Henri Matisse's Gallery
Friday, November 13, 2020
Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Barnes Foundation
Merion, Pennsylvania
- 181 works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
- 69 by Paul Cézanne,
- 59 by Henri Matisse,
- 46 by Pablo Picasso,
- 21 by Chaim Soutine,
- 18 by Henri Rousseau,
- 16 by Amedeo Modigliani,
- 11 by Edgar Degas,
- 7 by Vincent Van Gogh,
- 6 by Georges Seurat,
- as well as numerous other masters, including Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, El Greco, Francisco Goya, Edouard Manet, Jean Hugo, Claude Monet
- The son of a poverty-stricken Civil War veteran, he grew up in the verminous, squatter slums of Philadelphia, with a burning determination to get rich.
- Argyrol was an instant and worldwide success, and Barnes was a millionaire before he was 35. In 1928, with superb timing, Barnes sold out Argyrol for an estimated $4,000,000, not long before the discovery of antibiotics, which largely replaced it.
- Guided by his lifelong friend, Artist William Glackens, Barnes began to buy up French impressionist paintings by the boatload.
- Although many of his early purchases were mistakes, he showed taste and a fine instinct for good investment. He was one of the discoverers of Modigliani. In one moment of sound judgment he bought 60 Soutines for $50 apiece—long before Soutine was well known.
- In time Barnes assembled the world's greatest collection of Matisses, the largest group of Cezannes outside the Louvre, and over $50 million worth of art by Picasso, Braque, Gauguin, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ben Shahn.
- When his collection outgrew his home and factory, Barnes built a marble temple to house it in suburban Merion, surrounded the place with ferocious police dogs and a ten-foot "spite wall."
Saturday, July 17, 2010
‘Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917′ at MoMA (through October 11, 2010)
The new show covers the years between Matisse’s return from Morocco to Paris in 1913 to his departure to Nice in 1917. The show features nearly 110 of Matisse’s works, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings. According to the biography “The Unknown Matisse,” by Hilary Spurling, the artist often compared his development to that of a seed. “It’s like a plant that takes off once it is firmly rooted,” he said.
During the years covered by the show, Matisse was a man in motion, moving from one city to another, one model to the next, veering from almost undiluted abstraction to a sensual naturalism. He repeatedly reworked his canvases to find fresh ways to give form to his evolving ideas. He was inspired and challenged by the world around him–the Cubism championed by Picasso, the Moorish architecture from his travels in Spain and Morocco, even the Notre Dame Cathedral visible from his studio window in Paris.
According to the book “Matisse and Picasso: The Story Of Their Rivalry And Friendship,” by Jack Flam, Matisse once said “One can’t live in a house too well kept. One has to go off into the jungle to find simpler ways which won’t stifle the spirit.”
Matisse was searching for something deeper than what could be seen on the surface. In Spurling’s book “Matisse the Master,” she quotes the artist as saying of photography that “Its real service was in showing that the artist was concerned with something other than external appearance.”
The exhibition begins on July 18 and is on display through October 11.