Word: artfulness
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...restore Matisse to us in all his glorious difficulty is the public service performed by "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," a spectacular new show that can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 20 and then moves to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Why focus on just four years? Because they were a moment when Matisse fundamentally reinvented painting. His works of that period - there are almost 120 in the show, including canvases, prints, drawings and sculptures - truly were radical inventions, new answers to the fundamental question of how to construct a picture...
...years right after 1913 were an anxious time for Matisse. Born in 1869, he entered his mid-40s more visible than ever in the art world, but with work that to the French was still an eyesore. Though for the first time he was making enough money from his art to buy his family a comfortable house in a Paris suburb, much of his income derived from a single Russian patron, Sergei Shchukin, a wealthy merchant willing to fill his drawing room with Matisse's most difficult pictures while Moscow society snickered. (See the top 10 art exhibitions...
When he was through with the hectic charms of Fauvism, Matisse moved to distill and stabilize his art by conjuring up a stripped-bare world of preclassical antiquity, a place that was one part arcadia, one part Land That Time Forgot. In enigmatic pictures like Bathers with a Turtle, from 1908, bluntly rendered figures were disposed among wide, flat bands of nearly abstract blue and green that signified - just barely - land...
...Art During Wartime...
These are the pictures that open the Chicago show, curated expertly by Stephanie D'Alessandro of the Art Institute and John Elderfield of MOMA. They represent a final prelude to the leap Matisse would make around 1913 into radical distortion and near abstraction. Much of that work he would do in the shadow of World War I. Rejected for service - he was 44 when the war began - he went on working in a Paris studio, while outside his door Europe hammered itself to pieces. Not long after, his hometown in northern France was occupied by German troops, his mother left...