Art Museum

During the spring break, I visited the Montclair Art Museum. I had the pleasure to see the current special exhibition "Matisse and American Art," which consist of 19 works by Henri Matisse on display, including paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, along with 44 works by American artists inspired by him, including Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, Maurice Prendergast, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, John Baldessari, Sophie Matisse, Faith Ringgold, and Helen Frankenthaler. These works are on loan from individuals and institutions across the world. This show focuses on Matisse's influence on American painters. Visiting the museum was a great experience. It was my first time visiting an Art Museum and it was very impressive.

Matisse used pure colors and the white of exposed canvas to create a light-filled atmosphere in his paintings. Rather than using modeling or shading to lend volume and structure to his pictures, Matisse used contrasting areas of pure, unmodulated color. These ideas continued to be important to him throughout his career. His art was important in endorsing the value of decoration in modern art. However, although he is popularly regarded as a painter devoted to pleasure and contentment, his use of color and pattern is often deliberately disorientating and unsettling. Matisse was heavily influenced by art from other cultures. Having seen several exhibitions of Asian art, and having traveled to North Africa, he incorporated some of the decorative qualities of Islamic art, the angularity of African sculpture, and the flatness of Japanese prints into his own style. The human figure was central to Matisse's work both in sculpture and painting. Its importance for his Fauvist work reflects his feeling that the subject had been neglected in Impressionism, and it continued to be important to him. At times he fragmented the figure harshly, at other times he treated it almost as a curvilinear, decorative element. Some of his work reflects the mood and personality of his models, but more often he used them merely as vehicles for his own feelings, reducing them to ciphers in his monumental designs.

There was one specific painting which caught my attention, Spring In Central Park by William Zorach. He stated that his paintings of New York City's Central Park were "painted at home from imagination . . . in all wild colors, peopled with exotic nudes." With his wife, Marguerite, an avant-garde painter herself. Henri Matisse and Andre Derain influenced his work. 

My favorite painting was Blue Nude painted by Henri Matisse. The painting is of a woman laying nude with one leg over the other and arm bent against her head. The strokes that were used while painting this piece were somewhat sketch like and you can see the process of applying paint to the canvas through this. Some of the most noticeable places that you can see this type of application is the shading on the inner side of her left breast and the dark lines around her thighs and face. This is a feature that falls into the category of avant-garde because it goes against the smooth soft lines that the academy strived for and was much more sketch like. The painting style being more sketch like and the subject not being in perfect detail is a bit unconventional as well. Another way that this painting portrays the avant-garde style is its depiction of the female nude. Rather than displaying a very stylized and soft image of a nude woman, Matisse created a much different and rougher portrayal. Her anatomy is also different than many of the nudes that we normally see. She seems to have definite muscle and this also takes away from the softness. There is a somewhat abstract feel to this piece because of the use of color along with the faint detail in the background. Many of these features fall into primitivism as well. The sketch like strokes may seem simpler and abstract background also add a simple feel to this piece.