The Conversation, 1938: Henry Matisse' Timeless Drawing-Painting

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San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA

“...balance, of purity and serenity.” 

Matisse Describing His Art.

It would be too easy to spin tales about conversations, such as the one suggested by Henri Matisse's two women in The Conversation of 1938. Instead of that, let's listen to what Matisse has really said with his Modernist masterpiece.

It is fair of the SFMOMA to use Conversation in the context of a dialog in the exhibit on the second floor, where they have set up a “conversation” between the works of different artists in their permanent collection. Compare Marcel Duchamp to Picasso and Matisse. Does Matisse speak to Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, two rooms away, and if so, what does he say? Consider Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol: how do they interact with the history of Modern art? Then you have the obvious question: what are these artist's saying to the viewer?


The Trajectory of a Masterwork.

Henri Matisse named two paintings The Conversation, but the 1938 piece that I saw three weeks ago in San Francisco is more than just a depiction of parlor conviviality. The Conversation, 1938, is an effortless, masterful work that is a colorist piece and is rooted in the timeless elements of painting. It also unites the qualities of drawing and painting in thoughtful ways that only Matisse could accomplish.


“Matisse was an artist in the medieval sense of the word,” said the French historian Regine Pernoud. By referencing another era, Pernoud suggests the artist's aim was over the horizon, not just his own time.  Art is the root word of both artifice and artillery. Could Henri Matisse (I am borrowing a page from his World War II era) have shot a creative shell across the ages?

My Snapshot of The Conversation, 1938

SFMOMA official image here.

Back To Basics.


By the 1930s, Matisse was leaving behind Odalesques and returning to his bold and active earlier style. The Dance, 1932-3, featured monumental figures whose energy moved outside of the confines of the mural. His illustrations for Ulysses, 1935, were 26 line images that reinvigorated Matisse's sensibilities for the drawn figure. He said, “I do not reason when I draw; I don't know where I'm going.” For Matisse, drawing was an expressionist act, and his paintings were to become infused with this element again.

Although the faces of the two women in The Conversation may have been done with a rigger brush and paint, they give one the impression of transparent paint over pencil lines. To further emphasize this effect, Matisse draws each woman's hair and face together as one area and uses the same flesh color for both elements. Matisse outlines the figures and room elements – a total departure from a painter's desire to lose edges. Instead, Matisse draws in all of the edges; sometimes with negative white lines, and at other times with pencil-thin gray lines.


The Figure, The Color and The Space.

• The woman on your left recedes in a pure black dress, while her companion springs forward in a violet, yellow and red dress.
• The room is an effervescent pattern of colors, with compliments of red and green, blue-green with red orange, and the triadic relationships of violet and green and then the yellow and green sofa.  
• Both women form a triangular mass, the wall is divided vertically and there is a diagonal line created by the sofa's edge, arm and a red triangular shape at the bottom.  There is an X formed in the center of the picture by the edge of the black shirt sleeve and the elbow of the woman on your right, and the arm of the sofa.  
• Perspective is not achieved with  lines and atmosphere, but by the relationships of colors and  masses - Modern Art meets timeless divisions of the picture.
• There is a heart shape to each face, and a heart shape can also be suggested by both faces together with the bottom being the elbow.
• There is a a curvilinear pattern of lines and shapes around the interior of the space - they read gracefully.
• One woman's eyes gaze to the left, and the other to the right, which adds to the expansiveness of the picture.  Dreamy and pleasant, the two are caught in a moment of happiness.
  
  
  
  

Someone has said that a painting can no more be about color than a party can be about Tupperware. Look again at Matisse and reconsider this. He uses colors as the space, suggesting both a scene and a pattern simultaneously.  The comparisons between the colors become movements, and the use of pure tones, without shading, arouse both excitement and harmony.  The feeling is one of a brightly lit midday, illuminated by the southern sun.

“Do you find perfect correspondence between the nature of the drawing and the nature of the painting? In my opinion, they seem totally different from each other, absolutely contradictory. One, the drawing, depends on linear or sculptural plasticity, and the other, the painting, depends on colored plasticity.” Henri Matisse.

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Art Is Long.

Physicists think about the properties of time; they wonder if it bends or slows down under special conditions. Can fine art add anything to the conversation about time? When I am standing in front of Matisse's The Conversation, time is folded for me. This artwork may have been painted seventy-three years ago, but I am experiencing it in the here and now. If I understand the artwork, even minimally, then the artist and I are having a conversation of sorts. 

 We feel old, and somehow wizened, when we enjoy a masterwork. Henri Matisse has made what is, for me, the greatest contribution to the gallery space at the SFMOMA with The Conversation. It appears graceful and effortless in comparison to Picasso, Braque and Morandi, whose works hang in the same space. Does Marcel Duchamp, whose urinal is presented in the next room, really diminish art by his funny and outrageous installations?  His "readymade object" seems even more absurd directly after looking at Matisse's superb contribution to the canon of Modern Art. More on Duchamp in a later post.

With energy and singularity, and with clear, bright pictorial statements, Henri Matisse has given us more than words.  He has brought grace to the conversation about the art of the twentieth century.

Henri Matisse

1869-1954

The beautiful photo of the SFMOMA by cbrady2 at Photobucket.  This post is republished from April, 2011.

Joan Mitchell - Gestural Pursuasion

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There are many more of my new artworks to show you.  But, I think I'll spread it out and keep my reader's waiting.  Meanwhile, here is the next room in my walking tour of the San Fransisco MOMA.  I favored two strong and large paintings in this room, and the first one was by Joan Mitchell.  I'll tell you about the other one next time.

I had to reach my arms out to either side to gather the dimensions of this painting in my mind.  I found it to be just the span of my arms.  Then, I imagined it on its side, and again there was just the width of my arms.  Gestural.  Approachable.  Edible.

The date interests me a great deal.  The height of the the Modernist movement, in my mind, was 1950.  This piece was done in 1960, and the hues are brighter than those used in the fifties.  Modern, or Mod?

Also, I became more aware than ever of the canvas color, the same as Henri Matisse reveals in Woman With A Hat.  Sort of a warm, barely reddish buff or egg-white color.  These artists definitely are thinking about the dimension of the canvas itself, and you are immersed by the feeling of painting.  

Could my kid do this?  Of course, I know the answer is "no."  But still, the work is far more approachable than Ingres.

Joan Mitchell
Untitled, 1960
83.4" x 74.5"


SFMOMA link to this image.




Joan Mitchell Wikipedia.
Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Bomb Magazine.
The Art Story.
artnet.

Potty Talk - Marcel Duchamp's (ahem) Art

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In previous posts, which are listed below, we have been taking a tour of the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection exhibit.


Matisse, The Woman with a Hat.
Matisse, The Conversation, 1938.
SFMOMA posts.
The urinal we all know and love/hate.


In these posts, I've brought you some awe inspiring works by the French master, Henri Matisse.  Now, we will confront the most well known object d'art in the world, The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp.


From sublime to art crime. 


In the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, I present the following reactions and ideas in no particular order.


Duchamp is a very ostentatious artist. His works and installations are few, but his footprint is large.

Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp

Say what you will, but Mr. Duchamp's Fountain is a conversation starter. Rather than killing art, it probably renewed dialog on ideas and meaning in art. It isn't a beautiful object, but it does get you thinking.












The idea of an ugly object as an installation may be offensive, or it may be a tremendous joke, but I feel that M. Duchamp would be a very fun and interesting guy to sit over a cigar and spirits to shoot the bull with.   

The Fountain is more complex than you may think at first. Sure, the idea of anti art is easily understood, and the rejection of the aesthetic is not too challenging. But, the story is the thing. He entered the object in an exhibition where there was no jury, and everything entered was to be exhibited. Except that they rejected his work. That is funny. Then he resigned from the exhibition group, but the rejection brought him lasting fame.

The Independent noted in a February 2008 article that with this single work, Duchamp invented conceptual art and "severed forever the traditional link between the artist's labour and the merit of the work".[13]

You realize that performance artists vie for the chance to pee on the fountain.  Another no-brainer.

Dadaist art.  Marcel Duchamp is the duke of Dadaism.  His name is the foremost among Dadaists, but I also like Francis Picabia.

There is always room for the absurd in art, and it helps to have a sense of humor about yourself.  Congratulations to Marcel Duchamp for providing us with a laugh, and a conversation.

The Conversation, 1938, by Henri Matisse

San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA

“...balance, of purity and serenity.” 
Matisse Describing His Art.

It would be too easy to spin tales about conversations, such as the one suggested by Henri Matisse's two women in The Conversation of 1938. Instead of that, let's listen to what Matisse has really said with his Modernist masterpiece.

It is fair of the SFMOMA to use Conversation in the context of a dialog in the exhibit on the second floor, where they have set up a “conversation” between the works of different artists in their permanent collection. Compare Marcel Duchamp to Picasso and Matisse. Does Matisse speak to Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, two rooms away, and if so, what does he say? Consider Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol: how do they interact with the history of Modern art? Then you have the obvious question: what are these artist's saying to the viewer?


The Trajectory of a Masterwork.

Henri Matisse named two paintings The Conversation, but the 1938 piece that I saw three weeks ago in San Francisco is more than just a depiction of parlor conviviality. The Conversation, 1938, is an effortless, masterful work that is a colorist piece and is rooted in the timeless elements of painting. It also unites the qualities of drawing and painting in thoughtful ways that only Matisse could accomplish.


“Matisse was an artist in the medieval sense of the word,” said the French historian Regine Pernoud. By referencing another era, Pernoud suggests the artist's aim was over the horizon, not just his own time.  Art is the root word of both artifice and artillery. Could Henri Matisse (I am borrowing a page from his World War II era) have shot a creative shell across the ages?

My Snapshot of The Conversation, 1938

SFMOMA official image here.

Back To Basics.


By the 1930s, Matisse was leaving behind Odalesques and returning to his bold and active earlier style. The Dance, 1932-3, featured monumental figures whose energy moved outside of the confines of the mural. His illustrations for Ulysses, 1935, were 26 line images that reinvigorated Matisse's sensibilities for the drawn figure. He said, “I do not reason when I draw; I don't know where I'm going.” For Matisse, drawing was an expressionist act, and his paintings were to become infused with this element again.

Although the faces of the two women in The Conversation may have been done with a rigger brush and paint, they give one the impression of transparent paint over pencil lines. To further emphasize this effect, Matisse draws each woman's hair and face together as one area and uses the same flesh color for both elements. Matisse outlines the figures and room elements – a total departure from a painter's desire to lose edges. Instead, Matisse draws in all of the edges; sometimes with negative white lines, and at other times with pencil-thin gray lines.


The Figure, The Color and The Space.

• The woman on your left recedes in a pure black dress, while her companion springs forward in a violet, yellow and red dress.
• The room is an effervescent pattern of colors, with compliments of red and green, blue-green with red orange, and the triadic relationships of violet and green and then the yellow and green sofa.  
• Both women form a triangular mass, the wall is divided vertically and there is a diagonal line created by the sofa's edge, arm and a red triangular shape at the bottom.  There is an X formed in the center of the picture by the edge of the black shirt sleeve and the elbow of the woman on your right, and the arm of the sofa.  
• Perspective is not achieved with  lines and atmosphere, but by the relationships of colors and masses - Modern Art meets timeless divisions of the picture.
• There is a heart shape to each face, and a heart shape can also be suggested by both faces together with the bottom being the elbow.
• There is a a curvilinear pattern of lines and shapes around the interior of the space - they read gracefully.
• One woman's eyes gaze to the left, and the other to the right, which adds to the expansiveness of the picture.  Dreamy and pleasant, the two are caught in a moment of happiness.
  
  
  
  

Someone has said that a painting can no more be about color than a party can be about Tupperware. Look again at Matisse and reconsider this. He uses colors as the space, suggesting both a scene and a pattern simultaneously.  The comparisons between the colors become movements, and the use of pure tones, without shading, arouse both excitement and harmony.  The feeling is one of a brightly lit midday, illuminated by the southern sun.

“Do you find perfect correspondence between the nature of the drawing and the nature of the painting? In my opinion, they seem totally different from each other, absolutely contradictory. One, the drawing, depends on linear or sculptural plasticity, and the other, the painting, depends on colored plasticity.” Henri Matisse.

<><><>

Art Is Long.

Physicists think about the properties of time; they wonder if it bends or slows down under special conditions. Can fine art add anything to the conversation about time? When I am standing in front of Matisse's The Conversation, time is folded for me. This artwork may have been painted seventy-three years ago, but I am experiencing it in the here and now. If I understand the artwork, even minimally, then the artist and I are having a conversation of sorts. 

 We feel old, and somehow wizened, when we enjoy a masterwork. Henri Matisse has made what is, for me, the greatest contribution to the gallery space at the SFMOMA with The Conversation. It appears graceful and effortless in comparison to Picasso, Braque and Morandi, whose works hang in the same space. Does Marcel Duchamp, whose urinal is presented in the next room, really diminish art by his funny and outrageous installations?  His "readymade object" seems even more absurd directly after looking at Matisse's superb contribution to the canon of Modern Art. More on Duchamp in a later post.

With energy and singularity, and with clear, bright pictorial statements, Henri Matisse has given us more than words.  He has brought grace to the conversation about the art of the twentieth century.

Henri Matisse

1869-1954

The beautiful photo of the SFMOMA by cbrady2 at Photobucket.

Have a Dish of Modern Art

Come with me, dear reader, on a walking tour of the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art.  I'll be focused on the older holdings, since those are the artworks that have been subjected to the acid test of time. First, may I present my card?

Don't be fooled.  I will be praising here as much as criticizing, because I am an adherent of Modern Art.  But, it helps to have a healthy handful of skepticism when you are viewing the Moderns.  I don't let their notoriety get in the way of my having a go at the master artists' works.

The Tour.

The SFMOMA introduces their permanent collection exhibition with the Fauvists and Cubists who painted at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.  Matisse's be-hatted wife,  Amélie Parayre, invites you to enter. The layout of the second floor  weaves around different rooms, establishing a timeline of Modern works and telling the story of progressive ideas in art.

The first room gives way to anti-art statements by Marcel Duchamp, and an eddy-out shows off the museums proud holdings by Paul Klee.  I was attracted to the next room from an historical sense, if not as much for the art.  These were the large format Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo paintings. Next are the mid-century rooms, where the larger-than-life heroes are presented, such as Mark Rothko and many, but not by any stretch most, of the Abstract Expressionists.  This was my favorite room, after the early Modernists.  More details on that later.

As you leave the rare air of Abstract Expressionism, and continue to the next rooms, you may become, as I was, lost at the soul-level.  Not for ignorance was I lost.  I am well aware of the movement to supersede painting with objects and experiences.  In these rooms you find the advancement of Pop Art, and the experiences of video and installations.  Thus begins the boredom.  That's me.  I love painting and sculpture, and don't feel the need to replace them in the Post-Modern sense.

Opinions.

Pride of place at the SFMOMA is given to Woman With A Hat, by Henri Matisse.  Even now, one-hundred and six years after completion, this painting appears different from anything else ever painted, except maybe by Matisse, himself.

Because this was my first opportunity to view a painting by Matisse, I spent a lot of time with Woman With A Hat, 1905.  I have been under Matisse's influence fairly heavily for the past year, having read the massive two-volume biography by Hilary Spurling, as well as a couple of lesser volumes on this master.  It is easy to see why HM is noted as an early, major influence on Modern Art.

Matisse is much better than I thought he was from even the glowing books and articles I have read.  This is a good example of how actual real life viewing is superior to the printed page or the CRT.  In those, I have to say I desired something else out of the man.  I wanted flow.  I wanted skill and expression.  

In the three Matisse paintings that the SFMOMA has on view, I found my wishes fulfilled.  Well, maybe more so in two of them, because the one still life looked just plain wrong to me.  It was forced, and especially it suffered from being hung next to a Morandi.  But The Conversation and the Woman With A Hat were outstanding paintings.

Woman With A Hat presents a mix of skilled brushwork, and savage beastly work as well.  Matisse flattens, pops, effuses and describes all at the same time, and he never does it meanly or without intention.  You get the tension between the flattering and the fatuous; the intimacy and the utility; the fine and the fierce.

I began to see a color that I have only been aware of in a minor way before.  It is the canvas color of old egg-white, with blushes of pale yellow and pink in this particular case.  This comes in better focus when we look at Joan Mitchell and some other works later on.

If you look closely at Edgar Degas' work of the same era, you see greens, blues and other wildly non-objective colors on the faces of his women.  But, Matisse is presenting the colorist view here, which is that the colors, along with the forms, are central to the ideas presented.  Not just as colors, or as not-true colors, but in the role of exposing new ways of seeing a painting.  Paintings are flat artifices, revealing other things about our world than rote description.  Their beauty is a transformational value; they are a tool for change and progress.  Amelie is beautiful in ways not under the tyranny of the caliper and the ruler.

Maurice Denis wrote that Woman With A Hat embodies "des noumènes de tableaux," which can be translated as the pure reason of ideas in the picture.  If so, it was a breakthrough of painting from abstract ideas; from instinct. It raised the bar.

I could go on.  I love The Conversation, 1938, Matisse, even more.  It is the greatest representational painting on view in the museum in my estimation, and it hangs in a room with Picasso, Morandi and Braque.  More on that next time.

Woman With A Hat

o/c, 1905

31.75" x 23.5"

Henri Matisse

Notes.

1. Woman With A Hat.
2. "Genuine points of comparison for Woman with a Hat are few." T.J. Clark.  In depth essay on Matisse's painting.

San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art

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The least perceptible movement of air pushed against my face, and my eyes opened slowly. This was warm, moist air from the Pacific; the kind of air that San Fransisco is famous for.  I had taken the red eye to California that morning, sped to the art museum, and spent the morning absorbing notable works of Modern art.  I was tired enough when I sat down at the rooftop cafe, that I thought I was sitting next to a large, closed window overlooking the atrium sculpture garden.  


I sipped tea with cream and sugar, and rested my eyes.  What I thought was a big window was actually an open door and I was literally at the threshold.  By analogy, perhaps it was the threshold of springtime, this being the first good weather I've experienced this year.  It was a pleasant unwinding.  My first trip to a museum after the long winter, cooped up in my stuffy and busy studio in eastern Washington.


Since my business in California was to judge some art, I used the SFMOMA as a sort of warm-up for my critical mindset.  What would it be like for me to be a first-time jurist for an art event?  It is especially hard to come off the farm (literally - my studio is on our farmstead) and engage with other people's artwork.


Let me tell you, kind reader, it was plenty fun to tear into the biggies enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art.  It was only practice, and the shoulders of these giants are plenty big enough to tolerate my arrows.  And, I did sling a few.  Return here next time, and we'll dish the greats with some relish and some salt.

The San Fransisco SFMOMA is nothing, if not convenient.  Me in front of a well known Marcel Duchamp object.  

How Do You Like My Hat?

La femme au chapeau

o/c, 79.4 x 59.7 cm

Henri Matisse

SFMOMA

In the next few days I'll be posting about my trip to the SFMOMA this week.  Matisse, Rothko and Joan Mitchell were the standouts.


Audio Commentary.