The Museum of Modern Art in New York is honoring the great French artist Henri Matisse with the exhibition running through September 9th.
More than a century after the dispersal of these paintings around the world, the New York Museum was able to collect them for the first time, and they are eleven paintings executed by the painter between 1898 and 1911 with other pieces of art such as a clay bowl and another from ceramics.
These paintings represent a series of paintings called “Self-Symphony” that he executed in the Red Studio. It was praised by author Michel Butor, and critic Derek Jarman wrote in Croma: “The walls of Matisse’s studio were gray, but he ignored them, and celebrated the new century with great fanfare, imagining the red walls of his then red atelier.
In this painting, the room and all the furniture are melted with crimson – as if saturated with this color.” Matisse’s artworks are oil on canvas. If Matisse is not physically present in his paintings, he wanders everywhere with his creativity.
“This painting is the artist’s self,” says Anne Timken, principal curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, which is another way of creating a self-portrait. When the painter moved to Issy-les-Moulineaux in 1909, he was about to turn forty, living and working in Paris in the Montmartre area, but the sale of the building forced him to look elsewhere and provided him with enough space to design two of his future paintings “The Dance” and the Music, which he would buy From him, Russian businessman Sergei Shchukin.
The drawings of what he called “the red studio”, in which he used the red color in his brilliance and creativity in this color, was not preceded by anyone to that, and even affected many artists.
These paintings were painted in 1911, oil on canvas, 180 / 220 cm in size. He was influenced in these paintings by traditional Islamic art during his visit to Spain, so we see him using a lot of decoration, trimmings, mosaics and depicting the space surrounding the painting.
These paintings were grouped with three others he painted in the same year at the epicenter of Western painting, where classical art is a representation of the past. The elements collected by Matisse express his individual identity, and became a prolonged meditation on art, life, space, time, perception, nature, and reality, that is, he painted the personal facts he knew so well.
These paintings are characterized by the spirit of deception that suggests three dimensions, even though they are flat paintings, and this affected the concept of perspective in the painting, that is, the spectator can look at his paintings from all sides as if we are dealing with a literary text written on a painting so that the compositions of the painting and its elements of lines and colors appear.
And we see in the paintings drawing tools such as a box of pens or charcoal on the table or others. His paintings also contain the artist’s materials such as portraits, landscapes, a lighting window, a vase, a chair, and other sculptures.
In these paintings the colors red, blue and gray overlap.
These paintings constituted an artistic event at the time because of their artistic creativity, which no one would abandon in the paintings of previous artists, and the paintings seem to be part of the wall, and overlap with it in an overlapping way, where the objects and elements chosen by the painter Matisse are suspended to hang in order to embody ideas Which was going on in his mind at the time, in an abstract way that does not resemble the abstract patterns that were prevalent at his time, so its importance increased with time.