In 1930 it legislated Henri Matisse In the execution of a large mural entitled “The Dance”, commissioned by the American collector Albert C. Barnes, he began experimenting with methods that would change the nature of his art until his death, using pre-cut and colored paper in a composition that created a new style of bold shapes.
This phase came after the decline of the experience French artist (1869 – 1954), who was one of the most famous symbols of European artistic modernity, decided to leave Paris In the twenties he resides in the city of Nice, and devotes himself to drawing portraits of women and other themes, until he makes a qualitative change in the treatment of color and in the techniques used after the age of sixty.
Until the twenty-ninth of next January, the exhibition “Matisse in the Thirties”, inaugurated on the nineteenth last month, continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the state of Pennsylvania, and includes about one hundred and forty works.
In the last three weeks prior to its opening, the French artist’s gallery played a role in bringing back one hundred and eighty museum workers who had struck; His administration was forced to improve wages and work performance, on the one hand due to union pressure, and on the other due to the impossibility of abandoning the exhibition scheduled for more than a year.
He used decorative fabrics in his paintings after visiting cities of the Islamic world
The first section of the exhibition illuminates the period between 1917 and 1930 in order to defend Matisse’s privacy through his use of decorative fabrics and other elements of Islamic art that he discovered in countries he visited such as Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco. and Mali, and has appeared in several of his paintings; These include “The Three Sisters” (2017) and “A Woman in a Hat” (1927).
The second section examines the renewal of his Matisse art in the 1930s in two parallel projects; The “Dance” mural in its three parts, which reaches a height of eleven feet and includes six dancers in gray, blue, pink and black, was his first work, which he began photographing the stages of its realization up to his completion in 1933 In the same period he presents his first illustrated book, which includes twenty-nine black type A engravings, alongside poems by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, executed in a simple and elegant way with precise layouts.
The exhibition includes the studies carried out by the artist before and during his work on the mural “Danza”, which is a development of an ancient work of the same name dating back to 1910, and the previous sketches, using pencil, gouache and oil, and presented by a short film about how Matisse drove his final project in He rented a garage in Nice and used it as a studio.
The third section is aimed at the nude drawings presented by the artist in the 1930s, characterized by boldness and primitiveness, such as the painting “Naked Lying on Her Back”, which he executed in oil on canvas, highlighting a woman lying next to a chair and a vase, but her facial and body expressions have multiple interpretations, as well as other paintings, including Drawings of fashionable models dressed in modern clothing, works with mirrors, large plants, home decor and flowers trying to illustrate Matisse’s decorative concept of the image.
