Matisse & His Circles: The Bridgestone Museum spins a corporate collection around a legendary figure
Woman with Blue Bodice, 1935
I've always been a bit suspicious of corporate art collections, but Tokyo's Bridgestone Museum shows how it should be done. Rather than locked away in high-security vaults or looking down on boardrooms, the company's artistic treasures are housed in a well-designed museum that provides an oasis of culture in the white-collar wasteland on the east side of Tokyo station.
With a large permanent collection dominated by not necessarily the best works of "brand name" artists (Van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso, etc.), the main challenge is to present them in a refreshing and new way. In these terms, the exhibition "Matisse and his Circles" is a success.
As curator Akemi Shiojima emphasizes, this show is not just about Matisse. Of the 54 works in the exhibition, only 16 are by the great French painter, known mainly for his fluid lines and sense of color. Rather, the artist serves as a focal point—the hub of the wheel rather than the rim and tire, so to speak.
Because of his lengthy career (1890s-1954), innumerable contacts, and resonances and affinities with other artists, Henri Matisse is the ideal figure to unify an exhibition this diverse. There are 20 other figures, including such stylistically disparate talents as Paul Gauguin and Jackson Pollock.
The show is arranged around three artistic circles with which Matisse was involved. The first of these is the Fauvists, whose name, as with many similar movements, was originally used as an insult before becoming a badge of honour. The Fauves (or Beasts), as they were known, came to prominence for their wild use of lurid and vibrant colours. Following impressionism, this represented a further retreat from representational realism. There are several excellent examples, including Maurice de Vlaminck's Canal Boat (1905-06) and Paul Signac's Port Concarneau (1925), a later example of the pointillist style that initially provided the basis for Fauvism.
In Matisse's Nude in the Studio (1899), there is little attempt to mix and blend colours. Instead the high-key hues are each allotted their own area of the canvas, from which they seem to jostle each other in order to grab our attention. Apart from the Fauvists' delight in colour, there was little else to unite the group, and the movement soon broke up as the painters took different paths.
Like many artists of the period, Matisse became increasingly interested in the idea that a painting was not a representation of anything, but was a thing in its own right. This tendency forms the second of the circles, with works by the Cubist Georges Braque, among others.
Motifs, even portraits, became mere excuses for putting lines and colours onto the canvas, distorted to fill the space for the best aesthetic effect. The result of this approach for Matisse was Woman with Blue Bodice (1935), in which the subject's arms and shoulders are arranged in melodious curving lines.
The last of the exhibition's circles makes a sketchy attempt to connect Matisse with the more abstract and spontaneous side of art. Near the end of his career, he created designs using paper cut-outs. The most abstract of these, like IX Forms from Jazz (1947), were inspired by music. Unlike painting, where line usually precedes colour, this method allowed Matisse to create both elements simultaneously with the action of cutting. These works provide a fitting coda for an artist whose career was equally devoted to the beauty of line and the power of colour.
C.B.Liddell
Metropolis
22nd May, 2009
With a large permanent collection dominated by not necessarily the best works of "brand name" artists (Van Gogh, Renoir, Picasso, etc.), the main challenge is to present them in a refreshing and new way. In these terms, the exhibition "Matisse and his Circles" is a success.
As curator Akemi Shiojima emphasizes, this show is not just about Matisse. Of the 54 works in the exhibition, only 16 are by the great French painter, known mainly for his fluid lines and sense of color. Rather, the artist serves as a focal point—the hub of the wheel rather than the rim and tire, so to speak.
Because of his lengthy career (1890s-1954), innumerable contacts, and resonances and affinities with other artists, Henri Matisse is the ideal figure to unify an exhibition this diverse. There are 20 other figures, including such stylistically disparate talents as Paul Gauguin and Jackson Pollock.
The show is arranged around three artistic circles with which Matisse was involved. The first of these is the Fauvists, whose name, as with many similar movements, was originally used as an insult before becoming a badge of honour. The Fauves (or Beasts), as they were known, came to prominence for their wild use of lurid and vibrant colours. Following impressionism, this represented a further retreat from representational realism. There are several excellent examples, including Maurice de Vlaminck's Canal Boat (1905-06) and Paul Signac's Port Concarneau (1925), a later example of the pointillist style that initially provided the basis for Fauvism.
In Matisse's Nude in the Studio (1899), there is little attempt to mix and blend colours. Instead the high-key hues are each allotted their own area of the canvas, from which they seem to jostle each other in order to grab our attention. Apart from the Fauvists' delight in colour, there was little else to unite the group, and the movement soon broke up as the painters took different paths.
Like many artists of the period, Matisse became increasingly interested in the idea that a painting was not a representation of anything, but was a thing in its own right. This tendency forms the second of the circles, with works by the Cubist Georges Braque, among others.
Motifs, even portraits, became mere excuses for putting lines and colours onto the canvas, distorted to fill the space for the best aesthetic effect. The result of this approach for Matisse was Woman with Blue Bodice (1935), in which the subject's arms and shoulders are arranged in melodious curving lines.
The last of the exhibition's circles makes a sketchy attempt to connect Matisse with the more abstract and spontaneous side of art. Near the end of his career, he created designs using paper cut-outs. The most abstract of these, like IX Forms from Jazz (1947), were inspired by music. Unlike painting, where line usually precedes colour, this method allowed Matisse to create both elements simultaneously with the action of cutting. These works provide a fitting coda for an artist whose career was equally devoted to the beauty of line and the power of colour.
C.B.Liddell
Metropolis
22nd May, 2009
Labels
2009,
Akemi Shiojima,
Bridgestone Museum,
corporate art,
cut-outs,
Fauvism,
Matisse,
Metropolis,
Signac,
Vlaminck
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