Henri Matisse Exhibition walkthrough - GOLDMARK.TV

Welcome back to the Goldmark Gallery and another exhibition showcasing printmaking mastery this time featuring the French master Henri Matisse an artist who witnessed some of the most transformative moments in modern art extraordinary developments in art throughout the 20th century He lived through its final years from Impressionism right through to the 1950s witnessed both world wars and produced enduring wor at would itself change the way we thought about and viewed art Printmaking was hugely crucial to Matisse Over a span of more than 50 years he created around 800 prints in various techniques various mediums from this remarkable free line in this linocut here to etchings engravings woodcuts lithographs and the extraordinary reproductions of his magnificent final paper cutouts For him printmaking was a deeply personal process—intimate and introspective a way to explore and develop ideas that emerged from sketching Often his prints feature a very free and loose line they served as a kind of release from the other work he was doing his career In this exhibition we're going to see some of that—extraordinary simplicity the incredible spontaneity he brought to the world of print and we're going to see how Matisse developed a visual language unmatched in the first half of 20th century I hope you enjoy For European artists like Matisse in the early 20th century printmaking was a way of bringing their art to a broader public of creating works that were more democratic enabling more people to own and enjoy them personally and that's partly why we can now enjoy Matisse's works even monumental paintings murals the final cutouts from his last years are confined to museum walls It was also for him a way of escaping the bulk of that larger work a kind of refuge the smaller scale of printmaking and that's precisely what this little etching was all about This is a study plate an etching that was not originally published created as part of a series of illustrations Matisse made to accompany poems by Stéphane Marmé This was a suite titled Poésie published in 1932 by Albert Skira a publisher with whom Matisse collaborated several times throughout his life At the time Matisse was handling a challenging commission he was working on a large mural was struggling with miscalculations regarding the wall's size meant he'd had to wor He was very much on track and in the three years prior he had gone through a difficult period in his life He realized much of his fame had been overtaken by Picasso and the Surrealists in Paris He found at nothing was truly inspiring him He had traveled to the South Seas to Tahiti undertaken tours throughout the region and had embraced the exotic lifestyle yet left without any genuine inspiration spiration in his work So this was an opportunity for him to withdraw to develop some ideas and to transfer onto his etching plates some of the thoughts he was pondering This is I think a truly beautiful print actually issued by the Matisse Foundation in 1987 so over 50 years half a century after it was made It was one of a number of study plates tha e Foundation released it and it truly demonstrates that Matisse's style was almost exactly e opposite of Maillarmé's poetry Maillarmé's work was fragmentary obscure and often deliberately convoluted 's virtually impossible to translate into English Compare that with the beautiful clear lucid line of this print these wonderful languid odalisques that show Matisse's love of the female form the curves the contours It's in a plate like this rare among Matisse's printed works you can see him actually exploring the ideas that would later come to life the very concepts that would ultimately culminate in the final portfolio That's why we see a number of these distinct iterations Images nearly overlapping—Matisse finding his line finding his hand seeing where his eye and hand were leading him It's a wonderful counterpoint to the poems in the The portfolio has this wonderful clarity this lovely ethereal quality that complemented the poems while also contrasting with their challenging language were deeply intertwined revealing the essence of what printmaking meant to Matisse went hand in hand and he compared poetry to oxygen and printmaking to sketching wo tonics for the soul From the 1940s onward in the later years of his life his style of the 70s and 80s he created several suites that explored poetry llustrations for poetry and that's exactly what you see in these portraits here You can see it again ough these are lithographs and not etchings there is once again that wonderful clear line —a very simple fluid flowing line that he has captured in these portraits These were made 1945 and they were illustrations once more to accompany the work of another poet a contemporary poet this time Jean-Antoine Nau Nau's poems were inspired by the landscapes of the islands in the The Caribbean and this kind of exotic charm were things Matisse was deeply conscious of He had personally traveled to Morocco and held a special affection for its heat and vid energy color of the old French colonies He enlisted the help of a number of Polynesian models for this series and the idea was to truly capture the sensuous quality of their facial features o in these very simple portraits capture that sense of freedom and relaxation a kind of leisure luxury and that wonderful exhilarating quality of the place described e poems I think they're truly beautiful prints—they possess I believe a wonderful sensuous quality a kind of lust for life and you would think they were made by a young man at the height of his vitality virility but in fact Matisse produced these lithographs at a time when he was perhaps at his most vulnerable Most frail his sickest his most disabled It was an extremely dark period in his life Matisse endured poor health throughout his life and the abdominal pain he had frequently experienced in his later years reached a crisis point in the late 1930s e years before the war and by December 1940 it had flared up so severely that he found himself a hospital in Nice practically on his deathbed with his assistant by his side His troubles had been wrongly attributed to his heart but he discovered in hospital that he had estinal cancer He didn't trust the surgeons in Nice so he called his daughter to his bedside They conspired to relocate him to Lyon—a 12-hour train ride during the dead of winter rough occupied French territory during the Second World War to get him to Lyon Matisse arrived at the hospital practically unable to move from the pain and underwent very intensive treatment bouts of surgery Although the surgery was successful the aftermath was not His surgical wounds soo became infected and he suffered from two blood clots in his lungs in the weeks that followed It was an intensely e was going through a tough time with his family and he thought this might be the end By March owever somehow miraculously he had pulled through The nuns who were on the ward in the e hospital that helped look after him referred to him as le resuscité the man who had come back from the dead e dead He was now living on borrowed time and boy did he know it In the weeks immediately after s surgery Matisse spent much of that time in a sort of feverish delirium He seemed to amidst periods of clarity and near-incoherent rambling one thing emerged from this profoundly difficult time: the realization of his mortality and the stark awareness of how little time he had left of him was that printmaking was one of the things he wanted to pursue as part of an extensio o the simple drawn line returning to the essence of his drawing He spent the months of 1941 confined devoting nearly all of his time to his bed or his chair In fact there are some wonderful photographs of him sitting up in bed sketching on the walls of his studio in the south of France with a a giant bamboo pole with charcoal at the tip used to reach the height of his walls During that time immediately after his surgery as a form of revitalization a way of regaining strength o the world of art he turned to a print series he had envisioned—a suite of lithographs called the Fleuret L'Èrge des Amours illustrating the love poems of Ronsard Love poetry was one of the things he turned to repeatedly in the years that followed e war a way of returning to something vibrant and full of life beauty and vitality This is one of his lithographs and the images in this suite e could truly draw upon all the imagery Matisse had accumulated throughout his life themes he knew so well that he could almost sketch them directly onto the block without conscious thought Bouquets of flowers female nudes faces portraits of friends and the many models he'd worked with among his family members It was a kind of love letter to the simple drawn line to the a certain lyrical quality of poetry that he could capture in the way he applied his pen or in this case his lithographic crayon to the block As the Nazi occupation of France continued Matisse soon decided to leave Nice and rema permanently in his studio in Vence just south of France There he was in the aptly named Villa Le Rêve his dream home and it was here that he would not only return to printmaking general he shifted from painting to sketching as he found it increasingly difficult to paint yet also toward what would become perhaps the most significant aspect of his later career e papier découpé or the cutouts Matisse had actually first explored the idea of the cutou long before the Second World War He had first developed it as a way of working out mural designs Using large sheets of paper cut to the exact dimensions of the spaces he was working with he could easily visualize the composition quickly shift his designs in place He could modify them adjust their alignment It was incredibly fast and an economical way to see what would work and what wouldn't From that idea however he returned to it more and more in the late 1930s and found in it a genre that nearly didn't exis exist This was not the cubist collage he was accustomed to from the early 20th century This was something entirely its own—a sculptural approach to drawing a method of crafting art that transcended traditional boundaries stood proud of the page a way of creating form color line—all at once—and in which he could worked extremely quickly with the help of his assistants at a time when his hands were arthritic when he was aching when he was bedridden and often in pain In these papier-de-coupé works Matisse was drawing from a variety of interests that captivated him so you'll see right here the blue nudes—these are not merely some of Matisse's most renowned works bu some of the most recognizable iconic works of art created in the last 100 years You can see how concern for the female form for that kind of sensuality for the curves of the female body figure the female form as a symbol of vitality and love of life—things he'd explored in other prints came to play in these cutouts In the original he would move his pieces made to feel uneasy by its intensity as if the colors were alive and watching him recommended by his doctors to wear thick heavy black glasses to lessen the intensity of light He had failing eyesight in these years too adding to his worries And he could move about these individual pieces of paper with pins and reconfigure them until he found a form tha captured exactly what he was looking for: a remarkably simple yet highly dynamic and extremely effective approac Dance is a constant throughout Matisse's career his life and his work And you can see that happening recurring in some of these blue nude forms the kind of contortions of the body the structure you can achieve through limbs positioned in various ways these kinds of idyllic Adam and Eve-style figures As he refined the cutout They grew larger and larger eventually covering the walls of his studio in Vence Unable to go out and visit and travel and explore as he had done earlier his career he decided no I'm going to bring the outside world into my studio I'm going to Transform the villa in Vence into a kind of paradise—this fantastic earthly garden of delights he brought into his own home instructing his assistants to pin up these various cutouts shapes around his house so they spread across the walls and transform the space into this sort of vibrant living environment of color and life This is one of my favorite cutouts and fact the original is enormous Again as we said earlier in printmaking Matisse found a way of aking some of those monumental works and making them more accessible to people So this is one budgie and the siren And you can see in these recurring floral patterns almost like seaweed or coral motifs these fruit shapes some of the designs that would recur again and again in these later cutouts And this blue arching dancing figure which we've seen here before Matisse had fully reembraced the cutout technique with intense passion during the years of the Second World War and when the conflict ended it was time to embrace this new way of working this new medium o the wider world He began with a suite called Jazz a portfolio of reproductions of his cutout designs that brought a sense of joy splendor and color to France in 1947 recovering in the years after the Second World War There were all the classic themes of Matisse's life and the things he enjoyed scenes of the circus there were acrobats and a sword performer a swallower a juggler trapeze artists even a white elephant balancing on its ball But amidst it all ese kinds of exuberant images these vibrant designs reveling in pure color There was also a recurring motif one that appears several times in Matisse's cutouts and that's the image of Icarus There are a number of different ways to interpret why Matisse mig ave turned to this image On one hand he was now fully aware of his own mortality aware at in the final years of his life which almost revitalized him with creative passio at he was living on borrowed time that he did not have long to live and that he now had to ge pouring as much of that creative vision into it as he possibly could like Icarus flying close to the su owing that the descent was near There's also a kind of connection to the Second World War here Matisse was sometimes criticized unlike his friend and rival Picasso for not getting involved with politics for avoiding the realm of death sorrow and conflict in the way that Picasso so clearly embraced One of the things that was especially highlighted The criticism against him when he revealed these cutout works was that they were childish frivolous and lacked the seriousness a great artist should truly possess I think some of these Icarus images might reference the Second World War It's been noted before that this image of Icarus almost resembles a corpse lying on the floor with the stars appearing almost like flashes of gunfire grenades and shells But there's something else happening here that I think you can see This red motif here— remember that Matisse in the weeks after his surgery suffered from blood clots in his lungs— e had that sensation of his body shutting down of the kind of pa his chest There is a kind of self-portrait in the jazz suite and the cutout images from this me a kind of mirror to both the passions he was feeling and the renewed energy tha e possessed the mind of a young man eager to create and to discover a new pa of seeing things trapped within a body ravaged by cancer and now ailing confined to bed recovering unable to move around during the final years of his life From the limitations of his own health and the frailty of his body Matisse discovered a certain kind of liberation in this new way of working—working at incredible speed with genuine efficiency This final chapter of Matisse's career was truly about simplicity about reaching the essence of things e essence of things of finding the most direct way to express what he wanted to convey in his wor and the cutout was perfect for that As these cutouts began to grow in size taking over his studio Matisse realized he could use this new approach to aid some of his own artistic challenges commissions He helped design a chapel in Vence run by the nuns who had aided him during his recovery after his surgery The vidness of the gouache on this paper which seemed to light up the space with its color made it ideal for designing stained glass windows for example We have a a couple of those here He was cutting the paper slicing directly from color in much the same way tha you'd have to make stained glass by cutting the glass directly In fact this gets to the hear of why Matisse enjoyed the cutout so much in the first place He used to describe it as drawing color Imagine you have a piece of paper or a canvas You can draw a outline You can color it that outline using a form or a brush you can build up a shape from a specific color work your brushstrokes until the form appears before you With these gouache sheets and a a pair of heavy tailor's shears Matisse could draw a line and create a form in a single motion It was at simplicity that essence of reduction to fundamental elements which made the cutouts so vital to Matisse These lithographic reproductions of the final cutouts are from a suite called the Last Works This was created in 1954 Trial prints of the reproductions began in 1953 and Matisse supervised them and made several corrections But the final portfolio was published posthumously at the age of 84 It features some of his most iconic works from his career We've got down here in the corner The Snail now owned by the Tate one of the jewels its modern art collection crown And it's in an image like this that you can see that kind of childlike simplicity that he and his friend and rival Picasso sought for which he was largely mocked at the time but which people have now come to embrace It's also in the cutouts tha you can see all of the influences from Matisse's career really coming to their culmination You ca See the inspiration he drew from his travels to Morocco—the vibrant colors of the place the abstract patterns on the ceramic tiles You can sense the influence of illuminated folios from the medieval period period You can see the influence of the Persian rugs he used to collect and the African sculpture that he had in his home Even his own family history his family descended from a line of weavers so finding his hands on a pair of scissors again cutting working with the direc e way his ancestors would have must have given him great pleasure At first glance some of the lithographic prints Matisse created in his final years though they might seem utterly different from these cutouts were in fact arriving at the same essence essential basics We have some sketches here from a suite called Cinquant d'Essa This was produced again immediately after his surgery eventually published in 1943 around the same time that he was then taking up the cutout again In this suite Matisse was given a commission to produce a number of drawings and to explore certain themes certain portrait styles the kind of modelled images he had been working from in these later years flower arrangements still lifes—the essence of Matisse Though they might appear radically different in style this was essentially the same subject matter in a cutout like this the Danseuse Creole This is an image created after Catherine Dunham a highly renowned African-American dancer who nearly established her own new dance style a new school of dance where young Black female and male dancers could really take centre stage in a way that they hadn't before This I think is a fantastic image embodies Matisse's passion for color a passion that stretches all the way back to his early days roots as a fauve as a wild beast as they were known for their use of color in the early 20th century It's a stunning image that takes the central dancer and explodes her into motion capturing all that dynamic energy and the wonderfully exotic essence of the moment movement It's almost like a firecracker bursting or a flower unfolding in full bloom richness and vitality Though it appears far more colorful and dynamic than some of these drawings the essence of the line remains the same—it was rooted in a kind of simplicity audacity almost to get at the very most fundamental qualities of what Matisse was striving for Sketching and striving to capture that idea that image as simply and as deeply as he could At the end of this exhibition I have some of Matisse's most iconic cutouts including the swimming pool frieze he created in the final chapter of his life The story goes that Matisse was visiting a luxurious swimming resort with his assistant and the oppressive heat combined with his inability to move without intense pain meant tha After a few hours he said I need to go home—I'm going to build my own swimming pool from the e comfort of my studio in Vence And that's exactly what he did With the help of his assistants set up large burlap panels—this dark tan-brown color here represents tha with a white strip of paper across it to which he would cut out blue gouache paper figures e images of figures diving into the water of coral of sea creatures like this starfish here a wonderfully evocative blend of heat and coolness in the water at the same time I have here the first of two panels as well as this head section that would have been positioned above e doors in the room where they had been installed in his home This pair of panels and this e frieze that went above are all part of the collection in MoMA in New York and in fac In 2014 as part of a major exhibition of Matisse's cutouts they underwent conservation And among the many things the curators noticed as they worked on this piece were the pinholes in the blue sheets of paper revealing how meticulously they had been moved to ensure the The composition was exactly as Matisse intended You can see in this print that some of these larger pieces have center folds which was partly done to allow the prints to fit within the portfolio in which they were originally published But in reality in a print like this it actually mirrors the original itself The large burlap panels feature these dividing connection points so there's quite a lovely echo between the printed work and the original I think though in these swimming pool panels there's a rather beautiful kind of melancholy almost You can see at in Matisse who could no longer enjoy the kind of wonderful splendours the delicacies of youth of young life splashing in the water as he once might have done You can see a a certain yearning for that world and a desire to bring all that wonderful exotic richness and warmth into his own living space It's rather touching I think that he decided to produce these works as lithographs so people can bring them into their own homes introducing the world of the cutout into their living spaces in much the same way tha Matisse had done himself The other major discovery of the conservation efforts for the original swimming pool panels was that the choice of materials had meant that they had deteriorated quite severely deteriorated over time The gouache has begun to fade Burlap now recognized for its acidity as damaged the paper it was attached to and they've gone to great lengths to restore the piece to some of its former glory That's something else that speaks to e significance of these lithographic reproductions of the cutouts It was here that Matisse supervised the color corrections on these plates working side by side collaboration with Moulin Frères the magnificent printers with whom Matisse worked throughout his life that the color remains true to its original It's in cutout prints like these around us tha We've seen today in this exhibition that you can truly experience the intense colors of Matisse's originals exactly as he intended This great outpouring of printed work in the final years of Matisse's life emerged simultaneously from exhaustion and fragility yet also from an immense vitality and a creativity that he had carried with him throughout his entire career It also echoes how Matisse began his life as an artist It was as a young boy confined to his bed by illness that his mother firs brought him the art supplies that sparked his love for the world for the visual image o the world of art and creation which would guide him for the rest of his life It was a poetic conclusion to his life when he passed away in 1954 at the age of 84 having witnessed some one of the most extraordinary developments in art over the past 50 years of the 20th century at Matisse's career came to a close During that time he had made his own contributions to at development He had cemented his celebrity and he had solidified his reputation as one of the greats of 20th century art For now I will leave you with the colors of spring emerging in the wonderful vitality and creativity of Amiri Matisse