新部落
I think, therefore I am. - René Descartes
Great Leap Forward: Matisse in Chicago
By Richard Lacayo
April 12, 2010
To restore Matisse to us in all his glorious difficulty is the public service performed by "Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917," a spectacular new show that can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago until June 20 and then moves to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Why focus on just four years? Because they were a moment when Matisse fundamentally reinvented painting. His works of that period — there are almost 120 in the show, including canvases, prints, drawings and sculptures — truly were radical inventions, new answers to the fundamental question of how to construct a picture. They were also, no surprise, considered ugly and incomprehensible in their time. Matisse once said he wanted viewers to feel about his art the way they would about "a comfortable chair" — an odd sentiment from a man whose art was more like an electric chair.
The 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.
And even as he struggled to gain a wider public, Matisse was losing his position
as leader of the Parisian avant-garde to Picasso, 12 years his junior. Young
artists were fascinated by the militant astringency of Cubism and its systematic
means of exploding form and space. Compared with the bristling brown surfaces in
Picasso and Braque, even Matisse's fiercest pictures, with their dizzying color,
could look a bit "decorative" — a dismissive word thrown at him all the time.
To be regarded as old hat was something new for Matisse. He had made his name in
the preceding decade as the most dauntless of the Fauves — the Wild Beasts — a
small group of painters who pushed the telegraphic brushwork of Impressionism
and the dissonant palette of post-Impressionism into fever territory. At their
head was Matisse, King of the Beasts, building pictures out of colliding zones
of pyrotechnic color or from staccato dashes of magenta and ultramarine.
When he was through with the hectic charms of Fauvism, Matisse moved to distill
and stabilize his art by conjuring up a stripped-bare world of preclassical
antiquity, a place that was one part arcadia, one part Land That Time Forgot. In
enigmatic pictures like Bathers with a Turtle, from 1908, bluntly rendered
figures were disposed among wide, flat bands of nearly abstract blue and green
that signified — just barely — land, sea and air.
Art During Wartime
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 stranded behind enemy lines and his brother sent to a prison camp. In Paris
on many nights, the booming of German artillery was audible in the distance.
These were the conditions under which Matisse began to produce pictures based on
what he called the "methods of modern construction." Struggling to mount a
personal response to the challenge of Cubism, he approached the very edge of
abstraction. Things and people were reduced to concise signs of themselves, but
in the end Matisse always remained attached to the visible world. Just look at
Goldfish and Palette, from 1914, in which light and shadow, form and space, are
distilled into ambiguous stage flats. Is that black strip down the center of the
painting a wall or a shadow? Actually, it's the central mullion of a window and
its shadow, widened and dislocated by perception and imagination. Planes of pure
color pressed tight against the surface of the picture, those passages of black,
white and blue don't so much depict light and shadow as conduct their essences
into the canvas. At the same time, they act as compositional load bearers,
structuring the picture into geometric zones that frame the fish bowl, the
highly abstracted orange fish and, to the right, the painter's white palette
with his thumb stuck through it.
Even in his portraits, like The Italian Woman, Matisse could almost entirely
transform the sitter, because he was confident that feeling in a painting was
conveyed not by physical appearance or facial expression but by the sum of the
impressions created by line and color. Often he began a picture with something
like a realistic scene, then distilled it repeatedly. This is what happened with
his magnificent Bathers by a River. When he started the large wall painting in
1909, it was a panorama of voluptuous women in bright colors. When he finished
it seven years later, the women were angular and anonymous, the setting
radically flattened, and the river had become another of those vertical black
bands, with a stark white snake shooting upward along it like a bent poker.
In 1917 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 all.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1977111-1,00.html
謝謝你的好意，蘇鄉！我自己倒不記得我的個人資料上是這個月的 － cyber birthday.
泰國麵我去看了，看上去很可口，很能引起食欲。但好像程序也很複雜，難怪家長用了一個多小時的時間操辦。也許我會找家泰餐館試試，或幹脆就陽春一下得了。:-)再次謝謝你的有心。
"過生日總得意思意思吧", 給你出個主意，當然，若覺得太複雜，那再改成“陽春麵”也不遲:))
http://blog.wenxuecity.com/blogview.php?date=201004&postID=33743
E君，祝你生日快樂！
Hummmmm，“文化人“的確是一個很模糊的概念，好象人們總是把喜歡藝術的人稱為“文化人“，能欣賞藝術的人就是有”文化品位“，等等。但是，最好還是不要讓梁實秋來評論，我擔心他會把文化人糟蹋個一塌糊塗，盡管他自己也是一文化人。:-)
河畔的沐浴者，一幅花了七年時間完成的作品，除了線條，布局和色彩，還真不得不令人好奇畫家本身融入在作品中的那些創作想象和情緒。
對了，說到文化人，究竟怎麽個定義法呢？ 梁實秋先生會不會有什麽高見？:))
哇，ZZ的姑姑是文化人啊！
馬蒂斯的作品在許多地方都看過（但亞特蘭大 High Museum 沒有去過）， 都已經不記得了。這幾幅的確沒有一點印象，雖然灰暗，顏色倒也和諧，但吸引我的是線條和布局，尤其是幾個女人海邊洗浴的那幅（第二幅）,視覺上很舒服， 甚至連那條蛇看上去也簡約到不讓人生厭。另外，這幾幅的共同特點是在色彩的運用上好象沒有一點“野獸派”的味道，可能這就是文章作者所說的馬蒂斯的“大躍進“吧。幾幅畫看上去都生機盎然，隻是那位意大利女人麵相有一點陰鬱。:-)
文章轉發給ZZ的姑姑了，她對塞尚和馬蒂斯的畫有過一段時間的專門研究。 她自己也曾收集了不少當時在北大附近一些年輕freelance畫家的作品。 還曾在網上作了個畫廊，當時（十多年前）我對那些畫的印象就是兩個字：頹廢。 可她自己不這麽認為，記得她說她畫中看到的是中不懈的精神，畢竟她跟那些藝術家接觸得較多，她承認那些作品不會被多數人認可，但祈求終有一日會有人去發掘出那份鍥而不舍的才華來，似乎至今還沒能遇到Sergei Shchukin這樣的人 :)) 她自己也畫
記得最初是在MOMA看到馬蒂斯的作品，當時就對他的色彩留下很深刻的印象，不過這裏介紹的幾幅還真的不了解，帶著戰爭的陰影？ 那些灰暗絕對不是他鼎盛時期的風格。
這麽些年來看美展真不多，去很多地方多半是避開美展，因為小家夥沒耐心。 最近一次是在亞特蘭大High Museum. 很喜歡那裏，不知e君到過沒有。