More Matisse, Please!

Surrounding Matisse: Masterworks from The Baltimore Museum of Art, you’ll find four additional exhibitions of outstanding works from our own collection, all of them created or inspired by Matisse.

Chasing Matisse: American Moderns Under the Influence

GALLERY 361

Arthur B. Carles
Seated Woman with Flowers
c. 1922
Lent by Curtis Galleries, L2013.100.1
Reproduced with permission from Curtis Galleries

In the decade prior to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, dozens of American artists made their way to Paris to see, study and make art, eventually bringing the message of modernism home to the United States. It was Henri Matisse (French, 1869-1954) who had the most significant and lasting influence on these young American painters. This exhibition will examine how Matisse’s art influenced American painters to revise their thinking about color and form, challenging the tradition of representational painting in the United States.

Exhibition Page »

More Matisse, Please: Drawings and Prints

GALLERY 369

Henri Matisse
The Concert
1922-1923
black crayon
Bequest of Putnam Dana McMillan 61.36.1
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse the Draftsman

Best known as the greatest colorist in modern painting, Matisse was also a remarkable and celebrated draftsman. In fact, drawing was the only medium he pursued throughout his career. He created thousands of drawings and experimented widely in a variety of drafting techniques.
Matisse drew to discover the essence of a subject. He thought of pure line drawing, so elemental in its simplicity, as the most direct way to communicate his emotions about a motif. Through the simple act of applying pencil to paper, Matisse conveyed a tremendous amount of power and meaning, using the lines to limit form, volume, and space, to decompose or store light, and as an indicator of movement.
Matisse thought drawing was essential to the proper training of a young painter and found, in his own work, that it helped coordinate his mind, eye, and hand. Matisse compared his preparatory drawing work to the “several hours of limbering-up exercises” performed each morning by “a dancer or acrobat.”

Henri Matisse
The Concert
1922-1923
black crayon
Bequest of Putnam Dana McMillan 61.36.1
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse the Draftsman

Henri Matisse
Girl with Fishbowl
1929
drypoint
The Margaret McMillan Webber Estate, by exchange P.78.6.9
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse the Printmaker

Matisse’s endeavors in printmaking give us a glimpse into the artist’s studio, bringing us into direct contact with his working process. After long, difficult painting sessions, Matisse would turn to printmaking to create variations on a theme that currently interested him. Both practical and innovative, these forays into a different medium reflect the evolution of his ideas, from the development of poses to the study of facial expressions and human anatomy to the transformation of a subject from representational to abstracted form.
Matisse availed himself of a wide variety of printmaking techniques, as the prints in this gallery demonstrate, though the technical processes did not really interest him—he often left the inking of plates or the pulling of proofs to family members, especially his daughter, Marguerite. He would also delve deeply into a technique, exploring and pushing that medium’s boundaries and possibilities, only to abandon the technique for years at a time. His efforts in lithography, for instance, can be dated to 1906, 1913, and sporadically through the 1920s. And more than half of his known etchings were made in 1929 alone.
Matisse’s prints reveal the artist’s great creative imagination, working methods, mental commitment, and emotional input in pursuit of his objective. The MIA is fortunate to own several significant prints by Matisse, representative of his shifts in style over the many decades of his long career.

More Matisse, Please: Book Illustration

GALLERY 359

Henri Matisse
Page from Poésies
1932
etching
Gift of Bruce B. Dayton B.81.13.6
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Henri Matisse
The Poems of Charles of Orléans
February 25, 1950
color lithographs, letterpress
Gift of Bruce B. Dayton B.75.3
© Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Matisse the Book Illustrator

Matisse did not begin illustrating fine books until 1930, relatively late in his career. From then on, however, most of his printmaking was devoted to book illustrations. Among his most notable projects were some of the most beautiful modern editions of the writings of distinguished French poets of the Renaissance and the 19th century, including Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465), Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), and Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). The MIA is fortunate to possess all of the artist’s major books.
Matisse’s definition of true book illustration was rigorous, and he oversaw all aspects of layout and design, from the paper stock and typography to the placement of text and imagery to the creation of borders and other design elements. His illustrating wasn’t limited to books, however, as he designed covers and frontispieces for a variety of art journals and exhibition catalogues.
For his principal projects, Matisse approached illustration as the beautifying and enriching of a text with his own images that corresponded in feeling to the author’s. He distinguished his process from the more orthodox, less imaginative method of literal, imitative illustration. After a number of studies and variants on a given image he would closely re-read the text before selecting the variation he believed most closely matched the true tenor of the book.

More Matisse, Please: Paintings and Sculpture

GALLERY 377

Matisse the Sculptor

Sculpture functioned as a complementary study to Matisse’s painting, and frequently coincided with moments of crisis and change in his art. Sculpture offered Matisse a more intimate knowledge of the figure, the added dimension enabling him to experience mass and volume more completely. Matisse’s first active period as a sculptor, from 1900 to 1913, paralleled his early years as an avant-garde painter. The second and last period, from 1923 to 1932, converged with a major reorientation of his painting, centered on the theme of the female figure. The majority of the MIA’s sculptures date from this period.
Matisse most often modeled small, freestanding female nudes in clay, which were subsequently cast in bronze in rare editions of 10. Matisse preferred the small format because he could directly control the essentials of form. For this reason, most of his bronzes appear very solid and quite dense, though in fact they are hollow objects cast in an age-old process called cire perdue, or the lost-wax method.
To make a Matisse bronze, a wax model would be covered with a mixture of clay and plaster to create a final mold. When heated, the wax melted out through a vent, leaving a thin space between the core and the mold where molten bronze would then be poured. The cooled mold would be broken up to reveal the bronze sculpture, and the core material could be scraped out, leaving a hollow sculpture.
In his sculptures, Matisse usually focused on the three-dimensional projection of the figure in space. This projecting of the body and its intertwined limbs became a formal arabesque that determined the character of his sculptures. Matisse also enjoyed manipulating the clay surfaces with his fingers and the knife, a vigorous treatment of the surface that often rivals the weight and mass of the body in visual importance. From certain vantage points, however, abrupt planing with the knife creates a bold sculptural silhouette stressing the interaction between solid form and surrounding void.

Matisse the Painter

In 1904, Henri Matisse established himself as the leader of Fauvism, the first revolutionary art movement of the 20th century. His interest in the expressive power of color freed from realistic representation led him to transform the essential nature of painting. By means of radical simplification, Matisse sought to achieve an art of balance, purity, and serenity. This aim dominated a career that spanned more than half a century and transformed the direction and character of modern art.
Early in his career, Matisse recognized the importance of certain themes that, for him, came to embody his entire body of work. Still lifes, interiors, and the female nude—so fundamental to the art of the Old Masters—became his preferred subjects for painting. He would repeatedly return to these themes, refining and transforming them by stressing the primacy of color, elegance of line, and assurance of design.
His approach to painting shifted as he struggled to push the boundaries of pictorial representation. In his earliest experiments, he explored the potential of color, experimenting with its intensity and resonance. He then began to eliminate the traces of illusionistic description of volume and space that remained in his colorful Fauvist work, emphasizing instead the flatness of the picture plane and the abstract purity of line, decorative pattern, and color, as seen in Boy with Butterfly Net. Shifting once again, he adopted a more formal structure, resulting in the austere, monumental grandeur of a series of pictures stylistically typified by Three Bathers of 1907.
Matisse’s approach to painting significantly altered after World War I. In 1917, he moved to Nice on the Mediterranean coast, and his artworks from this period, while just as bright and luminous in color as ever, are quieter in tone. Enamored of the brilliant sunshine of southern France, he began to harness the power of light in his paintings, demonstrated here in Still Life with Pascal’s Pensées. By the 1930s, Matisse would change course once again, problem-solving challenges in depicting the interrelationships of form and pattern. Matisse’s last paintings of the late 1940s are filled with bold color, abstract forms, and dynamic space—the painterly equivalents of the paper cut-outs that became the hallmark of his late career.