The idea for the exhibition stemmed from two suggestions: art historian André Chastel’s well-known definition of the Midi, the South of France, as the ‘great atelier of modern art’, and, at the same time, Guy de Maupassant’s famous phrase describing the Mediterranean as ‘un jardin incomparable’. Henri Matisse, painter of joie de vivre, becomes the leitmotif of a geographical and chronological journey through the revolutions that transformed art from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, expressed in the masterpieces acquired by the City of Venice for the International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca' Pesaro.
The journey starts from the wild coasts of Northern France, the cradle of Symbolism and Impressionism, and arrives in the South. The Midi and the Mediterranean allow Matisse and his colleagues to unleash colour and light, exploring new forms of expression. This is where the revolution of the Fauves – the beasts, the savages – of which Matisse is the protagonist, comes to life. It then continues as far as the coasts of Corsica, Italy, Morocco and Algeria, enriching itself with new creative ideas: arabesques, ornaments and fascinating odalisques.
Modernity comes from the sea is the title – an ironic but truthful one – of the first room that presents the visual revolutions on which Matisse cut his teeth: on the one hand Symbolism and early Impressionism of Eugène Boudin’s North Sea paintings, up to the Post-Impressionism of Maximilien Luce’s Port of Rotterdam.
The primitive Arcadia that Matisse sought in the Midi already burst into life in his 1898 paintings, when he made a trip to Corsica that would mark him profoundly. The first work of his that we encounter in the exhibition is L’Arbre, a small oil on cardboard depicting an olive tree. The forms dissolve in
to broad brushstrokes and bright colours, representing a wild, uncontaminated, primordial nature. Thanks to the light of the Mediterranean, a ‘golden light that eliminates shadows’, as Derain wrote in a famous letter to Maurice de Vlaminck, the revolution of the South was born, which would make colour explode in the incendiary canvases created by Matisse and Derain in Collioure in 1905.
The Midi was a wild and in some ways primitive place, but it is also a cradle of antiquity. Artists sought harmony where the Mediterranean bathes ancient civilisations, the remains of the Roman Empire and classicism. Theirs was an aspiration to a golden age, as the third section of the exhibition is titled, with Virgilian tones, where happiness, tranquillity and abundance reign.
The central room of the exhibition explores the triumph of liberated colour. Enchanted by the light of the South, Matisse found an artistic refuge there in which to create his masterpieces, such as the two splendid India ink drawings from the Ca' Pesaro collections. Also exceptional are the works of his companions: André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Albert Marquet, Henri-Charles Manguin, Pierre Bonnard and Raoul Dufy.
While light and colour are the focus of the exhibition, drawing emerges as Matisse's other great passion. His trips to North Africa along the shores of the Mediterranean, are fundamental; Algeria and Morocco contribute to the liberation of colour and the emergence of the arabesque line.
Having got beyond, but not forgotten, the Fauve phase, between 1919 and 1929 came the great season of Matisse's odalisques, the protagonists of a wall of masterpieces where the Yellow Odalisque of 1937, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, stands out. It is not only the vibrant quality of the colours that is revolutionary but above all the centrality of ornament, the true protagonist of the painting. Flanking Matisse's women is the work of Pierre Bonnard, present in the exhibition with his masterpiece Nude before the Mirror of 1931.
The importance of drawing also emerges in the final goal towards which Matisse pushes his art: from the primacy of colour to that of form. This creative phase begins with the production of papiers découpés, sheets of coloured paper cut out and glued together in which the artist takes expressive synthesis to its maximum. The blue of the sea re-emerges, no longer seen through an open window but as the background for the iconic Icarus, with its red heart and stylised yellow stars. Matisse's blue, like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue (1924), expresses spirituality but also light, vitality, the fluid energy of the sky and the sea, of Nice, Tangier, Vence or Ajaccio.
From the imitators in the area of Venice, such as Renato Borsato or Saverio Barbaro, to the figurines of Chris Ofili, up to the compositions of Marinella Senatore, the dignity of the decorative, of ornament, drawing and the stylisation of the figure remains perhaps Matisse's most important legacy for the contemporary age.