MOMA : the Darker Side of Henri Matisse

See Henri Matisse like you have never seen him before . The new exposition at the MOMA focuses on what some have called the war years of 1913-1917. It was a pivotal period in Matisse’s artistic development when he seemed to abandoned his interest in decorative patterning and brilliant color for darker,grim and more abstract compositions.

The curators at the MOMA propose that these geometrically composed paintings, dominated by blacks and grays, were in some way a response to World War I, which broke out in Europe in 1914, a year after Matisse had returned to Paris from Morocco.These works are also thought to represent his attempt to absorb ,respond and counter the challenge of cubism, which at the time was the dominant trend in the avant-garde art world, with its radical reinvention of form and space.

The centerpiece work of the show is the oil painting, “Bathers by a River,” Matisse had reused this theme from a bright, decorative watercolor of five figures in a lush landscape from 1909. The Blacks and gray pallet transformed the subject , to more abstract, faceless ,geometric and monumental expression of the grim new reality the war years had brought on.

The Museum of Modern Art located at 11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019 : Phone (212) 708-9400 .Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917 from July 18–October 11, 2010.

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