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In 1896 Matisse exhibited four paintings at the backward-looking Salon de la Société Nationale desBeaux-Arts and scored a triumph; he was elected an associate member of the Salon society, and his Woman Reading (1894) was purchased by the government. From this point onward he became increasingly confident and venturesome, both as an artist and as a man. During the next two years he undertook expeditions to Brittany, met the veteran Impressionist Camille Pissarro, and discovered the series of Impressionist masterpieces in the Gustave Caillebotte Collection, which had just been donated—amid protests from conservatives—to the French nation. His colours became, for a while, lighter in hue and at the same time more intense. In 1897 he took his first major step toward stylistic liberation and created a minor scandal at the Salon with The Dinner Table (La Desserte), in which he combined a Renoir kind of luminosity with a firmly classical composition in deep red and green.

In 1898 he married a young woman from Toulouse, Amélie Parayre, and left Paris for a year, visiting London, where he studied the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, and working in Corsica, where he received a lasting impression of Mediterranean sunlight and colour.

Revolutionary years

During 1898, Paul Signac, the theoretician and actively proselyting leader (after the death of Georges Seurat) of the Neo-Impressionists, or Pointillists, published in the literary review La Revue Blanche his principal manifesto, “D'Eugène Delacroix au Néo-Impressionnisme.” Matisse, back in Paris in 1899, read the articles and, without turning into an immediate convert, became interested in the Pointillist idea of obtaining additive mixtures of colour on the retina by means of juxtaposed dots (points in French) on the canvas. He furthered his research into new techniques by buying, from the well-known modernist dealer Ambroise Vollard, a painting by Cézanne, The Three Bathers; one by Gauguin, Boy's Head; and a drawing by van Gogh. Often accompanied by his close friend Albert Marquet, who was also interested in the problem of pure colour, he began to paint outdoor scenes in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in suburban Arcueil, and from the open window of his apartment overlooking the Seine.

He also purchased from Vollard the plaster model of the bust of Henri Rochefort by Auguste Rodin,and during 1899 he began to attend an evening class in sculpture. His early work in three dimensions, the first of some 60 pieces he executed during his lifetime, reveals the influence not only of Rodin but also of Antoine-Louis Barye, generally considered the greatest French sculptor of animals.

After 1899 he ceased to exhibit at the Salon and gradually became a familiar figure in the Parisian circles where modern art was being produced and ardently discussed. In 1901 he showed for the first time in the juryless, eclectic Salon des Indépendants, which had been founded in 1884 as a refuge for painters unacceptable to the official exhibition juries. In 1902 he was in a group show at the small gallery of Berthe Weill, and the next year he and a number of his old classmates from Moreau's atelier and the Académie Carrière were the progressive contingent in the liberal, newly created Salon d'Automne. But in spite of such recognition, he was often on the brink of financial disaster. In 1900 he was obliged to accept work on the decoration of the Grand Palais, which was being erected to house part of the new Exposition Universelle in the Champs-Élysées quarter. His wife opened a dress shop in the hope of helping to make ends meet. In 1901 an attack of bronchitis forced him to take a long rest. During part of 1902 he had to return to Bohain with his three children—Marguerite, Jean, and Pierre—and Mme Matisse. He was past 34 when, in June 1904, at Vollard's gallery, he had his first one-man show, and it was a failure.

He spent the summer of 1905 with André Derain at Collioure, a small French fishing port on the Mediterranean, near the Spanish border. In the dazzling sunshine he rapidly freed himself from what he called “the tyranny” of Pointillism. The carefully placed little dabs required by the additive-mixture approach turned into swirls and slabs of spontaneous brushwork, and the theoretically realistic colours exploded into an emotional display of complementaries: red against green, orange against blue, and yellow against violet. Representative of this new freedom were Open Window, which was finished at Collioure, and Woman with the Hat, a portrait of his wife painted back in Paris in September. That fall, the two pictures were exhibited at the Salon d'Automne alongside works by a number of artists who also had been experimenting with violent colour. The Paris critic Louis Vauxcelles called the group les fauves (“the wild beasts”), and thus Fauvism, the first of the important “isms” in 20th-century painting, was born. Almost immediately Matisse became its acknowledged leader.

Almost immediately, too, his financial situation altered for the better. The Stein family in Paris—Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and the latter's wife, Sarah—became Matisse collectors. In 1906 the artist had a show at the Galerie Druet in Paris in addition to exhibiting againat the Salons des Indépendants and d'Automne. In 1907 a group of admirers, who included Sarah Stein and Hans Purrmann, organized for him a Left Bank art school, in which he taught off and on until 1911. In 1908 he exhibited in New York City, Moscow, and Berlin.

Fauvism was too undisciplined to last long, and soon its adherents were moving, according to their temperaments, toward Expressionism, Cubism, or some kind of neo-traditionalism. Matisse had no liking for these directions, and if “Fauve” is taken to mean simply a painter with a passion for pure colour, he can be said to have remained one all his life. He had, however, too much rationalism in his outlook not to wish for some order in a stylistic situation that threatened to become chaotic, and his search for chromatic equilibrium and linear economy can be followed in a series of major works produced between the revelation of Fauvism in 1905 and the end of World War I. In 1906 he painted Joy of Life; in 1908, The Dessert, a Harmony in Red; in 1911, The Red Studio; in 1915, Goldfish; in 1916, Piano Lesson; and in 1918, Montalban, LargeLandscape.

In such works, the list of which should be much longer, the main characteristics of Matisse's mature painting style recur constantly. The forms tend to be outlined in flowing, heavy contours and to have few interior details; the colour is laid on in large, thin, luminous, carefully calculated patches; shadows are practically eliminated; and the depicted space is either extremely shallow or warped into a flatness that parallels the plane of the canvas and defies academic rules for perspective and foreshortening. The total effect, although too intense and freehand to be merely decorative, may recall the patterns of the rugs, textiles, and ceramics of the Islāmic world. The choice and treatment of subject matter imply optimism, hedonism, intelligence, a fastidious sensuality, and, in spite of the many studies of both clothed and unclothed women, scarcely a trace of conventional sentiment.

Riviera years

In 1912 Matisse's sculpture was on view in New York City and his painting in both Cologne and London. In 1913 he was represented by 13 pictures in the much-discussed, much-lambasted New York Armory Show, and when the exhibition arrived in Chicago he was given some useful publicity by the burning, happily merely in effigy, of his Blue Nude. But middle age, growing affluence, an established international reputation, the disruptions of World War I, and a distaste for public commotion gradually combined to isolate him from the centres of avant-gardism. He began to winter on the FrenchRiviera, and by the early 1920s he was mostly a resident of Nice or itsenvirons. His pictures became less daring in conception and less economical in means. Like many of the painters and composers during these years (notably Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky), Matisse relaxed into a modernized sort of classicism and into a ratherevident attempt to please an art public that was a bit tired of attempts to shock it. Such typically Nice-period works as the Odalisque with Magnolias and Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Background, however, are masterpieces that deserve their popularity.

Prosperity did not make him less industrious. In 1920 he did the sets and costumes for Sergey Diaghilev's production of Le Chant du Rossignol . He returned to sculpture, which he had neglected for several years, and by 1930 he had completed his fourth and most nearly abstract version of The Back, a monumental female nude in relief, on which he had been working at intervals since 1909. He relaxed, as he had always done, by traveling: to Étretat, on the coast of Normandy, in 1921; to Italy in 1925, and to Tahiti, by way of New York City and San Francisco, in 1930. During 1933 he visited Venice and Padua (Italy), and in Merion, Pennsylvania, completed and installed the final version of his large mural, The Dance II (Barnes Foundation).

Matisse had been interested in etching, drypoint, lithography, and allied printmaking techniques since his first years in Paris and had produced a number of occasional prints. In 1932 he had published, as illustrations for an edition of Stéphane Mallarmé's Poésies, 29 etchings, in which his talent for supple contours and linear economy was subtly attuned to the “purity of means” evident in the poems. After the outbreak of World War II, he became increasingly active as a graphic artist, notably with his illustrations for Henry de Montherlant's Pasiphaé (published in 1944), Pierre Reverdy's Visages (1946), the Lettres portugaises (1946), Charles Baudelaire's Fleursdu mal (1947), Pierre de Ronsard's Florilège des Amours (1948), and Charles d'Orléans' Poèmes (1950). Along with these books in mostly black and white techniques, he published Jazz (1947), a book consisting of his own reflections on art and life, with brilliantly coloured illustrations made by a technique he called “drawing with scissors”: the motifs were pasted together after being cut outof sheets of coloured paper (hand-painted with gouache in order to get the desired hue).

During the last years of his life, he was a rather solitary man who was separated from his wife and whose grownup children were scattered. After 1941, when he underwent an operation for an intestinal disorder, he was bedridden much of the time; after 1950 he suffered from asthma and heart trouble. Cared for by a faithful Russian woman who had been one of his models in the early 1930s, he lived in a large studio in the Old Hôtel Regina at Cimiez, overlooking Nice. Often he was obliged to work on his mural-sized projects from a studio bed with the aid of a crayon attached to a long pole. But there are no signs of flagging creative energy or of sadness in his final achievements; on the contrary, these works are among the most daring, most accomplished, and most serenely optimistic of his entire career.

At Vence, a Riviera hill town where Matisse had a villa from 1943 to 1948, he completed in 1951, after three years of planning and execution, his Chapelle du Rosaire for the local Dominican nuns, one of whom had nursed him during his nearly fatal illness in 1941. He had begun by agreeing to design some stained-glass windows, had gone on to do murals, and had wound up by designing nearly everything inside and outside, including vestments and liturgical objects. Before the chapelwas finished, he was at work on the huge coloured-paper cutouts—amplifications of what he had done in the illustrations for Jazz—that made him in many respects the “youngest” and most revolutionary artist of the early 1950s. He died in 1954.

Roy Donald McMullen

CUBISM

highly influential visual arts style of the 20th century that was created principally by the artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The Cubist style emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane, rejecting the traditional techniques of perspective, foreshortening, modeling, and chiaroscuro, and refuting time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature. Cubist painters were not bound to copying form, texture, colour, and space; instead, they presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects.

Cubism derived its name from remarks that were made by the criticLouis Vauxcelles, who derisively described Braque's 1908 work Houses at L'Estaque as being composed of cubes. In Braque's painting, the volumes of the houses, the cylindrical forms of the trees, and the tan-and-green colour scheme are reminiscent of Paul Cézanne's landscapes, which deeply inspired the Cubists in their firststage of development (until 1909). It was, however, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon , painted by Picasso in 1907, that presaged the new style; in this work, the forms of five female nudes become fractured, angular shapes. As in Cézanne's art, perspective is rendered through colour, with the warm reddish-browns advancing and the cool blues receding.

The movement's development from 1910 to 1912 is often referred to as Analytical Cubism. During this period, the work of Picasso and Braque becameso similar that their paintings are almost indistinguishable. Analytical Cubist paintings by both artists show the breaking down, or analysis, of form. Picasso and Braque favoured right-angle and straight-line construction, though occasionally some areas of their paintings appear sculptural, as in Picasso's Girlwith a Mandolin (1910). They simplified their colour schemes to a nearly monochromatic scale (hues of tan, brown, gray, cream, green, or blue were preferred) in order not to distract the viewer from the artist's primary interest—the structure of form itself. The monochromatic colour scheme was suited to the presentation of complex, multiple views of the object, which was reduced to overlapping opaque and transparent planes. These planes appear to move beyond the surface of the canvas rather than to recede in depth. Forms are generally compact and dense in the centre of an Analytical Cubist painting, growing larger as they diffuse toward the edges of the canvas, as in Picasso's Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (1909–10). In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters; their favourite motifswere musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, and the human face and figure.

Interest in this subject matter continued after 1912, during the phase generally identified as Synthetic Cubism. Works of this phase emphasize the combination, or synthesis, of forms in the picture. Colour assumes a strong rolein these works; shapes, while remaining fragmented and flat, are larger and more decorative. Smooth and rough surfaces may be contrasted with one another, and frequently foreign materials, such as newspapers or tobacco wrappers, are pasted on the canvas in combination with painted areas. This technique, known as collage, further emphasizes the differences in texture and, at the same time, poses the question of what is reality and what is illusion.

While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on 20th-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz. The adoption of the Cubist aesthetic by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier is reflected in the shapes of the houses he designed during the 1920s.

PABLO PICASSO

born October 25, 1881, Málaga, Spain

died April 8, 1973, Mougins, France

in full Pablo Ruiz y Picasso. Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator (with Georges Braque) of Cubism.

The enormous body of Picasso's work remains, and the legend lives on—a tribute to the vitality of the “disquieting” Spaniard with the “sombre . . . piercing” eyes who superstitiously believed that work would keep him alive. For nearly 80 of his 91 years Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly to and paralleled the whole development of modern art in the 20th century.

Early years

Pablo Picasso was the son of José Ruiz Blasco, a professor of drawing, and Maria Picasso López. His unusual adeptness for drawing began to manifest itself early, around the age of 10, when he became his father's pupil in La Coruña, where the family moved in 1891. From that point his ability to experiment with what he learned and to develop new expressive means quickly allowed him to surpass his father's abilities. In La Coruña his father shifted his own ambitions to those of his son, providing him with models and support for his first exhibition there at the age of 13.

The family moved to Barcelona in the autumn of 1895, and Pablo entered the local art academy (La Llotja), where his father had assumed his last post as professor of drawing. The family hoped that their son would achieve success as an academic painter, and in 1897 his eventual fame in Spain seemed assured; in that year his painting Science and Charity, for which his father modeled for the doctor, was awarded an honorable mention in Madrid at the Fine Arts Exhibition.

The Spanish capital was the obvious next stop for the young artist intent on gaining recognition and fulfilling family expectations. Pablo Ruiz duly set off for Madrid in the autumn of 1897 and entered the Royal Academy of San Fernando. But finding the teaching there stupid, he increasingly spent his time recording life around him, in the cafés, on the streets, in the brothels, and in the Prado, where he discovered Spanish painting. He wrote: “The Museum of paintings is beautiful. Velázquez first class; from El Greco some magnificent heads, Murillo does not convince me in every one of his pictures.” Works by these and other artists would capture Picasso's imagination at different times during his long career. Goya, for instance, was an artist whose worksPicasso copied in the Prado in 1898 (a portrait of the bullfighter Pepe Illo and the drawing for one of the Caprichos, Bien tirada está, which shows a Celestina [procuress] checking a young maja's stockings). These same characters reappear in his late work—Pepe Illo in a series of engravings (1957) and Celestina as a kind of voyeuristic self-portrait, especially in the series of etchings and engravings known as Suite 347 (1968).

Picasso fell ill in the spring of 1898 and spent most of the remaining year convalescing in the Catalan village of Horta de Ebro in the company of his Barcelona friend Manuel Pallarès. When Picasso returned to Barcelona in early 1899, he was a changed man: he had put on weight, he had learned to live on his own in the open countryside, he spoke Catalan, and most importantly he hadmade the decision to break with his art school training and to reject his family's plans for his future.He even began to show a decided preference for his mother's surname, and more often than not he signed his works P.R. Picasso (by late 1901 he had dropped the Ruiz altogether).

In Barcelona Picasso moved among a circle of Catalan artists and writers whose eyes were turned toward Paris. These were his friends at the café Els Quatre Gats (“The Four Cats,” styled after the Chat Noir [“Black Cat”] in Paris), where Picasso had his first Barcelona exhibition in February 1900, and they were the subjects of more than 50 portraits (in mixed media) in the show. In addition, there was a dark, moody “modernista” painting, Last Moments (later painted over), showing the visit of a priest to the bedside of a dying woman, a work that was accepted for the Spanish section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in that year. Eager to see his own work in place and to experience Paris firsthand, Picasso set off in the company of his studio-mate Carles Casagemas (Portrait of Carles Casagemas, 1899) to conquer, if not Paris, at least a corner of Montmartre.

Discovery of Paris

One of Picasso's principal artistic discoveries on that trip (October–December) was colour—not the drab colours of the Spanish palette, the black of the shawls of Spanish women, or the ochres and browns of the Spanish landscape, but brilliant colour—the colour of Van Gogh, of new fashion, of a city celebrating a world's fair. Using charcoal, pastels, watercolours, and oils, Picasso recorded life in the French capital (Lovers in the Street, 1900). In Moulin de la Galette (1900) he paid tribute to French artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen as well as his Catalan compatriot Ramon Casas.

After just two months Picasso returned to Spain with Casagemas, who had become despondent about a failed love affair. Having tried unsuccessfully to amuse his friend in Málaga, Picasso took off for Madrid, where he worked as an art editor for a new journal, Arte Joven. Casagemas returned to Paris and attempted to shoot the woman he loved, then turned the gun on himself and died. The impact on Picasso was deep: it was not just that he had lost his loyal friend and perhaps felt a sense of guilt for having abandoned him; more importantly, he had gained the emotional experience and the material that would stimulate the powerful expressiveness of the works of the so-called Blue Period. Picasso made two death portraits of Casagemas several months later in 1901 as well as two funeral scenes (Mourners and Evocation), and in 1903 Casagemas appeared as the artist in the enigmatic painting La Vie.

Blue Period

Between 1901 and mid-1904, when blue was the predominant colour in his paintings, Picasso moved back and forth between Barcelona and Paris, taking material for his work from one place to the other. For example, his visits to the Women's Prison of Saint-Lazare in Paris in 1901–02, which provided him with free models and compelling subject matter (The Soup, 1902), were reflected in his depictions of Barcelona street people—blind or lonely beggars and castaways in 1902–03 (Crouching Woman, 1902; Blind Man's Meal, 1903; Old Jew and a Boy,1903). The subject of maternity (women were allowed to keep nursing children with them at the prison) also preoccupied Picasso at a time when he was searching for material that would best express traditional art-historical subjects in 20th-century terms.

The move to Paris

Picasso finally made the decision to move permanently to Paris in thespring of 1904, and his work reflects a change of spirit and especiallya change of intellectual and artistic currents. The traveling circus and saltimbanques became a subject he shared with a new and important friend, Guillaume Apollinaire. To both the poet and the painter these rootless wandering performers (Girl Balancing on a Ball, 1905; The Actor, 1905) became a kind of evocation of the artist's position in modern society. Picasso specifically made this identification in Family of Saltimbanques (1905), where he assumes the role of Harlequin and Apollinaire is the strongman (according to their mutual friend, the writer André Salmon).

Picasso's personal circumstances also changed at the end of 1904, when Fernande Olivier became his mistress. Her presence inspired many works during the years leading up to Cubism, especially on their trip to Gosol in 1906 (Woman with Loaves), including the sculpture Head of a Woman (1909) and several paintings related to it (Woman with Pears, 1909).

Colour never came easily to Picasso, and he reverted to a generally more Spanish (i.e., monochromatic) palette. The tones of the Blue Period were replaced from late 1904 to 1906 in the so-called Rose Period by those of pottery, of flesh, and of the earth itself (The Harem, 1906). Picassoseems to have been working with colour in an attempt to come closer to sculptural form, especiallyin 1906 (Two Nudes; La Toilette). His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (1906) and a Self-Portrait with Palette (1906) show this development as well as the influence of his discovery of primitive Iberian sculpture.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Toward the end of 1906 Picasso began work on a large composition that came to be called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). His violent treatment of the female body and masklike painting of the faces (influenced by a study of African art) have made this work controversial. Yet the work was firmly based upon art-historical tradition: a renewed interest in El Greco contributed to the fracturing of the space and the gestures of the figures, while the overall composition owed much to Paul Cézanne's Bathers as well as to J.-A-.D. Ingres's harem scenes. The Demoiselles, however, named by Picasso's friend Max Jacob (to refer to Avignon Street in Barcelona,where sailors found popular brothels), was perceived as a shocking and direct assault: these women were not conventional images of beauty but prostitutes who challenged the very tradition from which they were born. Although he had his collectors by this date (Leo and Gertrude Stein, the Russian merchant Sergey Shchukin) and a dealer (Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler), Picasso chose to roll up the canvas of the Demoiselles and to keep it out of sight for several years.

In 1908 the African-influenced striations and masklike heads were superseded by a technique that incorporated elements he and his new friend Georges Braque found in the work of Cézanne, whose shallow space and characteristic planar brushwork are especially evident in Picasso's work of 1909. Still lifes, inspired by Cézanne, also became an important subject for the first time in Picasso's career.

Cubism

Picasso and Braque worked together closely during the next few years (1909–12)—the only time Picasso ever worked with another painter in this way—and they developed what came to be known as Analytical Cubism. Early Cubist paintings were often misunderstood by critics and viewers because they were thought to be merely geometric art. Yet the painters themselves believed they were presenting a newkind of reality that broke away from Renaissance tradition, especially from the use of perspective and illusion. For example, they showed multiple views of an object on the same canvas to convey more information than could be contained in a single, limited illusionistic view.

As Kahnweiler saw it, Cubism signified the opening up of closed form by the “re-presentation” of the form of objects and their position in space instead of their imitation through illusionistic means; and the analytic process of fracturing objects and space, light and shadow, and even colour was likened by Apollinaire to the way in which the surgeon dissects a cadaver. This type of analysis is characteristic of Picasso's work beginning in 1909, especially in the landscapes he made on a trip to Spain that summer (Factory at Horta de Ebro). These were followed in 1910 with a series of hermetic portraits (Ambroise Vollard; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler); and inhis 1911–12 paintings of seated figures, often playing musical instruments (The Accordionist, 1911), Picasso merged figures, objects, and space on a kind of grid. The palette was once again limited to monochromatic ochres, browns, and grays.

Neither Braque nor Picasso desired to move into the realm of total abstraction in their Cubist works, although they implicitly accepted inconsistencies such as different points of view, different axes, and different light sources in the same picture. Furthermore, the inclusion of abstract and representational elements on the same picture plane led both artists to reexamine what two-dimensional elements, such as newspaper lettering, signified. A song title, "Ma Jolie," for instance, could point to events outside the painting; it could refer narratively to Picasso's new mistress, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). But it could also point to compositional elements within the painting, to the function of flat pictorial elements that play off other flat planes or curvilinear motifs. The inclusion of lettering also produced the powerful suggestion that Cubist pictures could be read coming forward from the picture plane rather than receding (in traditional perspective) into it. And the Cubists' manipulation of the picture shape—their use of the oval, for example—redefined the edge of the work in a way that underlinedthe fact that in a Cubist picture the canvas provides the real space.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 828