Word: colorations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris-New York abstraction. If you assume that art history culminates in abstract art, then you may feel betrayed if your hero's work goes from flatness to depth, from a space built from blocks of color to one evoked by the illusion of light, from schematic drawing to fuller modeling...
...however much the public liked their results) as a slackening of his talent, almost a betrayal of its essence; he would not entirely recover, this version insists, until he began a new phase of abstraction in the early 1930s, one which would culminate 15 years later with the pure color silhouettes of his paper cutouts. Museums, up to now, have not shown us much of Matisse the Nicois. Of the gaps in our experience of any great 20th century artist, this was surely one of the biggest...
...instrument for this was color, betokening light. Nice gave him a different light from Paris -- a high, constant effulgence with little gray in it, flooding broadly across sea, city and hills, producing luminous shadows and clear tonal structures. It encouraged Matisse to think of space (in particular, the space of the hotel rooms where he worked overlooking the Promenade des Anglais) as a light-filled box, full of reflections, transparencies and openings. Shutters filter the light, and their bars are echoed in the stripes of awnings or rugs; light is doubled by mirrors that break open the space...
...entirely Matisse's own. The modulation of silvery grays (jug of water, belly of sole) with a few touches of red within the ambient - darkness of Still Life, Fish and Lemons, 1921, accentuates a lesson Matisse had learned from Manet: that black, far from signifying the absence of color, can read as a suave and powerful hue. Matisse's work, seen in this concentration, proves once more that in painting, innovation means nothing without a vital sense of the past. "I have simply wished to assert," he used to tell his students, echoing Courbet, "the reasoned and independent feeling...
...illustrate his explanation of his project in the Italian highlands, he pulled a full-color map out from a drawer to pinpoint particular locations. Togive a more concrete sense of what the smallItalian village he lived in looked like, he showedphotographs and postcards of the area, of hisfriends and the farmhouse in which he lived...