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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street (between Mission and Howard Streets)
San Francisco
415-357-4000
Matisse: Painter As Sculptor
June 9-September 16, 2007

Matisse: Painter as Sculptor features more than 150 works in a variety of media to illustrate the artist’s inventiveness, dexterity, and historical significance. Side-by-side presentations of two- and three-dimensional pieces showcase the way themes, imagery, and processes overlapped in Matisse’s studio practice, while a selection of works by the artist’s peers — including Constantin Brancusi, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin, among other modern masters — provides a vivid context for considering Matisse’s oeuvre.

Matisse: Painter as Sculptor is organized thematically around a core group of more than 40 of Matisse’s sculptural masterpieces, which are complemented by a selection of related works on paper, paintings, and original photographs of the artist in his studio. These integrated groupings illuminate the evolution of Matisse’s sculptural ideas and his complex creative process. The exhibition explores how the artist’s drawings may have developed through sculpture and how sculpture may have influenced his painting. Matisse’s bronze sculpture Reclining Nude I (Aurora) (1907) appears alongside the painting Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907), a canvas that the artist was painting during a key and difficult moment in the modeling of the sculpture. The painted and sculpted representations of the reclining female nude evolved together and were inextricably linked. Other exhibition highlights include the bronze sculptures Madeleine I (1901) and Madeleine II (1903), the five portrait busts of Jeanette (1910–14), and the monumental series of four bronze reliefs known as The Backs (1909–30), Matisse’s most sustained exploration of the reduction and abstraction of the human form.

Born Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started painting during a period of convalescence following an attack of appendicitis, and discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. In 1891 he returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, he made colour a crucial element of his paintings from the start. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac.

His first exhibition was in 1901 and his first solo exhibition in 1904. His fondness for bright and expressive colour became more pronounced after he moved southwards in 1905 to work with André Derain and spent time on the French Riviera. The paintings of this period are characterized by flat shapes and controlled lines, with expression dominant over detail. He became known as a leader of the Fauves (wild beasts), a group of artists which also included Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck. The decline of the Fauvist movement after 1906 did nothing to affect the rise of Matisse; many of his finest works were created between 1906 and 1917 when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse. Matisse had a long association with the art collector Sergei Shchukin. He made one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin.

He was a friend as well as rival of his younger contemporary Picasso, to whom he is often compared. A key difference between them is that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lifes, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors.

Matisse lived in Cimiez on the French Riviera, now a suburb of the city of Nice, from 1917 until his death in 1954. His work of the decade or so following this relocation shows a relaxation and a softening of his approach. This "return to order" is characteristic of much art of the post-World War I period, and can be compared with the neoclassicism of Picasso and Stravinsky, and the return to traditionalism of Derain. After 1930 a new vigour and bolder simplification appear. In 1941 he was diagnosed with cancer and, following surgery, he started using a wheelchair. Matisse did not allow this setback to halt his work, and with the aid of assistants he set about creating cut paper collages, often on a large scale, called gouaches découpés. His Blue Nudes series feature prime examples of this technique; these demonstrate the ability to bring his eye for colour and geometry to a new medium of utter simplicity, but with playful and delightful power.

The first painting of Matisse acquired by a public collection was Still Life with Geranium in 1910, today exhibited in the Pinakothek der Moderne.

Today, a Matisse painting can fetch as much as US $17 million. In 2002, a Matisse sculpture, Reclining Nude I (Dawn), sold for US $9.2 million, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Matisse's son, Pierre Matisse, during the 1930s went on to open an important modern art gallery in New York City. Pierre Matisse represented and exhibited many European artists in New York for the first time. He exhibited Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, André Derain, Yves Tanguy, Paul Delvaux, Wilfredo Lam, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Balthus, Leonora Carrington, sculptors Raymond Mason and Reg Butler, and several other important artists, including the work of Henri Matisse. His grandson, Paul Matisse, is an artist and inventor living in Massachusetts.