Praeterita

I went to see the Matisse show at the Art Institute of Chicago recently. I have good things to say about the show, but bad things to say about the attitude to the public on the part of the show’s organizers. The show is called ‘Matisse: Radical Invention’ and it gathers together an amazing selection of Matisse’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from 1913 to 1917. At least half of the pieces I was seeing for the first time, even though I’ve known about them for many years. It was particularly satisfying to see so many of his prints in one place. There is a whole room of his monoprints, done using a very simple technique (basically rolling a flat layer of black ink on a copper plate, then removing some of the ink with thin strokes to leave a white line drawing). When en masse, these prints show how closely related Matisse’s printmaking was to the problems he was considering in other media. There are the sculptures, with their lumps and their clumsiness and their apparent ha...