Lot 32 : Henri Matisse1869-1954 anemones au miroir noir

Henri Matisse - 1869-1954

Auction Location: United States of America - 1998
Please sign in or subscribe to Artfact Professional or Artfact Fine Art to see auction date and house information.

Please sign in or subscribe to Artfact Professional or Artfact Fine Art to view enlarged images.

Description:

Henri Matisse 1869-1954 ANEMONES AU MIROIR NOIR Signed Oil on canvas 26 5/8 by 21 1/8 in. 67.6 by 53.7cm. Painted in the winter of 1918-19. This striking oil is one of a series of still-lifes Matisse executed in Nice at the Hotel Mediterranee, where he had taken residence in November 1918, and where he was to spend several months at a time during the next four years. The Hotel Mediterranee (fig. 4) would become for Matisse a most fertile, expansive environment. The rooms were decorated in 19th Century Italianate style, and were bathed with the translucent light of the Mediterranean sea wafting through large windows overlooking the Baie des Anges. Matisse was to describe it as, "An old and good hotel, of course! And what pretty Italian-style ceilings! What tiling! It was wrong to demolish the building. I stayed there four years for the pleasure of painting in an old rococo sitting room. Do you remember the light we had through the shutters? It came from below as if from theater footlights. Everything was fake, absurd, amazing, delicious" (Henri Matisse, The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1939, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986-87, p. 24). The motif of the elongated vase of flowers in front of an oval mirror, explored in the present composition, appears in several other oils executed at the time, such as Nature morte, vase de fleurs, citrons et mortier and Vase de fleurs sur la coiffeuse, lit reflete dans le miroir (fig. 3). In this work Matisse places the vase of sprawling anemones on a table patterned with subdued tones of neutral gray, black and white. Behind the flowers, the gold-framed mirror mysteriously portrayed in black gleams against the subtly patterned pastel walls. The swirling complexity of Matisse's spatial organization of the decorative elements is heightened by the unceasing play between light and darkness. Although the objects painted are set in an enclosed, windowless space, the soft winter light of the Mediterranean is present in the gleaming touches of white paint Matisse added to the composition. The innovative use of black in Matisse's work, a color virtually absent in his pre-war pictures and here masterfully employed to render the mirror that occupies a significant part of the composition, was first noted by Renoir. During one of Matisse's visits to Cagnes, where the older artist was living at the time, Renoir remarked: "In all truthfulness, I don't like what you do. I'd almost like to say that you are not a good painter... but one thing prevents me from doing this: when you put black on the canvas it stays in its plane. All my life, I thought that one couldn't use it without breaking the chromatic unity of the surface. It is a tint that I have banished from my palette. As for you, using a colored vocabulary, you introduce black and it holds. So, in spite of my feeling, I think that you are most surely a painter" (Matisse, The Early Years in Nice, 1916-1930, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986-87, p. 20). Matisse's fascination with the Mediterranean light is expounded in a letter he wrote in 1918 to his friend and fellow painter Charles Camoin: "It's like a paradise you have no right to analyze, but you are a painter for God's sake! Nice is so beautiful! A light so soft and tender, despite its brilliance. I don't know why it reminds me of the Touraine... The Touraine light is a little more golden; here it is silvery. Even though the objects it touches have rich colors - the greens, for example, I often break my back trying to paint them" (Jack Flam, Matisse, A Retrospective, New York, 1988, p. 170). Matisse's credentials as a master of still-life had been hard won. As a student he spent hours in the Louvre copying some of the greatest still-lifes of the golden age of Dutch seventeenth century art. He was also familiar with the work of Chardin, from whom he learned the potential poignancy of apparently simple, everyday subjects. Schneider records several early canvases in which Matisse learned the rudimentary basis of still-life (Pierre Schneider, Henri Matisse, Paris, 1984, p. 35). Schneider demonstrates that Matisse was fully aware of the enormous challenges of this genre. He states: "The still-life painter must thus manoeuvre between two incompatible terms, objectivity and subjectivity, or, to borrow Claude Levi-Stauss's terms, 'nature' and 'culture'. Incidentally, the ethnologist's definition of the artist applies admirably to the still-life painter: 'He is someone who draws the object to language... He stands in front of an object, and an extraction takes place, a drawing forth, that turns this object, which was a natural being, into a cultural being'... The method most generally followed- including by Matisse- consists in imposing on the objects that are to be reproduced relationships that coincide with those required by the composition of the painting; a jug next to a glass, a coffee pot beside a lemon, a porcelain vase adjoining a piece of meat offer contrasts of straight and curved lines, of colors and values, of bright and dull, polished and coarse surfaces. The 'marriages of objects' of which Matisse speaks are forced marriages. They substitute an aesthetic figure for the unruly exteriority of things" (Schneider, ibid., p. 33). Matisse shared Manet's conviction that "still-life is the touchstone of painting" (Schneider, ibid., p. 41). Ever since the Impressionists (figs. 5 and 6) had invested the genre of still-life with new urgency it had been a subject through which artists would often embark upon their most radical voyages of discovery, from Cezanne and Van Gogh to Picasso and Braque. Cezanne was the spiritual father of Matisse, and this work shows clearly Matisse's profound admiration for the master. Matisse lived by his own, oft-repeated motto that "Cezanne was right, I am right" and owned a number of works by Cezanne, which served to confirm his faith in his own direction as an artist. Matisse shared Cezanne's custom of repeatedly using the same, favored objects, such as the vase holding the flowers and the mirror in this composition. In essence these familiar objects become extensions of the artist's life, of the self and are almost like objectified self-portraits or, at any rate, portraits of the artist's daily life during his sojourn in the south of France. In this work Matisse elevated the genre of still-life to new heights. By 1912 he had demonstrated in his work that simple objects placed in a suitable setting could transcend their subject when he painted them and achieve a previously undreamed-of sublimity. His uncanny ability to create harmonies of color and form remained with him throughout his career. With still-life there was none of the formal restraint often imposed by the need to attend to the proportions of the human figure. Still-life allowed Matisse to delight in his subject, as is clearly the case with this painting, in which he combines an eloquent strength of composition with sophisticated and daring application of blocks of color. Provenance: Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist on March 20, 1919) L'Art Moderne (acquired from the above on April 29, 1927) Valentine Dudensing, New York The Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1927) Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (by exchange, February 1947) Acquired by Reader's Digest in 1947 Exhibited: Paris, Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Oeuvres Recentes de Henri Matisse, 1919, no. 32 Washington, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Leaders of French Art Today, 1927 Washington, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Tri-Unit Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, 1928 New York, Century Club, 1930 Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, 1930 Rochester, New York, Rochester Museum, 1931 New York, Museum of Modern Art, Henri Matisse Retrospective Exhibition, 1931, no. 51 Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, 1931, no. 23 Pennsylvania Museum of Art, 1933 Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, 1941 New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Paintings, 1898 - 1939, 1943, no. 11 Buffalo, Albright-Knox Gallery; Cincinnati, Art Museum; St. Louis, The City Art Museum; Washington, D.C., French Embassy (n.d.), French Paintings of the Twentieth Century, 1944-45, no. 41 New York, M. Knoedler and Co., Inc., Reader's Digest Collection, 1963, p. 22 Tokyo, Palaceside Building, Forty Paintings from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1966, no. 18 New York, Wildenstein & Co. (traveling exhibition), Selections from The Reader's Digest Collection, 1985-86, pp. 38-39 Paris, Musee Marmottan, Extraits de la Collection du Reader's Digest, 1986 Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Henry Matisse: The Early Years in Nice 1916-1930, 1986-87, no. 55 (as Anemones and Mirror) Auckland City Art Gallery, The Reader's Digest Collection: Manet to Picasso, 1989, pp. 44-45 Literature: Duncan Phillips, The Artist Sees Differently, New York, 1931, illustrated pl. CXXI Alfred H. Barr Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, pp. 205, 207 Elie Faure, Histoire de l'art, l'art moderne, Paris, 1926, illustrated p. 459 Malcolm Vaughan,"Matisse, The Brilliant Designer,"Reader's Digest Family Treasury of Great Painters and Great Paintings, Pleasantville, 1965, illustrated p. 28 Guy-Patrice and Michel Dauberville, Matisse, vol. 2, Paris, 1995, no. 269, illustrated p. 725.