Matisse’s longest journey

In its symbolic dimension, ‘The Open Window’ is, above all, an invitation to travel. This small canvas today presides over one of the rooms that Beyeler Foundation dedicated to the career of more than six decades of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) with a retrospective of 72 works. We admire paintings and sculptures in rooms with natural light that enters through the transparent ceilings and the large windows of the building that Renzo Piano designed bordered by the ponds and water lilies that border the Swiss mountains next to Basel.

The exhibition takes as its starting point the poem ‘The invitation to travel‘, by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), to which the painter referred on numerous occasions. Matisse traveled endlessly: southern France, Italy, Spain, Russia, North Africa, the United States, and places as far away as the South Pacific. These experiences, often linked to the search for new light and color, inspired his work in many ways, filling it with exotic nuances that led him to paint disparate paintings, from his almost indecipherable ‘Moroccans’, to the apparently more naturalistic ‘Screen Screens’. moriscos’; from the fiercely colored ‘Music’ to the calm and contemplative ‘Living in Silence in the Houses’. He also made sculptures, drawings and engravings, designs for costumes and stained glass.

In the summer of 1905, attracted by the vibrant light of the south of France, Matisse traveled accompanied by his wife. Amelia and his children to Collioure. In one of the coves, Port d’Avall, Matisse rented a small room as a studio and there he painted ‘The Open Window’, while Derain flourished in the company of his adoptive family.

Matisse was born on New Year’s Eve 1869 in the wool town of Le Cateau-Cambresison one of the historic battlefields of northern Europe. It is a cold and inhospitable region, with gray skies over a flat landscape and infinite horizons, dotted with church steeples around which towns with dark brick houses are grouped. His father was a prosperous grain merchant and his mother painted porcelain and made hats. Matisse did not oppose his father’s will until, around his twentieth birthday, an attack of appendicitis forced him to convalesce at home. Then his mother gave him a box of paints. That was an epiphany: “When I started painting, I felt transported to a kind of paradise,” Matisse said.

The sale of ‘The Joy of Living’ to Leo and Gertrude Stein allowed Matisse to travel, in the spring of 1906, to Algiers. It was his first trip to North Africa, then considered part of the East. There he bought some objects: a red kilim converted into a central element of the painting ‘The Red Carpets’ (1906), a large still life of objects and fruits converted into volumetric shapes that do not cast any shadows. The trip to Africa deepened the intercultural inspiration of Matisse, who had acquired his first African sculpture in 1906 and was hypnotized by its formal language. This dazzle reflected the general interest of modern European artists in all supposedly “primitive” art forms.

In July 1907, at the urging of Leo Stein, Henri and Amélie Matisse traveled to Italy to see the frescoes of Giotto in Padua. That experience, together with the example of Paul Cezanneencouraged Matisse in his work of several large-format paintings with imposing female figures. The works of Giotto (1267-1337) conveyed to him a particular kind of emotional force that manifested itself in pure pictorial expression rather than in content and motif. In Basel we perceive this in front of ‘Bathers with a Turtle’ (1907-08). Giotto’s representation of the Baptism of Christ, with its radical division of the landscape into an upper area of ​​ultramarine blue and a lower green section, is crudely reduced to that of this painting.

Matisse and his family moved in 1909 to a villa in the Parisian neighborhood of Issy-les-Moulineaux, thanks to the improvement in their economic situation, the result of orders from their main Russian collectors, Sergei Shchukin and Iván Morozov. In the garden of the house, Matisse erected a large study that would, from then on, be the central theme of his work. The year 1941 marked a new chapter in his life and work. With the outbreak of World War II, the artist chose to remain in France, settling in Nice in his studio apartment at the Hotel Regina. In January he underwent emergency surgery in Lyon. Matisse, who had been miraculously saved from death, from then on considered himself “a resurrected man” willing to take advantage of every moment to dedicate it to Art.

At 71 years old, an invalid and tied to his “special belt”, as he called his humiliating metal and rubber sash, he found a way to express himself through a new and amazing technique, the so-called ‘papiers découpés’, paper cuttings. painted with gouache. In this way, spread across the walls, the works continued their dynamic and unbridled flowering: acrobats, monkeys, bathers, masks, floral and vegetal motifs intermingled freely, sprouting from each other as if through prolific cloning. A set of them can be seen today in an exciting room in Basel. Matisse was incorporating into them all the impressions he remembered from his trip to Tahiti. The words of Louis Aragon: «That it can be said about Matisse that before him all painting was dark may be wrong and unfair, but the important thing is that it was said. (…) There are painters with that glory, with that role of dazzling for at least 50 years. “These artists are like an open window in the night of humanity and, behind them, subsequent generations will be able to form an idea of ​​what the sun is.”