Beatrix Ruf explains in the Foreword “I am proud that the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has chosen to adopt an offbeat approach in The Oasis of Matisse, combining world-famous paintings and lesser known drawings and prints by Matisse with paintings and sculptures by predecessors and contemporaries, all drawn from the collection of the Stedelijk. This unusual approach provides the opportunity to explore very many different aspects of Matisse’s work, enabling the exhibition to offer an extraordinarily diverse impression of an artist whose work has already been the subject of the most minute study.” The exhibition focuses new attention on masterpieces by leading figures like Maurice de Vlaminck, Kees van Dongen, Marc Chagall, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, but also proposes unusual comparisons with less familiar gems from the museum depot.
And so does this catalogue.
With an impressive list all lenders to the exhibition form one page, to name some as Textielmuseum Tilburg, Tate London, Victoria & Albert Museum providing next to paintings and sculptures great works in textile as costumes, rugs, glass, stained glass and cartons described in chapters like The Oasis of Matisse – An Introduction to the Exhibition by Bart Rutten and Geurt Imanse: “Matisse’s costume for the mourner in Léonide Massine’s ballet Le chant du rossignol (1920) makes a perfect pair to the textile works of Bart van der Leck. In the spirit of the De Stijl movement, Van der Leck strove to marry art and design by producing textiles and other objects adorned with geometrical patterns (ills. 19 – 20). The costume designs for Le chant du Rossignol also represent Matisse’s first use of the technique that he would eventually use in his cutouts: he pinned the black paper triangles onto the fabric to arrive at a harmonious pattern. “ and “With Matisse’s designs for the Chapel of the Rosary, his cutouts gained a new dimension; the chasubles covered with cutout motifs can be regarded as existing also in the fourth dimension: moving in space and time as the priests celebrated mass.”
In Matisse and the Lure of Decoration Maurice Rummens points out the use of decoration, ornaments and patterns: “With a father who came from a family of weavers and a mother who sold house paints and decorated porcelain, Matisse could hardly have avoided contact with the decorative arts. The part of northern France where he was born, near the Belgian border, was a textile manufacturing area.” The relationship to ornament and decoration (Western and otherwise) is also reflected in the fact that a number of the cutouts were used as designs for tiling panels, luxurious wall coverings, tapestries, and stained glass."
His works are confronted with that of other artists through out the book with concepts as color and form: like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, and Robert Mangold, Daniel Buren and Lawrence Weiner.
…“sought the solution in the most perfect possible union between form and color: the armchair, oasis, or paradise, expressed in a style composed of curving lines and areas of flat color. The arabesque, sinuous ornaments consisting of purely mathematical combinations of lines or figurative (frequently vegetal) forms and used traditionally in Islamic art, and later in Renaissance Europe, and the decorative were key to his thinking.”…
This well made book breaths the spirit of Matisse: with chapters as Tapestry and Carpet Designs; Paris: Academic Art and Impressionism; From Painting by the Rules to Painting with Color; Collioure: Birth of Fauvism; New Influences and Tradition: The Serpentine and the Arabesque; The Concentration of Paris: Simplification and Abstraction; Matisse and the Dutch and Russian Avant-garde; Studies in Sculpture; Nice: Return to Representation; Red Interiors; Textiles: Fabrics and Patterns as a Source of Inspiration; Drawings and Prints; The Cutout: From Tool to Medium in Its Own Right; Memories of Tahiti: Polynesia and Oceania; Jazz; The Parakeet and the Mermaid; Sculpting in Light and Color: The Snail and Memory of Oceania; The Chapel of the Rosary in Vence; Matisse on Matisse – A Biography in Quotes; Matisse in Tahiti: the Revelation of a “Grand Mechanism” by Patrice Deparpe; At Home With Matisse – a Personal Account by Paule Caen-Martin and Dominique Szymusiak; The Parakeet and the Mermaid: Facts, Questions and Conundrums by Maurice Rummens, the book ends with the List of Works in the Exhibition.
With great texts, the reader can ping-pong between words and images and get exited on all the information. A book all should read to understand the works of one of the greatest artist of the 20th century who influenced -as predecessor, as source of inspiration and master- other artists and in return was influenced by them and to understand this great, once in a lifetime-exposition.
Angela van der Burght
See the Agenda: The Oasis of Matisse, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 27 March – 16 August 2015>
