Matisse's turn of the 1930s

About the exhibition "Matisse. Cahiers d'art, le tournant des années 1930" presented at the Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, until 29 May.

Did you know that the 1930s played a fundamental role in Matisse's work? So did the Cahiers d'art. This is what the exhibition "Matisse. Cahiers d'art, le tournant des années 1930" presented at the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris, until 29 May. An exhibition that also makes you want to go to Vézelay, in the Yonne, where the entire history of the Cahiers d'art founded by Christian Zervos (1889-1970) is written in the museum that bears his name and which is nestled in the house of the writer Romain Rolland, where the collection of modern art that the illustrious art lover of Greek origin bequeathed to the small Burgundy town that was once his own second home is also displayed.

Founded at 14 rue du Dragon, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, the "Cahiers d'art" is a magazine, a publishing house and an art gallery all in one. A must for all avant-garde artists with works of art to sell. Cahiers d'art is an almost unique model: a contemporary art magazine of the time, with a bold layout and typography, abundantly illustrated with photographs, through which every artist had to pass to gain recognition. Cahiers d'art played a decisive role in Picasso's career. But also in those of Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, René Char, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Le Corbusier, Kandinsky, Klee, Braque, Léger, Ernst, Arp, Giacometti, Miro, Calder, Gonzalez, Tanguy, Laurens, Brauner, Kelly... and thus Matisse.

In 1930, Henri Matisse (1869-1954) left France for a trip to Tahiti, thus voluntarily marking a pause in his creation and initiating a turning point in his work. The exhibition "Matisse. Cahiers d'art, le tournant des années 1930" looks back at this decisive decade. The exhibition looks at Matisse's work in the 1930s through the prism of Cahiers d'art, this major avant-garde journal. As the voice of international modernism and the aesthetic currents of his time, the magazine reports on the artist's production throughout the interwar period.

The exhibition, which brings together a group of works from this period, proposes to identify the major issues at stake. The painter's work, which had been sidelined from the art scene during the 1920s, returned to the heart of the debates on ideas and reflections of the time, through regular publications in Cahiers d'Art, which highlighted his pre-1916 painting - particularly his most radical work - and gave an account of his current production. Articles and reproductions of Matisse's works helped to rekindle the competition with Picasso. In successive issues of the magazine, Matisse appears alongside the artists of his time: Georges Braque, Juan Miro, Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky, Mondrian, Le Corbusier and Marcel Duchamp.

Several exceptional works, very rarely exhibited in France, are brought together for this exhibition, notably Le Grand nu couché de Baltimore, Le Chant de Houston and the 1938 series of Blouses roumaines (Romanian scrubs) held in various American museums. The density and complexity of this decade are suggested by sculptures, objects from Matisse's collection, drawings, engravings and paintings, as well as recent photographic prints, archives, film fragments and issues of Cahiers d'art.

Matisse boarded the liner Île de France in Le Havre on 26 February 1930, setting sail for Tahiti. "Although he had already made several trips, this one was undoubtedly the most important," writes Annick Colonna-Césari in her article for the May 2023 issue of Connaissance des arts magazine. "The painter, who had just entered his sixties, was indeed going through an inner crisis. Yet he is one of the most famous artists. The success of his interior scenes and languid odalisques continues, and three retrospectives are being prepared in Paris, Basel and New York. Despite this, he feels he is stagnating. But above all, as the journalist adds, "he can no longer paint, with a few exceptions, such as Woman with a Veil, on loan from the MoMa in New York, which opens the exhibition.

In fact, Matisse would like to turn the page on post-impressionism. He felt trapped in it since he lived in Nice. The angular contours of Woman with a Veil attest to his search for something new. So he took to the sea. "These essential 1930s were to mark a major turning point in his painting," explains Cécile Debray, president of the Musée national Picasso-Paris and curator of the exhibition, who was at the head of the Musée de l'Orangerie in 2017 when she had the idea of exploring this crucial decade, the importance of which no exhibition had yet explored.

While the Cahiers d'art regularly relayed Matisse's research, helping to reposition his works of art for sale in the international avant-garde and thus on the contemporary art market, the painter continued to seek inspiration from a hyperactive Picasso. In Tahiti, "curiously, he did not work," notes Cécile Debray. Nevertheless, he drew despite everything, collecting sketches of flowers or shells, and he took photographs. All of these motifs will reappear later in his work. Just back from Tahiti, he was invited to participate in the Carnegie Prize jury in Pittsburgh. He visited the Alfred Barnes Foundation in Merion, where some of his own paintings are on display, such as Le Bonheur de vivre (1906). It was on this occasion that Barnes commissioned him to create a fourteen-metre long decoration for the main hall of the museum.

"For an artist in search of renewal, the proposal was providential," wrote the journalist from Connaissance des Arts. "Matisse accepted it with all the more enthusiasm as he had never before tackled a mural art project. He chose dance as his theme, which appears in the background of his Bonheur de vivre, and links him to his spirited youth in Paris. In order to create this large fresco, he quickly came up with the idea of cutting out shapes from gouache paper, which his assistants placed and moved around according to his instructions. The first version was not the right size and ended up in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In 1933, Matisse finally supervised the installation of the second version of the Dance in Merion. "This work is a matrix," says Cécile Debray. "By redefining his working tools, Matisse reinvented himself to achieve more radical results. The famous Grand nu couché (Reclining Nude) lent to the exhibition by the Baltimore Museum of Art is the painting that best synthesises his new style.

Cut-out papers, Polynesian inspirations: the effects of this decade will not cease to operate in Matisse's work.

Illustration: Henri Matisse (1869-1954)
Woman with a Veil, 1927
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Succession H. Matisse / © Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence