Word: worke
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When Sunday night arrived, I dreaded turning my computer back on. I knew it meant I'd have to do work or respond to e-mails from friends and family, i.e., more work. And while the main lesson I took away from my two days is that technology is a gift from God and should never be turned off - one simple text would have kept Cassandra's friends at the party, which would have led to more drinking and Liberace-level candle lighting - I did learn that I'd rather hang out with my wife and son than find...
...Matisse always brings to mind the famous line from André Gide: "Do not understand me too quickly." Isn't that what we so often do with Matisse? We rush to indulge in the pleasures his art provides without coming to grips with its complexities. Compared with the Cubist-period work of his near contemporary Picasso - one picture after another that can be like a cheese grater for the eyes - even the most recondite Matisse is pretty beguiling. All those canvases flush with rose pink and aqua, filled with dancers and flowers and fruit - it's hard to look at them...
...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...
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...
...Matisse relocated to Nice, in the south of France, and in much of his work over the next three decades he would return - you might say retreat - to more conventional renderings of space and form. Decades passed before other artists began to draw out the full implications of his fertile experiments. Color-field paintings, for example - the big monochrome wafers of Ellsworth Kelly, the gossamer pools of pigment in Helen Frankenthaler - would emerge directly from Matisse, but not until the 1950s. Maybe we didn't understand him too quickly after...