The Art Program sponsored a group field trip to the Indianapolis Museum of Art on October 31 to see the excellent exhibition Matisse: Life in Color. Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art. The works shown were collected by the Cone sisters of Baltimore. The daughters of a German immigrant to America, Claribel and Etta Cone were among the first to collect works by Matisse and Picasso.
The exhibition has a fine selection of works from different periods of his life, including his Fauve period (1905-1907). A critic named this style due to the violent choice of colors and aggressive method of applying paint (Fauve is French for “wild beast”). As he progressed through his career, his work became more abstracted (flattened in appearance, with simplified subject matter. Among his themes are landscapes, portraits and still life (arrangements of objects on a tabletop).
Much of his late work is very design-oriented. Confined to a wheelchair, he would paint pieces of paper with gouache (watercolor with china white added to create an opaque color); then he would cut the paper into shapes and arrange them into compositions.
View of Matisse’s famous Large Pink Nude – to the right are a series of photographs documenting his artistic process.
Example of Matisse’s late design-oriented work.