Quantcast
Channel: Art History News
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2851

Matisse/Diebenkorn

$
0
0


The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 23, 2016-January 29, 2017
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art:March 11-May 29, 2017

Co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) October 23, 2016 –January 29, 2017, Matisse/Diebenkorn brings together 92 objects—including 36 paintings and drawings by Matisse and 56paintings and drawings by Diebenkorn—drawn from museums and private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe.

These extraordinary artwork reveals the lasting power of Diebenkorn’s firsthand experiences of the French artist’s work and present a new view of both artists. The BMA is the only East Coast venue for this ticketed exhibition.

“While much has been written about Matisse’s influence on Diebenkorn, this is the first major exhibition to illustrate the powerful influence of Matisse’s work on one of America’s most significant artists,” said Senior Curator of European Painting & Sculpture Katy Rothkopf. “We have carefully selected works by Matisse that Diebenkorn would have known, providing visitors to the BMA’s exhibition with the unprecedented opportunity to discover Matisse through Diebenkorn’s eyes.” 

Throughout his long and successful career, Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) was more inspired by Henri Matisse (1869-1954)than any other artist. 

Organized chronologically through Diebenkorn’s career, the exhibition illuminates how this influence evolved over time through different pairings and groupings of both artists’ work.

The exhibition begins in the 1940s with some of the first Matisse works that Diebenkorn saw in the Palo Alto home of Sarah Stein, one of the French artist’s first patrons. Following that introduction, hesought every opportunity to see Matisse’s work. While stationed at Quantico, Virginia, during World War II, Diebenkorn pursued a serious study of Matisse’s paintings in East Coast museums, including The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.,The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the BMA. These seminal examples introduced Diebenkorn to the motifs, palette, and techniques that would later have a tremendous resonance inhis own paintings and drawings. 

The exhibition also features outstanding examples of Diebenkorn’s Urbana and Berkeley abstractions (1953-55) that demonstrate the significant impact of his visit to a Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles in 1952. A rich selection of exceptional paintings and drawings from the artist’s representational period (1955-67) illustrate his shift from abstraction towards identifiable subject matter and are paired with some of Matisse’s own compositions that were of particular relevance.

Diebenkorn saw extensive collections of works by Matisse in the State Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin Museum during a trip to the Soviet Union in 1964. This was followed by a visit two years later to a major Matisse retrospective in Los Angeles, where he saw over 300 artworks. Two highly significant Matisse paintings that Diebenkorn saw in the 1966 retrospective are featured in the exhibition.



Henri Matisse. View of Notre Dame.1914. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©2016 Succession H. Matisse/ARS NY



Richard Diebenkorn. Ocean Park #79. 1975. Philadelphia Museum of Art. ©2016 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation


Henri Matisse. The Yellow Dress.1929-31. The Baltimore Museum of Art. ©2016 Succession H. Matisse/ARS NY



Richard Diebenkorn. Seated Figure with Hat.1967. National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C. ©2016

Diebenkorn returned to abstraction in 1967, soon after moving to Southern California and establishing a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica, where he created his most celebrated works—large-scale, color and light-filled abstractions. 

The exhibition will conclude with nine of these luminous Ocean Park paintings  (1968-80) juxtaposed with a selection of Matisse’s most influential works.

Exhibition Catalogue

A fully illustrated catalogue includes essays that examine Diebenkorn’s interactions with Matisse’s work throughout his long career by Matisse/Diebenkorn co-curators Katy Rothkopf, BMA Senior Curator of European Painting & Sculpture,and Janet Bishop, SFMOMA Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture. 

It also includes an introductory essay by John Elderfield, Allen R. Adler Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum and Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, who has curated groundbreaking exhibitions on both artists. Jodi Roberts, Halperin Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University contributes an essay regarding the relationship between Matisse’s drawings and Diebenkorn’s drawings.The exhibition catalogue will be co-published with DelMonico Books/Prestel.  


HENRI MATISSE


Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is revered as a master of color and form. Along with Pablo Picasso, he is considered one of the two foremost artists of the first half of the20th century. Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésisin northern France on December 31, 1869. The son of middle-class parents, he practiced law as a young man, but took up painting while recovering from appendicitis in 1890. Two years later, after much deliberation, Matisse gave up his law career and moved to Paris to study art. 

Matisse first studied with the academic painter Adolphe-William Bouguereau and then at the École des Beaux-Arts with Gustave Moreau, where he met many other young painters who later gained prominence with him in the Fauvist movement. Early in his career, Matisse copied Old Master paintings at the Louvre and studied contemporary art, especially the Impressionists. 

In 1899, he was drawn to the work of post-Impressionists Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne, whom he called a “god of painting.” Later Matisse became influenced by the pointillism of Paul Signac and Georges Seurat. 

As time went by, Matisse began to experiment with form and color, earning a reputation as a rebellious member of his studio classes.While visiting the Mediterranean coastal village of Collioure in 1905, Matisse began using pure primary color as a significant structural element. During that same year, he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne with his artist companions André Derain and Mauricede Vlaminck. Together, the group exploded onto the art scene and was dubbed les fauves (literally, "the wild beasts") because of their use of vivid colors and distorted shapes, and their evocative, sensual approach. While he was regarded as a leader of the radical Fauvist movement, Matisse began to gain the approval of a number of influential critics and collectors, including the American expatriate writers Gertrude and Leo Stein and their friends Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, and Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. 

Following the demise of Fauvism, Matisse continued to use color to communicate his emotions in bold patterns and striking decorations. He experimented with expressive abstraction and bold distortions, but rejected cubism in orderto develop his own ideas.In the winter of 1917, Matisse traveled to Nice, a city on the French Riviera, and became enchanted by the unique light and atmosphere of the location. Though he continued to travel throughout Europe, northern Africa, and Tahiti, the artist remained on the Riviera for most of his life, painting a series of odalisques and interior subjects then later abandoning conventional forms in favor of dramatically simplified areas of pure color, flat shape, and strong patterns. 

The Cone Collection’s great strength focuses on this remarkably prolific period of Matisse’s career. In addition to being an accomplished painter, Matisse worked across different media to further explore his complex ideas about form. His early sculpture reveals an interest in Antoine-Louis Barye, Auguste Rodin, and African art. Matisse also designed costumes and sets for the ballet,and illustrated books for writers Stéphane Mallarmé (1932) and Charles Baudelaire (1944), among many others.

When he was nearly 80, Matisse volunteered to decorate the Dominican nuns' chapel at Vence, France. In 1941, Matisse was diagnosed with cancer and became permanently confined to a wheelchair. It was in this condition that he completed the magnificent Chapel of the Rosary in Vence. Often bedridden during his last years, he occupied himself with decoupage, creating works of brilliantly colored paper cutouts arranged on a canvas surface. 

Matisse died in Nice in November1954. Unlike many artists, he was internationally popular during his lifetime, enjoying the favor of collectors, art critics, and the younger generation of artists. The largest collections of Matisse's works are in The Baltimore Museum of Art; Musée Matisse in Nice, France; Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia,Pennsylvania; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.


RICHARD DIEBENKORN

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn, Jr.(1922-1993) is one of the most acclaimed American post-war artists with a fluid and luminous style that encompassed both representational and abstract compositions. He was born in in Portland, Oregon, but when he was two years old, his father relocated the family to San Francisco. 

Diebenkorn took classes in studio art and art history at Stanford University from 1940-42 and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1943-45. While stationed in Quantico, Virginia, he visited a number of important collections of modern art, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was particularly inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne. He especially admired Matisse’s technique of structuring space through planes of color and merging indoor and outdoor space. 

Returning to San Francisco in 1946, Diebenkorn enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with David Park, an expressionist artist from the Bay Area. Awarded a fellowship the same year, he moved to Woodstock, New York, and made many contacts while visiting New York City. 

After returning to San Francisco, where he soon became a leading Bay Area artist, he was appointed to the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts in 1947, a position he held for two years. Diebenkorn had his first one-person show in 1948 at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a major accomplishment for such a young artist. 

After receiving a degree from Stanford University in 1949, he was awarded an M.F.A. from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 1951. He briefly taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana 1952-53, settling shortly thereafter in Berkeley, California. Diebenkorn often titled his works after places that provided him with inspiration, such as his Berkeley paintings. 

Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Diebenkorn followed a distinctive abstract vocabulary of forms, stylistically rooted in the New York School, placing him firmly within the ethos of American modernism. However, in 1955 he shifted from abstraction to a more representational mode, making reference to observed subjects. 

In 1964 he was invited to visit the Soviet Union on a Cultural Exchange Grant from the U.S. State Department. On that trip, he was able to see the great Matisse paintings at the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, which had been unavailable to most of the world for decades. Until 1967, when he returned to abstraction, Diebenkorn executed still-lifes, landscapes,and interior figure paintings that present his finely tuned sense of color and structure.

From 1955 to 1973, Diebenkorn taught at several California arts institutions, including a position at UCLA (1966-73) while he worked in a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica. There he created his last representational works, but returned to abstraction with his large-scale Ocean Park paintings. This series is characterized by broadly brushed surfaces of luminescent and atmospheric color, affirming the artist’s continuing concern with formal issues. These brilliantly colored abstract works—both paintings and drawings—elicited great acclaim. 

In 1976–77, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, organized a major retrospective exhibition that traveled to Washington, DC, New York City, Cincinnati, Los Angeles,and Oakland. 

By the 1980s, Diebenkorn was generally regarded as a well-established American master. His association with California would always remain, but his stature as a world-class modern artist was secure. In 1987, he and his wife left Santa Monica and moved to Healdsburg in the northern part of the state, where he worked on small-scale compositions. 

In late 1988, Diebenkorn’s works on paper were organized into a major traveling exhibition with a catalogue by the Museum of Modern Art’s curator John Elderfield. This was a landmark event for the artist and his public, as it included the entire range of his stylistic journey through the late 1980s. Diebenkorn remained a prolific artist until his death in Berkeley, California, in 1993.



Henri Matisse Sarah Stein1916 Oil on canvas 28 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. (72.4 x 56.5 cm.)San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarah and Michael Stein Memorial Collection, gift of Elise S. Haas, 1954



Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #4, 1953 Oil on canvas 66 x 49 in. (167.6 x 124.5 cm.)Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, gift of Julianne Kemper Gilliam, 1977.20



Henri Matisse Studio, Quai Saint-Michel1916 Oil on canvas58 1/4 x 46 in. (148 x 116.8 cm.)The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1940, 1307



Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #2 (The Archer)1953 Oil on canvas64 1/2 x 47 1/2 in. (163.8 x 120.7 cm.)Private collection



Richard Diebenkorn Urbana #6, 1953 Oil on canvas 69 1/4 x 58 in. (175.9 x 147.3 cm.)Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson Foundation Endowment Fund, 1996.01.P.P



Henri Matisse Interior at Nice 1919 or 1920 Oil on canvas 52 x 35 in. (132.1 x 88.9 cm.)The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, 1956.339




Richard Diebenkorn, Urbana #5 (Beach, Town), 1953, Oil on canvas, 68 x 53 1/2 in. (172.7 x 135.9 cm.), Collection of , Joann K. Phillips,



Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #5, 1953, Oil on canvas, 53 x 53 in. (134.6 , x 134.6 cm.), Private c, ollection,



Henri Matisse, Landscape: Broom, 1906, Oil on panel, 12 x 15 5/8 in. (30.5 x 39.7 cm.), San, Francisco Museum of Modern Art, b, equest of Elise S. Hass, 1991,



Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #23, 1955, Oil on canvas, 62 x 54 3/4 i, n. (157.5 x 139 , cm.), San F, rancisco Museum of Modern Art, g, ift of the Women’s Board, 1958,



Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #22, 1954, Oil on canvas, 59 x 57 in. (149.9 x 144.8 cm.), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution,, Washington, D., C., Regents Collections Acquisitions Program, 1986,



Richard Diebenkorn , Berkeley #7, 1953, Oil on canvas, 47 3/4 x 43 in. (121.3 x 109.2 cm.), Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, g, if t of Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., 1962, 



Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley , #47, 1955, Oil on canvas, 58 7/8 x 65 7/8 in. (149.5 x 167.3 , cm.), The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 




Richard Diebenkorn, Untitled (View from Studio, Ocean Park), 1969, Gouache, charcoal, and ink on paper, 17 x 13 3/4 in. (43.2 x 34.9 cm.), The Grant Family Collection,



Henri Matisse, Seated Pink Nude, 1935-, 36, Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. (92 x 73 cm.), Musée national d'art modern, e/Centre de création industrielle, Centre , Georges , Pompidou, Paris, gift 2001, AM 2001,215,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #6, 1968, Oil on canvas, 92 x 72 in. (233.7 x 182.9 cm.), Smithsonian, American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., gift of Arthur J. Levin in , memory, of his beloved wife Edith, 1999.17,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #29, 1970, Oil , and charcoal on canvas, 100 , 1/8 , x 81 , 1/8 in. (254.3 x 206.1 , cm.), Dallas Museum of Art, gift of the Meadows Foundation, Incorporate, d, 1981.106,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #27, 1970, Oil , and charcoal on canvas, 100 x 80 in. (254 x 203.2 cm.), Brooklyn Museum, gift of the Roebling Society and Mr. and Mrs. Charles H. Blatt , and Mr. and Mrs. William K. Jacobs, Jr., 72.4, 






Henri Matisse, Large Reclining Nude, 1935, Oil on canvas, 26 1/8 x 36 3/4 in. (66.4 x 93.3 cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel , Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, , BMA 1950.258,



Henri Matisse, Two Girls, Red and Green Background, 1947, Oil on canvas, 22 1/8 x 18 1/4 in. (56.2 x 46.4 cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed, by Dr. Claribel Cone and , Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland, , BMA 1950.264,




Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #54, 1972, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 x 81 in. (254 x 205.7 cm.), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, g, ift of Friends of Gerald Nordland, , 1972,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #79, Oil and charcoal on canvas , 93 x 81 in. (236.2 x 205.7 cm), Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts , and with funds contributed by private donors, 1977, , 1977-, 28-, 1



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #105, 1978, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 1/8 x 93 1/8 in. (254.3 x 236.5 cm.), Mo, dern Art Museum of Fort Worth, museum purchase, Sid W. Richardson , Foundation Endowment Fund and The Burnett Foundation, 1991.12, .P.P.,



Henri Matisse, French Window at Collioure, 1914, Oil on canvas, 45 , 7/8 x 35 1/8 , in. (116.5 x 89, .2 cm.), Musée national d'art moderne/Centre de création industrielle,, Centre Pompidou, Paris, gift 1983,, AM 1983, -508,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #9, 4 , 1976, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 93 1/8 x 81 1/8 in. (236.5 x 206.1 cm.), Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, California, g, ift of , Phyllis G. Diebenkorn, 1998.142 ,



Richard Diebenkorn, Sink, 1967, Ink, charcoal, , and watercolor on paper, 24 , 3/4 , x 18 3/4 in. (62.9 x 47.6 , cm.), The Baltimore Museum of Art: Thomas, E. Benesch Memorial Collection, BMA 1969.2,



Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #93, 1976, Oil on hardboard, 29 x 21 in. (73.7 x 53.3 cm.), The Grant Family Collection,




Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #122, 1980, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 100 1/4 x 81 1/4 in. (254.6 x 206.4 cm.), San , Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Charles H. Land Family Foundation Fund purchase, , 1980,






Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2851

Trending Articles