In the 1930s, Albert Barnes’s commission of a large mural from Henri Matisse for the Foundation’s Main Gallery represented a turning point in the artist's career. Simply put, the Dance mural generated a creative reboot: Matisse abandoned the more conservative style he had adopted in Nice in the 1920s and began working with the boldness of what specialists call his experimental years (1905-17). How did this happen? Matisse had to address the issue of scale, which had been crucial in his earlier art but he had all but ignored during his Nice years. In his correspondence with Dr. Barnes, the artist notes that he had to “find a way to extend [his] legs and arms,” because the dimensions of the “grande décoration” were “surperhuman.” He addressed this issue through the use of a long drawing stick and paper cutouts-both of which he returned to in a frenzy of creative output at the end of the 1940s.
This special talk by art scholar Yve-Alain Bois outlines the monumental commission project and its impact on Matisse’s career. Plus, learn about the trove of documents that were recently recovered, including letters, diagrams, and technical notes, that illustrate a fuller picture of this period in Matisse’s career-including details around a devastating mistake that set the artist back by more than a year.
About the Speaker
Yve-Alain Bois is professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written extensively on 20th century art, from Matisse, Picasso, and Mondrian to post-war European and American art. He has curated or co-curated several exhibitions, notably of the artists just mentioned as well as L’informe, mode d’emploi at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Ellsworth Kelly: Early Drawings at the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is an editor of the journal October and a contributing editor of Artforum.
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About The Barnes Foundation:
The mission of the Barnes is to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.
Our founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, believed that art had the power to improve minds and transform lives. Our diverse educational programs are based on his teachings and one-of-a-kind collections.
Philadelphia art collector, Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), chartered the Barnes Foundation in 1922 to teach people from all walks of life how to look at art. Over three decades, he collected some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, including works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He displayed them alongside African masks, native American jewelry, Greek antiquities, and decorative metalwork.
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