The relentless shockwave of the powerful Matisse effect

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) turned 20th-century art on its head with his colorful revolution. The powerful 'Matisse effect' forever changed the course of art and the language of the avant-garde. His influence remains very much alive today, as evidenced by the exhibition 'Chez Matisse. The Legacy of a New Painting,' hosted by CaixaForum Madrid until February 22, which celebrates the persistence of his ever-expanding influence.

The exhibition, one of the season's highlights, has been made possible thanks to the renovation works at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which will be closed for five years. The high-tech museum designed by Richard Rodgers and Renzo Piano holds the largest collection of Matisse's works. A total of 253 works, 46 of which are loaned thanks to the renewed agreement in 2019 with the La Caixa Foundation. These gems are displayed alongside 49 other works by great 20th-century creators and contemporary artists.

Protean

The exhibition thus explores the protean artistic adventure that turned Matisse's work into 'the house of modern art'. A symbolic space inhabited by artists from very different generations who found and find inspiration in his daring plastic language.

Creators such as Georges Braque, André Derain, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Picasso, and Le Corbusier coexist "in a game of cross-references that illuminates a century of creation and avant-garde," according to Aurélie Verdier, curator of the exceptional exhibition and chief curator at the Pompidou.

"Modern art is an outburst of the heart," Matisse said, who in 1900 revolutionized painting with his explosive use of color. He then began a long journey towards the essential that concluded in the 1950s when, already very ill, he reinvented the pictorial space with his famous 'collages'.

Verdier traces the essence of Matisse through his passions and his plastic challenges to explain the privileged place the brilliant artist occupies in the pantheon of art and how he seduced contemporaries, successors, and all kinds of audiences. "Primitive and sophisticated, classic and wild, figurative and abstract, Henry Matisse is a key figure of modernity, capable of dazzling other artists, who consider him a reference and a companion in plastic research," summarizes the curator.

"His work is the result of relentless labor that led him to the complex mastery of simplicity," she adds. His trajectory crosses the anguish and introspection of the war years, culminating in the sensuality and hedonism of many of his later works. "The painter of joy is also the painter of anxiety and restlessness," Verdier emphasizes.

Color in the Genes

Born into a family of weavers and pigment merchants in northern France, color was in Matisse's genes. Although he studied Law due to family imposition, he soon devoted himself to art. A painter, sculptor, engraver, designer, and scenographer, Matisse never stopped experimenting in all genres and media.

He produced more than a thousand paintings in a catalog of over 13,000 pieces. At 71, he was operated on the brink of death for a cancerous tumor. He survived thirteen years with severely limited mobility. Unable to paint or sculpt, he embraced 'collage' again and created his famous 'gouaches découpées,' pieces that expanded the shockwave of his legacy.

The exhibition begins with a self-portrait from 1900, painted under the symbolist influence of his teacher Gustave Moreau. On walls of a very 'Matissean' salmon color, iconic pieces such as portraits of his eldest daughter at ages 16 and 20: 'Marguerite with Black Cat' and 'White and Pink Head,' in a cubist style. Also 'Luxury I,' a revolutionary work that scandalized the Salon des Indépendants in 1907, and 'Door-Window in Collioure,' which Louis Aragon described as "the most mysterious painting ever painted."

The exhibition culminates by reviewing Matisse's footprint in contemporary artists like Barnett Newman, Daniel Buren, Raymond Hains, or Jacques Villeglé.

It also focuses on the female perspective that emerged in the avant-garde through creators like Sonia Delaunay, Françoise Gilot, Natalia Goncharova, Anna-Eva Bergman, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, and Baya, pseudonym of Fatma Haddad. An Algerian self-taught and very precocious, Baya 'matissed' already at twelve years old. Discovered at sixteen by the dealer and gallerist Aimé Maegh and sponsored by Picasso, DuBuffet, Breton, and Camus, she remains largely unknown today.