Matisse and the birth of modernism
Cone Collection at the VAG chronicles emergence of a vibrant new vision of the world
The big summer exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery is full of vibrant, colourful works by Henri Matisse and other early 20th century modernist artists who were exploring new ways of representing the world in painting, drawing and sculpture.
Called Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore, the exhibition is from a collection amassed by Claribel and Etta Cone in the early part of the 20th century. In addition to works by Matisse, the two sisters collected works by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Gustave Courbet and Paul Cézanne that were bequeathed to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
One of the truly great works in the exhibition is Matisse’s painting Large Reclining Nude. As Matisse worked on the painting, Matisse took photographs of its various stages which he sent to Etta as a way to persuade her to buy the work.
The VAG exhibition places Large Reclining Nude in its context by showing it beside one of Matisse’s preparatory drawings and the 22 photographs he took of the painting’s progress. The photographs are arranged in a grid on the wall and show how Matisse added or subtracted from the canvas as he flattened out the figure of a reclining woman. Taken together, the additional works show how Matisse worked through various problems he faced depicting a three- dimensional figure in two dimensions.
Katy Rothkopf, the curator of the Cone Collection at the Baltimore Museum of Art, said the Cones bought what they liked — and avoided what they didn’t. They avoided Matisse’s more abstract paintings and didn’t buy any of Picasso’s cubist works for which he is best known.
“They didn’t like abstraction,” she said. “They liked colour, vibrancy, texture and pattern and representation.”
The exhibition includes photographs of the works as they would have been displayed in the Cone’s apartment in Baltimore where art, furniture and decorative hangings all competed for space. Throughout the exhibition, works are hung or placed together to tell various stories about the Cones and their collection.
One grouping suggests why the Cone sisters found Matisse’s heavily patterned paintings so appealing.
Standing Odalisque Reflected in Mirror shows a woman wearing flowing skirt or pantaloons but only a black and yellow necklace on her upper body. Her naked breasts aren’t nearly as sensual as her lower abdomen which bulges slightly. She’s surrounded by competing patterns and grids that flatten out the space in the painting as the figure of the woman and her reflection in the mirror deepens it.
Beside her is a painting of another woman ( Matisse loved painting and sculpting women) with a long title: Seated Odalisque, Left Knee Bent, Ornamental Background and Checkerboard. The woman is in a space dominated by patterns of dots, grids and florals that are as flat as the surface of the painting they’re in. Hanging beside the seated Odalisque is a wall hanging, one of several belonging to the Cones. The vertical rectangular hanging from Uzbekistan is made out of cotton with beautiful silk embroidery that depicts a complex pattern of red flowers, leaves and other botanical motifs. Not only does the material reference the patterns and shapes in the nearby Matisse paintings, it also refers to the Cone’s family wealth which came from the textile industry.
The exhibition includes several outstanding examples of Matisse’s sculptures. The most striking is Large Seated Nude, a beautiful, dynamic bronze piece that rests on a raised, circular platform in front of an orange wall on the far side of the first floor of the gallery. The bright orange is just the right shade to make the dark sculpture glow in its architecturally framed space across from the entrance to the exhibition.
The nude is twisted in such a complex way it looks like she’s in an advanced Pilates position. With her hands behind her head, her arms create two triangles of negative space, her upper torso is off the horizontal at about 45 degrees and turned forward to put maximum pressure on her abdomen. As well, her left foot is tucked under her right knee.
The sculpture looks precariously balanced, as if she could easily tip backwards off her pedestal at any moment. All the vectors of energy represented by her thighs and torso have been brought together and focused at her midsection.
Collecting Matisse starts with a painting by a relatively unknown artist. In the Grove by the American impressionist Theodore Robinson depicts a woman wearing a plain fulllength skirt and top she stands and looks at something in her hands, deep in thought in a sundappled outdoor setting.
The painting is a significant one because of where it stands in the story of the Cone collection. It was among the first group of five paintings that Etta bought in New York in 1898 with $ 300 she received after her father’s death.
One of the standout paintings is Vincent Van Gogh’s Landscape with Figure painted by the artist during the last two years of his life. It shows a spectral blue figure outlined in black standing in a vibrating brown field as dark, threatening trees pulse above.