Chez Matisse

The title comes from a line by Baudelaire (“Invitation to the Voyage”). It is essentially a report on the summer with Paul Signac in Saint-Tropez. The painting is done in divisionist dots — but Matisse’s dots are larger and rougher than Signac’s, the figures simplified almost to outline, and the Mediterranean beach turned into a timeless idyll: bathers, a cloth spread on the sand. Here you can already see how Matisse adapts someone else’s method to his own purpose — the dots are not for optical trickery but to free colour from the obligation to describe reality. A year later he would abandon the dotted technique, but the main idea — “building space with pure colour” — he took with him to Collioure. From it, within a few months, Fauvism would be born.

The painting is the result of three London trips Derain made in 1906. Dealer Ambroise Vollard sent him to London on the model of Monet’s “London series”: to see how the same motif could be seen anew. But where Monet’s Thames dissolves in fog, Derain’s bursts into flame: the water becomes a turquoise-pink band, the sky gold, the bridge a lilac graphic arc. Such colour cannot be seen in reality — it can only be constructed — it conveys not the object itself but the sensation of it. Derain strips the Impressionist haze from the landscape and turns London into a decorative plane where colour no longer has to repeat reality. The main point here — Fauvism turns out not to be Matisse’s personal style but a shared language: one summer in Collioure — and a year later two artists are already working in the same direction.

After Gustave Moreau's death in 1898, Matisse and Marquet moved to the studio of their fellow student Henri Manguin at 61 rue Bourgoin. In the winter of 1904—1905, the three friends arranged a session with a nude model — and each painted his own version of the evening. Marquet chose not the model but Matisse himself at work: the artist's dark silhouette appears on the left, back to us, with a canvas on an easel between him and the model. The painting is documentary, without Fauvist colour shock — and that is precisely what makes it valuable: Fauvism was born not in the solitude of a genius but in a shared studio where artists watched each other paint and picked up techniques. At the exhibition this work sets the tone for the entire first gallery — before becoming a “wild beast”, Matisse was part of a small circle of colleagues.

Czóbel was the only non-French artist in the Fauvist room at the 1906 Salon d'Automne, alongside Matisse, Derain and Dufy. Peintres à la campagne (in the salon catalogue as Deux Peintres, “Two Painters”) is almost a manifesto of the Fauvist community: two painters with easels in a garden, surrounded by layers of green and ochre laid down in broad strokes without half-tones. The subject is deliberately everyday — and that is part of the programme: Fauvism sees itself as plein-air painting, heir to the Impressionists — but sharper, flatter and more emotional. Through Czóbel, Fauvism almost immediately spread beyond France — to Hungary, then more widely across Central Europe. At the exhibition this painting answers the question: “who heard Matisse already in the first winter after Collioure?” — even those without a French passport heard him.

After the pointillist Luxe, calme et volupté (1904) — a completely different tone. Matisse spent the summer of 1907 in Tuscany, where he saw frescoes by fifteenth-century Florentine masters, and brought back from there a different idea of a “golden age”. Pure flatness, clear contour, no volume — three nude figures on the shore look more like saints from medieval wall painting than classical bathers. The subject is ambiguous: preparation for bathing, a ritual scene, or simply an experiment — the same figure in three different poses. Large size, vertical format — this is no longer a “genre scene” but a monumental decorative painting. 1907 was a turning year: Matisse simultaneously turned away from descriptive Impressionism and from the Fauvist colour shock in favour of pure simplicity of form. This direction would remain his main one until the end of his life.

On a red tablecloth — a lobster, two dark bottles, a glass, a plate of oysters. A French tavern seen through the eyes of a Russian icon. No perspective, no modelling of light — space flattened almost to a poster, colour working at maximum. In Moscow in 1909 such a still life was a double slap: to academic tradition and to bland European Impressionism. Goncharova had seen Matisse in the Moscow collections of Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov, loved folk lubok prints and icons — and together with Larionov invented from this Neo-Primitivism, a Russian answer to Western modernism. Not imitation but a parallel path. In Barcelona the work is placed beside Matisse to show: the primitivist turn happened simultaneously in Paris and Moscow, and the movement ran in opposite directions.

Kirchner — founder of the Dresden group Die Brücke (1905), the leading figure of the first wave of German Expressionism. The painting was made later, in Davos, where the artist moved in 1917 after a nervous breakdown from front-line experience. The subject — a nude model (probably dancer Nina Hard, who stayed with Kirchner in 1921) and a clothed man — is resolved Expressionistically: colour here does not describe but conveys the “temperature” of the relationship between the figures. Green shadows on bodies, ultramarine contours, sharp diagonals of the carpet — everything works on emotion. In dialogue with Matisse one thing matters: Expressionists took liberated colour from Fauvism but translated it into another language — not decorative but psychologically charged, closer to Van Gogh than to Cézanne.

August Macke — one of the founders of the Munich group Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”, 1911), together with Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This painting was shown at the group's very first exhibition in 1911. It shows a girl in Bavarian folk costume playing a lute, with a white vase of orange flowers before her. Flat colour patches outlined in black — a device from Bavarian folk reverse-glass painting (Hinterglasmalerei), which Macke and Kandinsky were then seriously exploring. But the spatial structure and saturated colour are already visible influence from Matisse, whose works Macke could have seen at the major Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. In Lautenspielerin two streams converge: German folk tradition and the Parisian avant-garde. This hybrid is the portrait of Der Blaue Reiter in its first year.

A direct primitivist gesture by Matisse in sculpture. By his own account, the impulse was a photograph of African women seen in a magazine. The composition — two nude figures in a tight embrace — refers simultaneously to African sculpture (compact undivided mass, low-set hips) and to antique “Three Graces”, only without any classical grace. Bronze here works like clay: the surface deliberately rough, the sculptor does not “finish” but leaves traces of fingers and tools. In Barcelona — cast 2/10 from 1952 by the Valsuani workshop, given to the Centre Pompidou by Pierre Matisse in 1991. Beside Le Luxe I from the same year of 1907 you see one thing: the idea of a flat figure in painting and the idea of compressed, compact volume in sculpture — the same solution unfolded in two materials.

Jacques Lipchitz — a Lithuanian from Druskininkai, a Paris Cubist of the 1910s, then one of the main modernist sculptors of the interwar period. The mythological subject (Zeus as a bull carrying the Phoenician princess Europa to Crete) is resolved through dense, flowing, almost Baroque mass — without clear separation of “bull” and “figure”: one fused body where it is no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Pompidou curators place this work beside Matisse's Deux négresses not as stylistic rhyme but as continuation of one line: interest in compact, whole volume, which in Matisse was born in the 1900s and in Lipchitz continues in dramatic mythological subjects of the late 1930s. Lipchitz himself said he was inspired by Coptic bronze from his collection — that is, like Matisse thirty years earlier, he turned to art beyond Europe in search of another grammar of form. The link here is not stylistic but structural: twentieth-century modernist sculpture in both cases is born from refusal of anatomical detail in favour of tangible volume.

In 1914 Matisse lived on the fourth floor of no. 19 quai Saint-Michel — one floor below his former studio of 1892—1908. The painting shows the interior of the new studio: a tall French window with a view of the Seine and the Île de la Cité, before it a bowl with two goldfish on a stool. The curved line of the bowl rhymes with the arches of the Pont Saint-Michel outside the window — a typical Matisse play of forms between interior and exterior view. The palette — deep blue-greys, graphite, ochre against an almost black room — differs sharply from the southern Fauvist celebration of a decade earlier. This is the first of four works in which Matisse begins moving towards abstraction: reality is still recognisable, but planes already diverge, colour stops describing and starts existing on its own. Originally the painting was intended for Sergei Shchukin's collection in Moscow, but the war prevented it. In the 1920s Baron Gourgaud bought it and bequeathed it to the museum in 1965.

The painting shows the artist himself seated at an easel in the same studio on the quai Saint-Michel — but this is not a classical self-portrait. The face is hidden, the figure treated in sharply generalised form, the orange tone of the body deliberately “unrealistic”, and on the easel another work in progress is visible — “Lorette in a Green Dress” (1916). Before the easel — a model in pink and green; to the right an open window with a view of Paris rooftops and the silhouette of Notre-Dame. The result is a triple composition: artist + model + painting in progress, each layer separated from the others by dense black planes. This is Matisse's reflection on his own work during the war — an attempt to formulate what it means to paint when the world is collapsing around you. The dark, almost mourning palette and direct geometric divisions of space — a laboratory from which Matisse's most radical abstraction experiments would emerge a year later (see Gallery IV).

Auguste Pellerin — industrial magnate, owner of up to eighty Cézanne canvases. He commissioned his portrait from Matisse in 1916; the result of the first version did not satisfy him, and Matisse painted a second — this version was accepted and dated May 1917. The face is assembled with extreme economy: an oval, two dark patches instead of eye sockets, white “wings” of moustache — a flat ornamental sign. The background is black, cut through by a complexly coloured fragment of a “painting within a painting” (apparently one of Pellerin's own Cézannes). The pose is formal, the suit respectable, but the whole structure of the portrait is anti-portrait: instead of a flattering heroic image of a businessman Matisse offers an almost ritual mask, a ghostly “apparition” of industrial capitalism. According to Pellerin, Matisse initially offered to leave both versions for the price of one — the client refused and bought both.

Summer and autumn 1914 Matisse spent in Collioure — where he returned nine years after the Fauvist summer of 1905, this time to escape Paris wartime mobilisation. The painting shows the French window of his room — but almost nothing “shown” in it remains. Three vertical stripes — grey, ochre, green-turquoise — frame a central almost-black rectangle that replaces what should open beyond the door: landscape, sky, sea. This is the famous “black light” — a paradoxical effect in which the darkest plane works as radiating. The painting remained in Matisse's studio until his death; he considered it his own “closed window” and never showed it publicly. In radicality of refusal of the motif this is Matisse's most abstract canvas of his entire career; a year later he would step back and return to the figure, but this work would remain in his archive as the “extreme point” he marked for himself.

Czech artist František Kupka moved to Paris in 1896; from 1909 verticality began to occupy him as a way to convey movement and introduce a “fourth dimension” — time — into painting. By 1912 vertical planes became an independent motif, detached from any descriptive task. This work is part of a series of several canvases in which Kupka varies one composition: black, grey, ochre, purple verticals with bright accents of yellow and pink. Pompidou curators call such canvases “ancestors of compositions by Malevich, Arp and Mondrian” — among the first pure geometric abstractions in the history of European modernism. In dialogue with Matisse this is an important counterpoint: Kupka in 1912—1913 does what Matisse approaches in 1914 but in the end does not do — refuses to cross the threshold of abstraction to the end.

Another portrait of daughter Marguerite (cf. Marguerite au chat noir of 1910 from the intro) — but now, four years later, in a completely different register. The face is broken into sharp geometric segments: black lines cut through pink flesh, the white half of the face contrasts with the pink, the mouth treated as an independent plastic motif. This is a visible response to Cubism — to Picasso and Braque, whose works Matisse examined with interest from 1908—1909. According to family tradition, Matisse asked his daughter whether she agreed for him to “take her somewhere else” — she agreed, and the artist reworked in the new spirit an already begun canvas Jeune femme au chapeau corbeille of 1914. The painting remained in Matisse's studio all his life and entered MNAM only in 1976. Today it is considered one of Matisse's main portraits and simultaneously the point of maximum convergence between Matisse and Cubist geometry.

At the end of 1917 Matisse moved to Nice — first to the Hôtel Beau-Rivage, then to his own flat on the third floor of Place Charles-Félix. From this moment until the late 1920s the main theme of his painting is the interior with open shutters and landscape beyond the window. Siesta shows a female figure (probably Henriette Darricarrère, Matisse's main model of the 1920s) lying on a red sofa in a floral dress; behind her — a window with a view of the palm trees of the Promenade des Anglais. This is Matisse's “lightest” phase: after wartime gloom and Cubist geometry of 1914—1917 — a return to decorativeness, ornament, warm light. The painting passed through several collections (among others Frédéric Lung, an Alsatian merchant settled in Algeria) and entered the French national museums in 1961. Modest size — this is no longer the monumental decoration of Gallery I but an intimate, almost everyday format.

Goncharova discovered Spain in the summer of 1916: from July to September she lived in San Sebastián and travelled through the country with Diaghilev's company. From this trip began her long series of “Spanish women” — dozens of portraits of women in mantillas, lace shawls, traditional dress. This work is a characteristic example of what critics called femme-cathédrale, “woman-cathedral”: the figure elongated to Gothic verticality, the face simplified to an immobile mask, the lace mantilla working almost like a Gothic stained-glass window. In Gallery V Goncharova's southern theme is placed beside Nice-period Matisse: both artists after the catastrophe of the First World War seek support in the traditional, warm, feminine, Mediterranean. But Goncharova goes from the Russian icon to frozen vertical severity, while Matisse goes from planar geometry to decorative abundance.

Matisse spent several weeks in Seville and Granada in the winter of 1910—1911; the impression of Spain stayed with him for years — hence the series of “Spanish women” to which this work belongs. A young woman in traditional Spanish dress with a fan stands in a richly decorative interior: red Persian carpet, patterned wallpaper, gilded furniture. The composition is almost ritual: frontal figure, clear contour, ornament covering the whole plane without pause. Beside Goncharova's Espagnole this is the same theme but a different strategy: Goncharova goes from the Russian icon and frozen severity, Matisse from decorative abundance and saturated flatness. The painting has been on permanent deposit at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux since 1961; it came to Barcelona from there.

One of the first works for which Lydia Delectorskaya posed — a Russian émigrée who became Matisse's assistant in 1934 and his main model from 1935 to 1939. After the dense decorative Matisse of the 1920s here is a sharp turn to graphic simplicity: contour almost pencil-like, volume removed, the pink body dissolving smoothly into the striped fabric of the armchair. During the work Matisse photographed each stage — up to 22 images survive. From them you see how he gradually moved the figure closer to the viewer and cropped the frame tighter until there was literally “too much of her for the canvas”. This is already a new phase: Matisse stops describing the model and begins compressing her to a sign. A device that ten years later would lead him to cut-paper gouaches.

Painted in parallel with Nu rose assis and shares with it the same model (Lydia Delectorskaya) and the same blue checked sofa cover. The figure lies with eyes closed, head on a bent arm, body compressed to a dense fused mass — almost the pose of a sleeping infant. Matisse brought the painting to this state through a series of intermediate stages traceable today in archive photographs: he gradually enlarged the face until the “serene expression” spread across almost the whole canvas. Blue-pink palette, refusal of modelling, pure contour — this is already almost an iconographic sign: the body as symbol of rest. According to Delectorskaya's memoirs, Matisse worked on the painting several hours a day, not letting it dry between sessions, and finished on the day of his sixty-sixth birthday.

Wartime Paris, occupation nearing its end, four months before liberation. In these years Picasso shut himself in his studio on rue des Grands-Augustins and painted a series of harsh still lifes in which everyday objects (candle, coffee pot, saucepan, fruit) become almost symbolic signs of the time. Turquoise ground, clear black grid of contours, flat colour fields — still Cubist language, but already softened and emotionally charged. On the wall behind — an empty yellow frame with a white rectangle: a Picasso reference to conversation with Matisse, for whom the “painting within a painting” from the same year became a recurring motif. Placed in one gallery with Matisse's works of 1935, it shows: two rivals, having passed through the war, find themselves again in the same direction — where painting reclaims the right to be slow, quiet, contemplative.

Bonnard painted this canvas at his villa Le Bosquet in Le Cannet on the Côte d'Azur; the model was his lifelong companion Marthe de Méligny. The composition is almost cinematic: view from above, figure cut by the edge of the canvas, bathroom tiles, rug, clothes on a chair, shutters — everything enters the frame like a photographic record. Bonnard's colour “vibration” — small strokes of warm and cool tones not mixing on the canvas — creates the effect that light in this room hangs in the air like a dense humid cloud. In the “Classical modernities” gallery Bonnard stands as parallel to Nice-period Matisse: the same southern light, the same domestic theme, the same refusal of avant-garde noise, but with a far warmer, Cézanne-like gaze. The friends corresponded until Bonnard's death (1947) — and for Matisse Bonnard was the “only one” worth having a conversation about painting with.

In 1943 publisher Efstratios Tériade commissioned an illustrated book from Matisse. After surgery in 1941 the artist was confined to a chair and could no longer stand at the easel — but found a new tool: scissors. On large sheets pre-painted with gouache he cut figures and colour shapes directly with scissors and then arranged them in composition. The resulting book of 20 plates appeared in 1947 in an edition of 250 copies. The edition was printed in pochoir — a stencil technique where each colour is applied through a separate template; this preserved the density and saturation of the original gouache. Icare is the eighth plate of the book: a falling bird-man with a red dot of heart in a black silhouette against yellow flashes and starry sky. One of the most piercing pages: the ancient myth of the fall made almost like a child's collage — but with the weight of death passed through the war (the book was conceived during the occupation). After Jazz the cut-paper gouache method became Matisse's main one until the end of his life. In Gallery VII the entire series of 20 plates is exhibited in full.

Painted in Nice in autumn 1941, immediately after surgery for intestinal cancer that permanently changed Matisse's physical working regime. On green marble painted in schematic strokes are arranged a jug, glass, bowl of fruit, pears, lemon — each object reduced almost to a sign. Matisse called this work his diapason — tuning fork: “everything that grips in it is of the order of music”. Modest size (46 × 38.5 cm), but in it you see the step Matisse would take next: refusal of modelling, flat local colour, contour become the main structural element. This is already almost the vocabulary of future cut-paper gouaches, but still within traditional oil technique. The painting was bought by the state in 1945 and has been in the MNAM collection since.

Painted in Paris in summer 1939 — two months before the start of the Second World War and at the most anxious moment of the interwar pause. A young woman in a red dress sits at a table reading; before her a bouquet of daisies and scabiosa in a green vase, in the mirror behind — her reflection and the figure of a nude model from the studio, turned into a sign on a black ground. The composition Matisse calls homogeneous space gathers elements from different “universes” (real room, reflection, drawing on the wall, two blue squares as colour samples) into one plane where they become equal. The black ground is not threatening — it works like a theatrical pause on which the red figure, green vase, white bouquet are lit. This work is a transitional moment: all the Nice decorativeness of the 1920s—30s is already reduced, everything superfluous cut away, and only one decade remains until the first major cut-paper gouache (La Tristesse du roi, 1952).

Alain Jacquet (1939—2008) — one of the founders of French Mec Art (“mechanical art”), a direction in which artists work not with a brush but with printing and mechanical processes. In 1962—1964 Jacquet made a Camouflages series: he took famous masterpieces and overlaid them with camouflage pattern. In spring 1963 he took on Matisse's Le Luxe I (1907 — it is in Gallery II). The idea: on an “imperfect copy” of the Matisse canvas camouflage is laid, its colours matched to those of the original. The result is a riddle: to see Matisse you must make him out through the masking grid — and the masking itself consists of the same Matisse colours. Pop Art meets conceptual critique of the museum canon here: the “holy” Matisse turned into military fabric or wallpaper. The painting size almost matches the original (203 × 144 against 210 × 138 cm) — Jacquet literally “takes the place” of the classic. Acquired by the Centre Pompidou in 2011.

A painting-object exhibited during the third “Manifestation” of the BMPT group (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni) in June 1967 at the Musée des Arts décoratifs theatre — characteristically, in the very museum where six years earlier Matisse's landmark exhibition Les grandes gouaches découpées had taken place. Buren took ready-made awning fabric with regular 8.7 cm vertical stripes and painted two outer stripes white — that is the “work”. The BMPT quartet hung the painting on stage instead of a curtain; viewers waited 45 minutes, then learned from a leaflet that the performance had been running all that time. Buren's conceptual gesture connects to Matisse's legacy through the idea of “active whiteness of support”: both Matisse and Buren see untouched ground as an independent pictorial element, not neutral void. But if for Matisse white is space for gesture, for Buren it is a generalised “sign of painting” altogether.

One of the leaders of American Abstract Expressionism. His signature device — the zip, a vertical stripe cutting through a colour field. Here — a large white canvas with a single ochre stripe along the right edge. The enigmatic title “Not There — Here” refers to a “non-place” suited to contemplation; by another reading it describes the stripe's position — not in the centre but to the side. The link with Matisse is not direct but structural: Newman saw Matisse's Porte-fenêtre à Collioure (1914 — it is in Gallery IV) at the Art Institute of Chicago and himself said Matisse's central black rectangle gave him a model of “colour field as presence”. Vertical stripe, shift of composition to the side, open neutral field — all of this can be read as Newman's response across the Atlantic to the radical step Matisse took and immediately retreated from.