Curated by:
Claudine Grammont, Head of the Graphic Art Department at Centre Pompidou, Paris
The first exhibition devoted to the pivotal decade of the 1930s in Matisse’s art. Featuring exceptional loans, it explores the decorative aesthetic he developed after creating a monumental mural for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.
Henri Matisse’s work is marked by significant milestones that demonstrate his determination never to remain confined to one particular style. After the period of Nice interiors and odalisques, the 1930s were a turning point, a time of maturity.
Crowned with success, however, Matisse did not want to be seen as an artist who had arrived, preferring to run the risk of the unknown once again. This unknown took pictorial form with the major challenge of creating the mural composition of La Danse (The Dance) for the Barnes Foundation, to which he devoted himself between 1930 and 1933. He gave up easel painting to tackle large-scale work, opening himself to other dimensions. His art underwent a profound transformation, both in its architectural ambition and in his ability to produce on a larger scale, freed from the limits of the frame.
This exhibition aims to explore the decade of the 1930s and highlight the transformation taking place in his work. It focuses on the artist’s studios in Nice, defined as a conceptual and physical framework for creativity, and on the innovative procedures invented by the artist to meet the demands of a large format.
The exhibition also revisits Matisse’s presence in the journal Cahiers d’Art, placing his work in the context of the international avant-garde and the great debates that enlivened it. Emerging in its early days in the wake of Cubism, the magazine adopted an aesthetic, universalist, and trans-historical approach that nourished the artist’s thinking and his taste, far removed from the classical heritage, for extra-Western and ancient art.
This exhibition is organised with the Musée de l’Orangerie (Paris) and the Phildadelphia Museum of Art.
Exhibition catalogue, English edition : Matisse in the 1930s, Yales University Press, 256 p., 50 $
Buy the catalogue online
