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Henri Matisse’s stained glass work, Nuit de Noël or Christmas Eve (1952), is a vibrant example of the artist’s later experimentation with bold colors and forms, and very much influenced by his extensive work with paper cut outs.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Henri Matisse, Christmas Eve (Nuit De Noel)
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Fittingly, artist Roger Frey (1866 – 1934) memorialize the public debut of Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio in a painting that represents a group of Matisses artworks arranged in situ. A Room in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912) is the only surviving visual documentation of Pinneau Rouge on display at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1912. The gentleman on the leather sofa is probably the artist Duncan Grant, an admirer of Matisse who had been welcomed as a visitor to the studio at Issy. Grant was one of several members of the Bloomsbury Group (a close-knit circle of British artists and writers) who worked with Fry to organize the show.
Photographed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City
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In Nude in a Wood (1906), which was made near the town of Collioure in the French Mediterranean, Henri Matisse uses broad patches of vivid pigment to integrate a figure of his wife in a lush landscape. Although his techniques were new, his subject matter – the female nude in, and acquainted with, nature – refers directly to the pastoral landscape tradition and it’s imagined worlds of timeless pleasure in harmony. This painting was included in the 1913 Armory Show, a groundbreaking exhibition that introduced US audiences to European modernism.
Photographed in The Brooklyn Museum.
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In 1941, while convalescing from a serious illness, Henri Matisse devised a fresh approach to his interest in repeated motifs: a drawing series that he would published in 1943 as Themes and Variations. Comprising 162 drawings organized into 17 groups, the series mostly depicts female figures reclining or relaxing in chairs. This example, Woman Resting in an Interior (1941) is characterized by the contrast of charcoal and paper and of flatness and depth, as well as by its fluid, energetic line. Other studies in Themes and Variations use a much cleaner line to render the subject. As a whole, the series demonstrates the artist’s commitment to capturing a drawing’s essence through serial reworking.
Photographed in the Morgan Library in Manhattan.
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Best known for his later work as a sculptor, William Zorach spent two years studying painting in Paris, returning to New York in 1912. He wrote that his depictions of NYC’s most famous park in Spring in Central Park (1914) were “painted at home from the imagination . . . in all wild colors, peopled with exotic nudes,“ but the bold hues in undulating outlines recall the work of the Fauves, notably Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, whose canvases he had seen in Paris. With his wife, Marguerite, an avant-garde painter herself, Zorach associated with many of America’s earliest Modernists in New York in the late 1910s, including Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and John Maren. In 1913 both Zorachs exhibited at the prestigious international exhibition of modern art, known as the Armory Show.
Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.