Matisse being Matisse: The Exhibit at Chicago's Art Institute

Today’s post is written by Don Shearn

I just wanted to clarify that I am not the visual artist/painter at Ageless North Shore. So my opinion about the Matisse exhibit is purely from the entertainment angle.

Bathers by a River, March 1909–10, May–November 1913, and summer 1916–17

To wit, is it worth it to spend $18.00 ($12.00 if you’re over 65, a student or a child) at Chicago’s Art Institute to see the 120 paintings, prints, drawings, and prints that Henri Matisse created between 1913 and 1917?

Let’s start with what I knew about Henri Matisse.  Next to nothing. Matisse was the cutout guy. The guy who cut out colored paper and stuck them on paper or canvas or boards. And then years after Matisse died (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954), Museum Stores sold reproductions of Matisse cutouts on note cards.

Set of Matisse Cutout Notecards ($12.95 from SFMOMA)

It turns out that Matisse did not start the cutouts until 1941 after being diagnosed with cancer and following surgery. Matisse called his last fourteen years, “Une seconde vie”, a second life.

Matisse had been making a pretty good living since 1910 primarily through his association with the Russian textile merchant and art collector Sergei Shchukin. Shchukin used the paintings by Matisse to “decorate” his mansion in Moscow.

Shchukin drawing by Henri Matisse

Shchukin also collected Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso. He had an eye for the avante garde. Unfortunately for Shchukin so did the Russian Revolution whose government in 1917  appropriated his collection, while Shchukin escaped to Paris, where he died in 1936.

The exhibit follows Matisse in his mid-forties as he works to find new forms of expression. Matisse feels the artistic heat from Pablo Picasso as the leader of the artistic pack in Paris. In addition, the exhibit shows the influence of WWI on Matisse and his work. Although forty four at the time of the war, Matisse volunteered but was turned down due to health reasons.

Within a few weeks in August 1914, France was mobilized, the artist’s childhood in Bohain-en-Vermandois in the north was occupied and his house in Issy (a suburb of Paris) was requisitioned by the French military.

Matisse did a series of prints entitled Civil Prisoners of Bohain-en-Vermandois. These prints of residents of the occupied Northern French city were sold to assist those displaced by WW I. The prints are part of the exhibit.

I strongly recommend renting the audio guide. This gives you a sense of connection with the paintings and the thinking of the curators. For those few Ageless readers who are not totally conversant with Matisse, post-impressionism, print-making and sculpture, the audio guide fills in some important gaps.

Goldfish and Palette 1914-1915

Rachel Wolff wrote about this exhibit in the Daily Beast. Here is what she says,

There are few delicate floral arrangements, bright interiors, and lush color palettes for which the early modernist is so typically known. Instead, we see backgrounds invading foregrounds, abstracted objects, vast color fields, Cubist portraits, skewed perspectives, lots of black, lots of gray, and the painter himself letting his freak flag fly….

I, for one, love when museums showcase a crowd-pleasing artist’s darker, stranger, and uglier side (visually speaking, of course).

Click here for the full review on Daily Beast

My conclusion.

This is a pretty esoteric exhibit to my mind. It is a study of the artistic process and a narrow slice of Matisse’s work. It is fascinating to trace a subject like “The Bathers” through sketch, painting, sculpture and print.

And since we are members of the Art Institute, not only was the exhibit free…so was the coffee in the member’s lounge.