Praeterita

After writing a 1,000 word piece about Winslow Homer's eighteen month stay at an English fishing village, I'm writing a series of primers about other artists who made similar journeys . Henri Matisse, "Open Window, Collioure ," oil on canvas, 1905 Who Henri Matisse (1869-1954), French painter. Coastal association The Mediterranean coast of southern France. First coastal visit In the 1890s, Matisse spent significant time on two different coastlines: Brittany, from 1894 to 1896, and Corsica in 1898. But it was his first visit to Collioure in 1905 that brought about a transformation in his ideas about painting. Collioure was/is a tiny fishing village in the extreme southeast of France, about 10 miles from the Spanish border. Henri Matisse, " View of Collioure ," oil on canvas, 1905 Reasons for visiting He joined the painter Andre Derain and spent the summer exploring Derain's ideas of using patches of pure colour, applied in almo...

I'm in Paris, France, for three weeks, teaching on Columbia College Chicago's study abroad program. The students don't arrive until the weekend, so I'm just relaxing in the city and our rented apartment in Montparnasse, on an easy schedule of one museum per day followed by a nap and a light dinner (with wine, of course). On Wednesday, we went to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, near the Place de l'Alma. Half of the permanent collection was closed, but I still saw some seminal twentieth century works. From the first third of the century, there was the giant canvas-mural La Danse, the second version, painted for an American patron in the early 1930s. Inside the vast room that housed the works, there were two small cabinet with some fascinating photos, such as this one of Matisse sketching the mural: When you enter the hall where the paintings are displayed, you first see the sketched version: On the right, you can just about see one of th...

A couple of posts ago, I wrote something about seeing Matisse's "Bathers with a Turtle" in the St Louis Art Museum, and how it's only now being acknowledged as one of the seminal works of early twentieth century art. Right in front of it is his sculpture "Decorative Figure", which was modelled around the same time, in 1908, and is as revolutionary for the language of sculpture as "Bathers" was for painting. It's another of those works that I have known about for decades, but only saw in books or online before. Being in front of it is an experience akin to seeing the Empire State Building or the pyramids for the first time: it both fulfills and exceeds your mental picture of it. It's an extraordinarily bold piece of work, almost breathtaking in the liberties Matisse took with the figure. Every proportion is 'wrong', with the head being too large for the body, the hands and feet only approximately and occasionally fashioned, the...

I spent the afternoon at the Dallas Museum of Art with my hosts, Ava and Robert Everett, Carter Scaggs (printmaking professor at Collin County Community College where I am doing the workshops), and the lovely Karen and Amy (printmaking students). Funny thing, something I didn't expect, is that people were trying to play down my expectations for the museum -- funny, because the cliche of the Texan is that they boast about how everything is bigger and better. It turns out that in this case, the museum may not be a mega church for art like MOMA in New York or the Art Institute, but it is a very good museum indeed. On four floors, it houses collections of ancient Mexican art, Greek and Roman art, polynesian art, American and European art, with fantastic examples of each kind. As I wandered around from gallery to gallery, I decided to take pictures not just of complete paintings, but of sections of paintings that caught my attention. For example, the DMA had a few really early painti...

'Matisse', Lawrence Gowing, Thames & Hudson, 1979 If you’ve ever seen paintings by Lawrence Gowing (1918-1991), you would recognize the style of the Euston Road School: portraits, interiors, some street scenes, some landscape, still lives; muted colours, covering the full spectrum between brown and dark brown; very moody and quiet in tone; a certain looseness in the paint application, drawing a little from the work of Cezanne, but based on observation; in the context of the time, traditional and quite conservative. In many ways Gowing would be the last person you would expect to write a great book on Matisse. Yet in my opinion this is the best book not just on Matisse’s art, but one of the best books every written on the process of painting itself. In a biography of an artist, such as Hilary Spurling’s excellent two-volume life of Matisse, you don’t expect profound art historical analysis or complex theories about the artistic process. It’s usually enough if the biogr...

Thanks to snakeBISHOP for posting this to YouTube. No subtitles, but he starts by saying "For me, painting and drawing are the same thing."   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

I just found this short clip of Matisse, probably from the late 1940s or early 1950s, wielding scissors and cutting up a piece of coloured paper for one of his 'decoupages' works.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader