“Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913‱917” is an ambitious exhibition that investigates a pivotal point in the career of Henri Matisse (1869‱954) through nearly 120 of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from this five-year period, and the immediately preceding years.
On view from July 18 to October 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, it is the first exhibition devoted to the work of this important period in Matisse’s career, and thoroughly explores his working processes and the revolutionary experimentation of what he called his “methods of modern construction.”
Organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition is curated by John Elderfield, chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and Stephanie D’Alessandro, the Gary C. and Frances Comer curator of Modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“Radical Invention” examines Matisse’s production from his return to Paris from Morocco in 1913 to his departure for Nice in 1917, which comprises a major turning point in the artist’s career. Over these five years, he developed his most demanding, experimental and enigmatic works: paintings that are abstracted and rigorously purged of descriptive detail, geometric and sharply composed, and dominated by blacks and grays.
Previously considered mainly as responses to Cubism or World War I, works from this period are reassessed and presented in this exhibition as the products of one of the most significant chapters in Matisse’s evolution as an artist.
A highlight of the exhibition is the Art Institute’s monumental painting “Bathers by a River,” 1909‱0, 1913, 1916‱7, which has been the subject of extensive art-historical, archival and scientific research into Matisse’s working methods. A painting that Matisse worked on repeatedly over a period of many years, “Bathers by a River” provides the key to the development of the artist’s revolutionary style during this time.
Over the course of four years, Art Institute curators and conservators wedded new archival information and new imaging technologies to uncover the history of this painting’s evolution and its surprising connections with other works, most significantly MoMA’s “The Moroccans,” 1915‱6, and “The Piano Lesson,” 1916.
The museum has likewise engaged in an investigation of works in its collection, and, through this partnership, discovered new information about Matisse’s working methods, notably the extended processes of revision in composition, color and form in the creation of these highly ambitious paintings.
Building on this research, the exhibition showcases a wide range of Matisse’s paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints primarily from 1913 to 1917, along with a prelude of important compositions on the “Bathers” theme, including the famous “Blue Nude,” 1907, and “Bathers with a Turtle,” 1908.
Also included in the exhibition are such celebrated 1914 paintings as “Interior with Goldfish,” “Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg” and the highly abstracted “French Window at Collioure” and “View of Notre Dame.” Also represented are the artist’s sculptures “Back I,” “II,” “III,” “IV,” and his etchings, engravings and monotypes.
This latter method of printmaking was employed by Matisse only during the 1913‱7 period. The exhibition also includes a special presentation of Matisse’s little-known prints dedicated to the “Civil Prisoners of Bohain-en-Vermandois,” a group of works the artist sold to the collector Jacques Doucet in order to provide aid for those in his northern France hometown caught behind enemy lines during World War I.
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