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How Pierre Matisse stole the idea of ​​modern art

2021-06-20T23:29:27.985Z


An exhibition in Nice recalls the figure of the gallery owner who defended European art in New York when the cultural capital of the world was still Paris


France leaves the black year of the covid behind and begins the summer exhibition season with force.

Pierre Matisse, a New York art dealer

,

can be seen at the Matisse Museum in Nice until September 30.

The curator, Claudine Grammont, has selected 70 works by 23 artists such as Balthus, Giacometti, Léger, Masson, Miró, Chagall, Calder, Dubuffet, Millares, Saura, Tanguy or Zau Wou-Ki, the painter who unleashes passions among Chinese millionaires .

The pieces come from the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, the Ezra and David Naha collection, the Center Pompidou and private collections.

More information

  • Miró's unpublished letters to Pierre Matisse

  • PHOTO GALLERY: Pierre Matisse, a dealer in New York

Pierre, youngest son of the painter Henri Matisse, arrived in New York in 1924 fleeing from his Corsican father-in-law, who pursued him with a pistol in Paris for having broken a two-month marriage, and from the shadow of a famous father. The first was achieved when his persecutor died; the second, only half. In the 1920s New York was in art a province of Paris, money wanted to dress up in modern European culture and only a few galleries offered such

clothes

.

Matisse became associated in 1926 with another young man with a powerful father, Valentine Dudensing.

The benefits of a De Chirico exhibition and the push of his second wife, a girl from Cincinnati named Alexina

Teeny

Sattler, allowed him to open his own gallery in 1931 in an

Art Deco

building

on 57th Street, Madison Avenue corner, in where it would no longer move.

It was only two years ago that three women of New York high society, Abby Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan, had decided, over tea, to create the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Work by Georges Rouault (1871-1958), belonging to the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon, which is exhibited in the exhibition 'Pierre Matisse, a marcher d'art à New York'.Adam Rzepka / RMN-GP

The exhibition covers four stages and a section dedicated to oceanic, African and Amerindian art.

The first is the introduction in New York of modern art, with a large representation of the work of Henri Matisse, from a portrait of Pierre at age nine with a warrior's plume of feathers to

papiers collés

, together with pieces by De Chirico , Rouault, Derain, Calder, Balthus and, of course, Joan Miró, one of its lighthouses.

The second stage includes the exile of European artists in the United States.

Fabrice Flahutez recalls in the catalog the famous photo in which Matisse gathered almost all of them on the occasion of the

Artists in exile

exhibition

in 1942, from Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger to André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Pavel Tchelichew and Kurt Seligmann (Marcel Duchamp, who would later marry Teeny, did not want to date in the image). The gallerist's help was essential in getting them exhibitions and placing their pictures in museums and collectors. Especially for Tanguy, a fellow student at the Lycée Montaigne and who had married the American Kay Sage, a painter overshadowed by her husband's fame and who suffered from his alcoholic excesses, and for Joan Miró, for whom he organized exhibitions during his isolation in Franco's Spain.

Brochure of the exhibition 'Artists in Exile', 1942. In the first row, from left to right: Roberto Matta, Ossip Zadkine, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger. In the second row: André Breton, Piet Mondrian, André Masson, Amédée Ozenfant, Jacques Lipchitz, Eugène Berman. And in the third: Pavel Tchelichew and Kurt Seligmann.PML

The third stage is the change of cultural hegemony to the other side of the Atlantic. The authors of the catalog cannot avoid a certain nostalgia when noting that Matisse's enthusiastic work helped to strengthen New York to the detriment of Paris and they see the gallery owner as a hero of the resistance of the School of Paris, sponsoring the work of Dubuffet, Giacometti, Riopelle and, following Miró's advice, Manolo Millares ("there is a very interesting young Canarian", Miró tells him; "the best of them all", Jacques Dupin confirms) and Antonio Saura. In those years, French intellectuals still allowed themselves to be monolingual. Art was spoken in French and Matisse did not hesitate to endow his painters with the prestige of texts by Sartre

(The Search for the Absolute

, dedicated to Giacometti in 1948) or Camus (who wrote about Balthus in 1949).

'Semana Santa' (1968), by Marc Chagall.

An oil on canvas painting from the Center Pompidou (Paris) now exhibited in Nice.Philippe Migeat / RMN-GP

American Abstract Expressionists would express their group views by posing for

Life

magazine in 1951

(as European artists had done in

Artists in exile

in 1942

)

in protest at a Metropolitan exhibition of contemporary painting that excluded them.

They were, among others, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, and Ad Reinhardt.

That same year, Pollock, with his former patron Peggy Guggenheim in Europe, and disappointed by the gallery owner Betty Parsons, asked Matisse to hire him, and Matisse rejected him.

'Portrait of Pierre', Henri Matisse, 1909.

Catherine Dossin wonders why in the catalog.

"For Pollock," he says, "being portrayed by Pierre Matisse was not a sudden whim, but an aspiration dating back to 1947."

Not only because Parsons made them pay the expenses of the exhibition and kept a 30% commission, while Matisse bought a part of their work, assured them a personalized promotion and maintained his commitment to them, but also, according to Dossin, because Pollock wanted to find himself surrounded by artists he admired.

Pierre Matisse rejected the offer because "he had a very superficial knowledge of his work."

The fourth section of the exhibition is the consecration of the gallery owner.

When he died in 1989, 3,500 works were found in his warehouses.

The art world was already speaking in English.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2021-06-20

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