Venzal, one of the three curators of the exhibition, summarizes in three reasons why the sculptures of the man born in the north of France are little known: “First, they are small in size, between eight and 30 centimeters. Then, there are few sculptures [84 conservadas, de las cuales se exponen 33 en esta muestra] and, third, because they were considered unfinished forms of study.” However, Matisse always wanted to exhibit them, but he managed to do so on rare and unprofitable occasions: in 1921 at gallery 291 in New York, at the Venice Biennale in 1928, or as part of the retrospectives that the MoMA dedicated to him in 1931 and the Philadelphia Museum in 1948. In Spain, the IVAM (Valencia) dedicated an anthology to him with 60 pieces in 2003.
The Matisse of saturated tones and flat colors is not in the Canal Foundation exhibition, but his characteristic stylized figures, the movement of bodies and, above all, his obsessive studies on the representation of human anatomy are. In fact, the exhibition is organized into sections of crouching figures, lying figures, figures with raised arms, portraits and a fifth, motifs and variations, on plastic research done in drawing. “His sculptures were precisely considered studies because he allowed the worked, modeled matrix to be seen, leaving the physical mark of his hands modeling them,” describes Venzal.
Fixation on the female body
The artist’s fixation on physiognomy was mainly for its feminine side. This means that all the pieces in the exhibition, all made with the lost wax bronze casting technique, are models of women – among those represented are their partners, their daughter or their assistant -, with the exception of Small torso curled up (1908). Other times, he was inspired by photographs in artistic magazines that, at the beginning of the 20th century, published anonymous models in poses with an erotic charge; from them he produced Standing naked, very arched (1906). “It had to do with a new femininity of the time, which highlighted the energetic,” notes the curator about these sculptures with angular profiles, resembling silhouettes and with a charge of abstraction confessedly inspired by Auguste Rodin.
Also evident in the exhibition is his constant practice of transferring a motif from one medium to another, especially from sculpture to drawing. For example, the figure he molded in Nude leaning on hands (1905) includes it 30 years later in the graphic work Still life with anemone bouquet (1935), like the back of Reclining nude with shirt (1906) is also in charcoal on paper Lying nude seen from behind (1944). The variations and repetitions of the same theme are not only carried out from one medium to another, but also in the sculptures themselves, noticeable in the set of portraits he makes.
From academia to abstraction
In the section dedicated to portraits, the series he made of his daughter Marguerite, who posed for her father since she was six years old, and his models for several years Jeannette and Henriette stand out. From these last two he made a set of several heads at different times. The first piece of the series is the most realistic and academic, but it becomes abstracted until it becomes a succession of simplified pieces. “We should not see them as an express series of provisional stages or states that precede a final resolution, but as a complete work that gives rise to subsequent alterations of the previous work, but that exists independently,” Venzal emphasizes on this very characteristic. Rodin’s own.
The most expressive and expressionist portraits look like African masks, which proves the fascination that Matisse had with precolonial art (called primitive at that time), and which led him to travel to Tahiti or Congo, among other places. The Frenchman explained in a lecture in 1908 that the goal of portraiture was not to achieve visual precision, but rather “to reveal the essential qualities that physical imitation cannot capture.” His first sculptural piece, woman profile (1894), is a bas-relief portrait of his partner and mother of his first daughter (he later had two more with Amélie Matisse), Caroline Joblaud. While the last one, also present in the sample, is standing nude (1950), nicknamed as The shade plane for its resemblance to the fruit tree.
The time between both pieces demonstrates how sculpture was a practice that the fauvist never gave up. What’s more, at the end of his life, between 1947 and 1952, he dedicated himself exclusively to the sculptures that would form part of the Rosary Chapel, of which he was also awarded the construction and integral design. Matisse did not profess any religion, but the project involved him spiritually at a time when he had to remain bedridden due to intestinal cancer. produced at that time Christ of the Chapel of Vence (1949), part of the project that he defined as the “culmination of an entire work of work.”
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