Matisse and the moderns

The Gallery recently acquired Henri Matisse’s illustrated book Jazz (1947), one of the most famous graphic works of the 20th century.

In Matisse’s first major ‘cut-out’ project, realism and abstraction are finally reconciled at the end of a life-long tension. With the cut-out technique, Matisse felt he had finally solved the problems of form and space, outline and colour. ‘It is not a beginning, it is an endpoint’, the artist stated.

Matisse’s formal experimentation began five decades earlier, when he and his peers rejected their impressionist heritage and discovered the work of three essential ‘forgotten’ artists – Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. Pictorial innovations, including fauvism and cubism, soon followed.

Matisse and Pablo Picasso played the most significant roles in this drive toward modernity, despite their very different trajectories and personalities.

A selection of works by both artists is presented here alongside other key paintings from the Gallery’s collection, offering an opportunity to appreciate the new horizons that they opened up and the reasons for their lasting influence on modern and contemporary art.

This tapestry was woven in the Art Gallery of New South Wales by François Ruh of the French Gobelins factory during an exhibition of contemporary French tapestry in 1956. It was subsequently given to the Gallery by the French Government.

Polynesia is based on a detail of Matisse’s three-metre long tapestry maquette Polynesia, the sea 1946, which was inspired by memories of the artist’s trip to Tahiti in 1930. The thrilling impact of the whirlwind of Polynesian motifs is seen in the arabesque shapes placed on a group of pale and dark blue rectangles. Plants, fish and birds inhabit an ambiguous space where sky and sea coalesce.

Pablo Picasso painted this powerful assemblage of a dislocated and distorted nude in the studio of his new villa at Cannes in the south of France at the age of 75.

Matisse’s recent death may have reminded Picasso of the inescapability of his own mortality when he created this violent image. The painting’s scale, the division of the flat background, the colours, sense of light, decorative chair and the tree through the window, are all reminiscent of Matisse’s great last series of interiors.

This painting by Picasso plays with the tradition of the reclining nude, turning the idealised bodies of art history into something monstrous and profoundly mortal, thus echoing the sombre period in which it was created. The brewing trouble of World War II erupts through the very skin and physique of Picasso’s model, Dora Maar, portrayed here with splayed eyes, cadaverous green skin, artichoke hands and a menacing grin. The picture also pays homage to Matisse, whose paintings of reclining odalisques in interiors often feature windows opening onto palms and foliage.

Paul Cézanne spent much of 1888 in Paris and at this time painted a group of landscapes representing views of the river Marne. Believing colour and form to be inseparable, the painter attempted to emphasise structure and solidity in his work. The monumental impression given by Banks of the Marne depends on the stability of the composition and its architectonic sequence of horizontal bands. It also conveys a great sense of balance and harmony in the distribution of colour.

Georges Braque was much influenced by the posthumous Cézanne retrospective in 1906, taking to heart the artist’s advice to ‘approach nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’. He began to paint landscapes which, when exhibited in Paris in November 1908, elicited the comment from one critic, ‘Mr Braque reduces everything ... to cubes’. Thus was coined the name of the artistic movement that Braque, alongside Picasso, developed in the ensuing years: cubism. The palette of browns, greens and blues is already, at this date, quintessentially cubist.

From the late 1920s, the French cubist painter Fernand Léger sought to relieve his art from the decorative and return to a more formal approach. Using bold, defined shapes and odd juxtapositions of objects, he seems to focus attention on his obsession with contrasts between colours, as well as between natural and manufactured forms, seen as parts or complete. Suspended in ethereal space, Léger’s objects, including this bicycle, are brought together in connections that seem inexplicable and mysterious. Dr HV Evatt, a prominent Australian Labor politician and leading patron of modernist art, acquired this painting from the historic Herald exhibition of French and British contemporary art during its Australian tour in 1939.

With Matisse and André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck was one of the principal artists of the group who, inspired by Van Gogh, began using colour with an unprecedented ferocity. This led to their being dubbed the ‘fauves’ (literally wild beasts).

Another version of the view in Vlaminck's Sailing boats at Chatou, in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, includes a bridge in the background. The differences between the two paintings show that the artist was more concerned with expressing intense emotion through pure colour, than the scene itself.

The red roofs was painted in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I. It reveals Vlaminck’s abandonment of the exuberant colourism of his fauve period and his immersion in the art of Cézanne. A synthesis emerges by which the artist’s naturally fiery temperament is disciplined by a more solid and structured treatment of forms. Vlaminck continued to exploit landscape motifs as a vehicle for statements of intense emotion, his works often taking on a ‘haunted’ atmosphere.

A reclusive man, Giorgio Morandi devoted himself to the contemplation of a collection of familiar, everyday objects that he assembled over many years. He arranged and depicted these items in numerous natura morta (still lifes) with great subtlety and delicacy, thus developing an intimate approach to painting. In the end, Morandi’s silent art is enigmatic and can even be meditative.

Although Morandi cannot clearly be associated with any specific art movement, the art of Cézanne represents his main influence. He borrowed from the French painter the monumental treatment of forms and dense, flat areas of colour. The pale, often greyish surfaces of inanimate objects acquire a shimmering physicality in his works.

Raoul Dufy discovered and was dazzled by the work of Matisse at the Salon des Indépendants of 1905, thereafter adopting the fauves’ use of bold and vibrant colours. From 1907, however, his paintings reveal the new and essential influence of Cézanne. The forms are simplified while the colours are less intense, less contrasted and applied in characteristic faceted
brushstrokes.

In Yellow and red landscape, a dynamic composition is achieved through the landscape’s stylised lines while the houses in the background are indicated in simple geometric shapes. These forms also reveal the influence of Dufy’s contact with Braque with whom he worked for a time in 1908.

In the 1920s, Ben Nicholson’s work began to be influenced by synthetic cubism, prompting an abstract direction in his art. He painted his first abstract work in 1924 and carved his first low relief sculpture a decade later, though representational motifs occur throughout his career. With its dependence on pencil marks and pallid colours, 1946 hardly seems painted at all. The artist organised his surface into clearly defined, overlapping shapes with little regard to depth or dimensional interplay. The illusionism which was once the mainstay of the oil on canvas technique has given way to its opposite – a kind of insubstantiality.

In 1927 Jean Lurçat was already celebrated for his role as a designer in the revival of French contemporary tapestry. However, he also maintained a lifelong commitment to painting. Along with Louis Marcoussis and Dufy, Lurçat was among the generation of cubist artists who suffered through World War I and later developed a colourful and seductive palette proclaiming their attachment to humankind. An indefatigable traveller, the impact of the artist’s trip to Turkey and Greece in the 1920s resulted in a series of monumental portraits of women. The austerity of the Macedonian woman’s facial expression and her frontal attitude are balanced by her traditional costume and its colourful arabesques and shapes.

Henri Hayden arrived in Paris in 1907 and soon made the acquaintance of many School of Paris artists, including Jacques Lipchitz and Juan Gris. His early interest in Cézanne developed in the years up to the early 1920s into a firm commitment to cubism. The guitarist is one of a pair of musician portraits – the other, a clarinettist – that both belonged to Hayden’s dealer Léonce Rosenberg who, with his brother Paul, was one of the major dealers of modern art in Paris. It is a fine example of the second phase of cubism, known as ‘synthetic cubism’. A great amateur musician and friend of composer Erik Satie, Hayden succeeded here in bringing a new elegance to the geometry and typically restrained colour of cubism.