20th Century Still-life Prints

Still life is a vintage offset print, reproducing the original watercolor by Giorgio Morandi. Signature and date by the artist is perfectly reproduced on plate. Image Dimensions: 17...

Still life is a vintage offset print, reproducing the original watercolor by Giorgio Morandi. Signature and date by the artist is perfectly reproduced on plate. Image Dimensions: 16...

Lorna Simpson (b. 1960) is an American artist renowned as a pioneer of conceptual photography. Her artwork explores the interplay between historical memory, culture, and African-Amer...

Still Life is an offset print, reproducing the original watercolor by Giorgio Morandi. Signature and date by the artist is perfectly reproduced on plate. Image Dimensions: 16 x 21 c...

Original poster: LAMALOU LES BAINS. CEVENNES - MONTAGNE NOIRE. Linen-backed old original French spa poster. Excellent condition. Statues look at t...

Insect I is a contemporary artwork realized by the artist Fifo Stricker in 1981. Mixed colored aquatint and etching. Hand signed and dated by the artist on the lower right margin.

This print is from David Halliday's Box Series where he creates his own distinctive take on classic still life compositions. Signed, titled and numbered in pencil from the edition ...

Le goût du Bonheur - 20.9.64 I   is a colored  lithograph  printed in  1970  from an original artwork realized by  Pablo Picasso  in 1964. Limited edition of 666.  Le Goût du Bonheu...

Insect I is a  contemporary artwork realized by the artist Fifo Stricker in 1981. Mixed colored aquatint and etching. Hand signed and dated by the artist on the lower right margin....

Joan Miro - Moon Bird, Sun Bird - Original Lithograph 1964 From the journal "XXe Siecle" Unsigned edition of unknown size Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm Publisher: G. di San Lazzaro. Refere...

Brauerei is a  contemporary artwork realized by the artist Fifo Stricker in 1985. Mixed colored aquatint and etching. Hand signed by the artist on the lower right margin. Numbered...

Hangar is a contemporary artwork realized by the artist Fifo Stricker in 1981. Mixed colored aquatint and etching. Hand signed and numbered. Edition 17/25.

Hand titled, dated, initialed and numbered by the artist. From the Fruits and Flowers suite. Sheet size 23 x 22 inches. Image size 12 x 12 inches. Frame size approx 30 x 29 inches. A...

French Iris I Reducutve color woodcut, 1982 Unsigned Stamped verso “Imprimerie Arnera Archives/Non Signe” From: Tramp Picture series "The printer was Claude Jinchat at Imprimerie Arn...

Le goût du Bonheur - 20.9.64 II  is a colored  lithograph realized in 1970 after an original artwork realized by  Pablo Picasso  in 1964. The original artwork of 1964 was part of th...

Joan Miro Miro Abstract Lithograph Artist: Joan Miro Plate III from “Miro Lithographs I” Medium: Lithograph on Rives vellum Year: 1972 Image Size: 10" x ...

Iclee print on canvas of the painting "Still Life with Centerpiece" by Maestro Giorgio Morandi

HOMAGE TO DE CHIRICO is an original, hand drawn, stone lithograph by the Italian artist Antonio Recalcati (1938-2022) printed in Paris France c. 1973 using hand lithography techniques on archival printmaking paper, 100% acid free. HOMAGE TO DE CHIRICO presents a surreal, landscape scene depicting an ancient Roman monument, empty town square with a lone shadowy figure visible in the upper window; a mysterious still life arrangement is set in the foreground with a ham? sandwich and drinking goblet positioned on the ground presenting a point of intrigue for the viewer. Print size - 20.25 x 28.75 in., unframed, very good condition, pencil signed by Antonio Recalcati, Printer's Proof dedicated "Pour Joseph"850 In 1973, Paris Recalcati painted a series of pictures titled “The Boheme de Chirico”. It is an unconventional and ironic reading of the great Giorgio de Chirico. The metaphysical monuments in the squares are transformed into physical objects such as a sandwich, macaroni dish, Parma ham, etc. The exhibition at the “Galérie Mathias Fels” in Paris received great success from the critics. The text in the exhibition catalogue is by Alain Jouffroy. President Georges Pompidou, had sent a jeep from Élysée Palace to have some paintings to view. Recalcati took up the theme of "ham" several times, for example in a painting from 1973, "La bohème de Chirico, place d'Italie" or in the work "Jambon de Paris" from 1972. Recalcati often exhibited in the 1970's in Italy, Paris, Caracas, and New York. During this time the 'Ham series' was created. About the artist - Antonio Recalcati (2 May 1938 – 4 December 2022) was an Italian painter and sculptor, born in a working-class family in Bresso, a suburb of Milan. Born in 1938 in Bresso, near Milan, who died on 4 December 2022, Antonio Recalcati was a major artist of the second half of the 20th century. Known first as a painter of the New Figuration in Paris, he was later more closely related to the movement of the Narrative Figuration. Without an artistic background, he was noted in the first half of the 1960s by his "Imprections" (Impronte), paintings made by applying directly to the canvas and in oil his own body or empty clothes (shirts, underpants, body jerseys). This process is then of total originality. It carries an unprecedented expressionist charge, and it becomes enigmatic when combined with abstract shapes or narrative devices (space of the canvas separated into several boxes, such as a page of comics). Exhibited both in Italy; in Paris in the salons and galleries (Gallery Mathias Fels, gallery Claude Levin, Galerie André Schoeller); in Brussels (Fragmy Gallery, Lanzberg Gallery); in New York (Odissey gallery); he participates in historical exhibitions such as: (Paris, 1964); and , During these same years, he befriended poets (Jacques Prévert) and novelists (Dino Buzatti), and he participated – with other artists such as Gilles Aillaud, Eduardo Arroyo, and Jean-Jacques Lebel – in several collective works that had become emblematic of the commitment of a new generation of painters: Grand Tableau...

Selected from the personal collection inherited by Marina Picasso, Pablo Picasso's granddaughter. After Pablo Picasso's death, his granddaughter Marina authorized the printing of t...

Original Russian European Weight Lifting Championship held in Leningrad in 1968. This poster is archival linen-backed and in very good condition. The original fold marks have been restored during linen backing. The event was June 19th – 25th, 1968. Translation: USSR WEIGHTLIFTING FEDERATION June 19.25 LENINGRAD EUROPEAN WEIGHTLIFTING CHAMPIONSHIP The image of a big hand holding one side of a set of giant weights for the bench press...

Signed in graphite to the lower right and well presented in a white card mount. On laid paper.

Color woodcut on Japan paper. Signed, numbered 1/30 and inscribed by the artist.

JEWISH SYMBOLS is an original hand drawn, limited edition lithograph by Marius Sznajderman (Born-Paris, France 1926-2018) printed in colors on white archival printmaking paper, 100% acid-free, using traditional hand lithography printmaking methods. JEWISH SYMBOLS is an expressive modern abstract color still life composition depicting symbols from the Jewish faith including a menorah, roosters, Magen David(star), Aron Kodesh...

Salvador Dali - Cherries - Original Hand-Signed Lithograph Dimensions: P. 57 x 37 cm Sheet: 75 x 56 cm Handsigned Edition: EC.d (collaborator edition "d") Excellent Condition Refer...

untitled (Still Life with Cup and Horn) Color mezzotint, c. 1980 Numbered and signed in pencil by the artist (see photos) Edition: 100 (53/100) Published by John Szoke Graphics, New ...

Skulls (FS.II.159) is a screenprint on paper with an image size of 30 x 40 inches, signed 'Andy Warhol' and annotated lower left. From the edition of 60, numbered 50/50 (there were also 10 APs), and framed in a custom, closed-corner, gold-leaf frame. Catalogue - Feldman Schellmann, #159 (II.159 Skulls 1976) Andy Warhol’s Skulls from 1976 are part of the transition he began initially in 1972 with the Mao series – incorporating hand-drawn lines into the image – and with Ladies and Gentlemen and Mick Jagger in 1975 where he began the print process with his own photographs rather than appropriated ones. Additionally, in the 1975 prints, he began using collaged elements – torn paper, photographic elements, etc. Donna de Salvo writes about the Skulls series, “Skulls (II.157 – 160) lies somewhere between the genres of still life and portraiture and is based on a photograph of a skull taken by Warhol’s studio assistant, Ronnie Cutrone. The theme of skulls became a major preoccupation for Warhol, and he produced numerous versions of it in paintings. In this image, Warhol combined all three pictorial forms...

Salvador Dali - The Woman of the Shoe - Original Stamp-Signed Etching Stamp signed by Dali Edition of 294 copies. Paper : Arches vellum. Dimensions : 16x12". Catalogue Raisonné : ...

ARTIST: Salvador Dali TITLE: Magic Butterfly & The Dream Apparition of The Rose MEDIUM: Lithograph SIGNED: Hand Signed EDITION NUMBER: 92/250 MEASUREMENTS: 29.5" x 21.3" YEAR...

Lowell Nesbitt Orchid, 1979 Silkscreen on wove paper Pencil signed, dated and numbered 144/175 by Lowell Nesbitt on the front Published by Charles Cardinale Fine Creations, Inc., with blind stamp on the front 25 × 25 inches Unframed This work is pencil signed, dated and numbered 144/175 by Lowell Nesbitt on the front. About Lowell Nesbitt. Lowell Nesbitt, who was born in Baltimore on Oct. 4, 1933, was a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia and also attended the Royal College of Art in London, where he worked in stained glass & etching. In 1964, the Corcoran Gallery or Art in Washington gave him one of his first museum exhibitions, and by the mid 1970's he had decided to leave the museum a bequest of more than $1 million. But in 1989, he publicly revoked the bequest after the Corcoran canceled a disputed exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, who was an old friend. Mr. Nesbitt named the Phillips Collection as a beneficiary instead. He was frequently grouped with the Photo Realists, but his images were more interpretively distorted, somewhat loosely painted and boldly abbreviated. He had many subjects: studio interiors, articles of clothing, piles of shoes and groupings of fruits and vegetables. He also painted his dog, a Rottweiler named Echo, the Neoclassical facades of SoHo's 19th century cast-iron buildings and several of Manhattan's major bridges. Despite such variety, Lowell Nesbitt was best known for gargantuan images or irises, roses, lilies and other flowers, which he often depicted in close up so that their petals seemed to fill the canvas. Dramatic, implicitly sexual and a little ominous, they earned the artist a popularity with the general public that tended to overshadow his reputation within the art world. In 1980, the United States Postal Service issued four stamps based on Mr. Nesbitt's floral paintings. He also served as the official artist for the space flights of Apollo 9...

Artist: Ben Shahn, American (1898 - 1969) Title: The Sea Itself from the Rilke Portfolio Year: 1968 Medium: Lithograph on Arches, signed in the plate Edition: 750 Size: 22.5 x 17.75 ...

"Church of St. Aignan Chartres" Etching in Ink on Paper (Demonstration Plate) Delicate and detailed drypoint etching of the Church of St. Aignan in Chartres, France by John Taylor Arms (American, 1887-1953). The viewer stands in an alley near the church, looking out of the shadows at the sunlit towers. The architectural details of the church are well-captured, including the texture of the stone walls, the roof, and ornamental detail. Titled, signed, dated, and inscribed along the bottom edge: Sketch, Saint Aignon, Chartres John Taylor Arms 1950 The inscription includes details about production, as well as a dedication "To my friends Georgia and Jasper Mathews, with my sincerest good wishes" Presented in a wood frame with an off-white mat. Frame size: 12.5"H x 9.25"W Image size: 7"H x 4.5"W John Taylor Arms was born in Washington, DC in 1887. He studied law at Princeton University, transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, to study architecture, graduating in 1912. After serving as an officer in the United States Navy during World War I, he devoted himself full-time to etching. He published his first original etchings in 1919. His initial subject was the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City near which he worked. Arms developed a successful career as a graphic artist in the 1920s and 1930s, specializing in series of etchings of Gothic churches and cathedrals in France and Italy. In addition to medieval subjects, Arms made a series of prints of American cities. He used sewing needles and magnifying glasses to get a fine level of detail. A member of many printmaking societies, Arms served as president of the Society of American Graphic Artists. An educator, Arms wrote the Handbook of Print Making and Print Makers (1934) and did numerous demonstrations and lectures. Arms was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member in 1930, and became a full member in 1933. His work was also part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1932 Summer Olympics...

Signed in graphite to the lower edge. On laid paper.

Unsigned. On Japanese paper.

Signed in graphite to the lower right and inscribed with the print number 3/75. On Japanese paper.

Signed in graphite and numbered 4/75. On Japanese paper.

Signed in graphite and numbered 3/75. On laid paper.

"Paint Cans" is a lithograph in colors on wove paper made in 1990 by Wayne Thiebaud. The work is number 13 from an edition of 100. The work is signed in pencil, lower right, "Thiebau...

Lowell Nesbitt Red Rose, 1985 Silkscreen on wove paper Signed, dated, and numbered AP 9/25 by Lowell Nesbitt on the front 24 × 24 inches Unframed Hand signed,...

Yasuo Kuniyoshi was a unique and dynamically talented Japanese-American painter, photographer, and printmaker. His works ranged from bold portraits and scenes whose singular style ev...

This artwork "Still Life with Vase and Lemons" c.1980, is an original color lithograph on Wove paper by noted French artist Claude Gaveau, b.1940. It is hand signed and numbered 64/1...

By Raoul Dufy 34.5" x 34.5" Silk Screen Print on wearable scarf

Raoul DUFY Bunch of Flowers, 1953 Original Lithograph with stencil watercolor With printed signature in the plate On Arches vellum 28 x 37.5 cm (c. 11 x 14.8 inch) Very good condition

after Henri MATISSE (1869-1954) Lithograph after a drawing of 1941 Printed signature and date Book plate from Aragon. Henri Matisse: Dessins, Thèmes et Variations : précédés de "Matisse-en-France". (M. Fabiani: Paris 1943). Vélin Paper Dimensions: 32 x 24 cm (12 x 9") This lithograph is one of a rare edition made during the Second World War (1941 - 1943) by the Fabiani Editions. MATISSE'S BIOGRAPHY YOUTH AND EARLY EDUCATION Henri Emile Benoît Matisse was born in a tiny, tumbledown weaver's cottage on the rue du Chêne Arnaud in the textile town of Le Cateau-Cambrésis at eight o'clock in the evening on the last night of the year, 31 December 1869 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis is in the extreme north of France near the Belgian border). The house had two rooms, a beaten earth floor and a leaky roof. Matisse said long afterwards that rain fell through a hole above the bed in which he was born. Matisse’s ancestors had lived in the area for centuries before the convulsive social and industrial upheavals of the nineteenth century. Matisse grew up in a world that was still detaching itself from a way of life in some ways unchanged since Roman times. The coming of the railway had put Bohain on the industrial map, but people still traveled everywhere on foot or horseback. Matisse’s father, Émile Hippolyte Matisse, was a grain merchant whose family were weavers. His mother, Anna Heloise Gerard, was a daughter of a long line of well-to-do tanners. Warmhearted, outgoing, capable and energetic, she was small and sturdily built with the fashionable figure of the period: full breasts and hips, narrow waist, neat ankles and elegant small feet. She had fair skin, broad cheekbones and a wide smile. "My mother had a face with generous features," said her son Henri, who always spoke of her with particular tenderness of the sensitivity. Throughout the forty years of her marriage, she provided unwavering, rocklike support to her husband and her sons. Matisse later said: "My mother loved everything I did." He grew up in nearby Bohain-en-Vermandois, an industrial textile center, until the age of ten, when his father sent him to St. Quentin for lycée. Anna Heloise worked hard. She ran the section of her husband's shop that sold housepaints, making up the customers' orders and advising on color schemes. The colors evidently left a lasting impression on Henri. The artist himself later said he got his color sense from his mother, who was herself an accomplished painter on porcelain, a fashionable art form at the time. Henri was the couple’s first son. The young Matisse was an awkward youth who seemed ill-adapted to the rigors of the North; in particular, he hated the gelid winters. He was a pensive child and by his own account he was a dreamy, frail and not outstandingly bright. In later life he never lost his feeling for his native soil, for seeds and growing things he had encountered in his youth. The fancy pigeons he kept in Nice more than half a century after he left home recalled the weavers' pigeon-lofts tucked away behind even the humblest house in Bohain. Matisse's childhood memories were of a stern upbringing. "Be quick!" "Look out!" "Run along!" "Get cracking!" were the refrains that rang in his ears as a boy. In later years when survival itself depended on habits of thrift and self-denial, the artist prided himself on being a man of the North. When Matisse in turn had children of his own to bring up, he chided himself for any lapse in discipline or open display of tenderness as weakness on his part. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. Although he considered law as tedious, he nonetheless passed the bar in 1888 with distinction and began his practice begrudgingly. Once Matisse finished school, his father, a much more practical man, arranged for his son to obtain a clerking position at a law office. PAINTING: BEGINNINGS Matisse’s discovery of his true profession came about in an unusual manner. Following an attack of appendicitis, he began to paint in 1889, when his mother had brought him art supplies during the period of convalescence. He said later, “From the moment I held the box of colors in my hands, I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges towards the thing it loves.” Matisse’s mother was the first to advise her son not to adhere to the “rules” of art, but rather listen to his own emotions. Matisse was so committed to his art that he later extended a warning to his fiancée, Amélie Parayre, whom he later married: “I love you dearly, mademoiselle; but I shall always love painting more.” Matisse had discovered "a kind of paradise" as he later described it. His drastic change of profession deeply disappointed his father. Two years later in 1891 Matisse returned to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian and became a student of William-Adolphe Bouguereau. After a discouraging year at the Académie Julian, he left in disgust at the overly perfectionist style of teaching there. Afterwards he trained with Gustave Moreau, an artist who nurtured more progressive leanings. In both studios, as was usual, students drew endless figure studies from life. From Bouguereau, he learned the fundamental lessons of classical painting. His one art-schooled technical standby, almost a fetish, was the plumb line. No matter how odd the angles in any Matisse, the verticals are usually dead true. Moreau was a painter who despised the "art du salon", so Matisse was destined, in a certain sense, to remain an "outcast" of the art world. He initially failed his drawing exam for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, but persisted and was finally accepted. Matisse began painting still-lives and landscapes in the traditional Flemish style, at which he achieved reasonable proficiency. Most of his early works employ a dark palette and tend to be gloomy. Chardin was one of Matisse's most admired painters having made four the French still-life master paintings in the Louvre. Although he executed numerous copies after the old masters he also studied contemporary art. His first experimentations earned him a reputation as the rebellious member of his studio classes. In 1896, Matisse was elected as an associate member of the Société Nationale, which meant that each year he could show paintings at the Salon de la Société without having to submit them for review. In the same year he exhibited 5 paintings in the salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, and the state bought two of his paintings. This was the first and almost only recognition he received in his native country during his lifetime. In 1897 and 1898, he visited the painter John Peter Russell on the island Belle Île off the coast of Brittany. Russell introduced him to Impressionism and to the work of Van Gogh who had been a good friend of Russell but was completely unknown at the time. Matisse's style changed completely, and he would later say "Russell was my teacher, and Russell explained color theory to me." Matisse also observed Russell's and other artists' stable marriages. This probably influenced him to find in Amélie Noellie Parayre, his future wife, his anchor. The Dinner Table (1897) was Matisse’s first masterpiece, and he had spent the entire winter working on the oeuvre. Though the Salon displayed the piece, they hung the work in a poor location, disgusted by what they considered its radical, Impressionist aspects. Caroline Joblaud was Matisse's early lover for four years during his initial struggles to affirm his artistic direction and professional career. Caroline (also called Camille) gave Matisse his first daughter Marguerite in 1894, who after Matisse's marriage to Amélie Noellie Parayre was warmly accepted contrary to conventional hostility such arrangements provoked. Caroline posed various times for the artist’s compositions while Marguerite served many times as a model for Matisse throughout his life. MARRIAGE WITH AMÉLIE NOELLIE PARAYRE The Matisses of Bohain and the Parayres of Beauzelle had outwardly nothing in common, and there was no reason why Matisse and Amélie should ever have met. But in October 1897 Matisse went to a wedding in Paris and happened to sit next to her at the uproarious banquet that followed. There had been no banal flirtation between them, even when the wine flowed, each recognized the other as true metal, and when they got up from the table she held out her hand to Henri Matisse in a way that he never forgot. Matisse at that time was not yet the professorial figure of legend. He was known as a prankster, as a ribald and anti-clerical songster, and as someone who had once broken up a café concert performance just for the hell of it. Amélie's relatives operated at that time within a social, intellectual, and political context of which Matisse had had no previous experience. They stood for free thinking, for the separation of church and state, and for the secularization of the French educational system. Her family, better off that that of Matisse, provided the support he needed for the budding artist. When Matisse married Amélie in January 1898, they had been introduced only three months after. Amélie's Aunt Noélie and two of her brothers ran a successful women's shop called the Grande Maison des Modes. Before her marriage, Amélie had shown a gift for designing, making, and modeling hats for a fashionable clientele. In June 1899, she found a partner and opened a shop of her own on the rue de Châteaudun. This allowed Henri and herself to live, with Marguerite, in a tiny two-room apartment on the same street. Madame Matisse, fervently loyal, would play a fundamental role in the life and career of the artist for more than 40 years. Marguerite was to become her father's lifetime mainstay In 1902 disaster struck. Amélie’s parents were disgraced and financially ruined in a spectacular scandal of national scope, as the unsuspecting employees of a woman whose financial empire was based on fraud. Thanks to his early years in a lawyer's office, Matisse was able to busy himself to great effect in the organization of his father-in-law's defense. When all about him lost their heads, burst into tears, and felt more than sorry for themselves, Henri Matisse dealt with their problems one by one. The ordeal had taken its toll, in more than one way. His doctors ordered Matisse to go to Bohain and take two months' complete rest. Amélie had lost both her hat shop and the apartment on the rue de Châteaudun. For the first time, Henri, Amélie and the three children were united in Bohain, having nowhere else to go. Hillary Spurling, one of Matisse’s biographers, asserts that Amélie’s memories of that public disgrace nurtured a “suspicion of the outside world” that would always mark the Matisse family. The Matisse family formed a kind of hermetic unit which revolved around the artist’s work and profession. They fitted their activities according his breaks and work sessions. Silence was essential. Even during the years when Matisse lived mostly alone in Nice, an annual ritual of unpacking, stretching, framing and hanging ended with the whole family settling down to respond to the paintings. The conference might last several days. Then the dealers were admitted. Matisse and his wife had had two sons, Jean (born 1899) and Pierre (born 1900). He was not always in peace with his family. He wrote that their views were not always in accord “which disturbs me considerably in my work, for which I require the most complete calm and from those how surround me, a serenity that I cannot find here. I intend to move to a village a few league away.” Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. In 1899, at a time when his paintings displayed rebellious talent but not much clear direction, Matisse began attending classes in clay modeling and sculpture. Assigned to copy one of the sculptural masterpieces in the Louvre, he selected Jaguar Devouring a Hare a violently precise work by Antoine-Louis Barye. Later, whenever his paintings seemed stuck, he turned to sculpture to organize his thoughts and sensations. Influenced by the works of the post-Impressionists Paul Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Paul Signac, and also by Japanese art, Matisse made color a crucial element of his paintings. Matisse said, "In modern art, it is indubitably to Cézanne that I owe the most." By studying Cézanne’s fragmented planes -- which stretched the idea of the still life to a forced contemplation of color surfaces themselves -- Matisse was able to reconstruct his own philosophy of the still life. Many of his paintings from 1899 to 1905 make use of a pointillist technique adopted from Signac. In 1898, he went to London to study the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and then went on a trip to Corsica. After years in poverty, Matisse went through his "dark period" (1902-03), moved briefly to naturalism, went back to a dark palette and told friends in 1903 that he had lost all desire to paint and had almost decided to give up. Fortunately, Matisse was able to earn some money painting a frieze for the World Fair at the Grand Palais in Paris. He also traveled extensively in the early 1900s when tourism was still a new idea. Brought on by railroad, steamships, and other forms of transportation that appeared during the industrial revolution, travel became a popular pursuit. As a cultured tourist, he developed his art with regular doses of travel. FAUVISM Matisse's career can be divided into several periods that changed stylistically, but his underlying aim always remained the same: to discover "the essential character of things" and to produce an art "of balance, purity, and serenity," as he himself put it. The changing studio environments seemed always to have had a significant effect on the style of his work. In these first years of struggle Matisse set his revolutionary artistic agenda. He disregarded perspective, abolished shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries by substituting a conscious subjectivity in the place of the traditional illusion of objectivity . Matisse hit his stride in the avant-garde art world in the first years of the new decade. He explored the modern art scene through frequent visits to galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Vollard, where he was exposed to work by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. Matisse’s first solo exhibition took place in 1904, without much success. In 16 May 1905 he arrived in the charming Catalan port of Collioure, in the south of France. He soon invited the painter André Derain (1880-1954), 11 years his junior, to join him. By 1905, Matisse was considered spearhead the Fauve movement in France, characterized by its spontaneity and roughness of execution as well as use of raw color straight from the palette to the canvas. Matisse combined pointillist color and Cézanne’s way of structuring pictorial space stroke by stroke to develop Fauvism - a way less of seeing the world than of feeling it with one’s eyes. When the Fauve summer drew to an end, Derain left Collioure with 30 paintings, 20 drawings and some 50 sketches, never to return, while Matisse departed some days later bringing back to Paris 15 finished paintings, 40 aquarelles, over 100 drawings. He returned Collioure in the summers of 1906, 1907, 1911 and 1914. The lure of the sun would prove always to have powers of restoration to the artist throughout his life particularly after periods of great emotional exertion. When Fauvist works were first exhibited Salon d'Automne in Paris they created a scandal. Eyewitness accounts tell of laughter emanating from room VII where they were displayed. Gertrud Stein, one of Matisse's most important future supporters, reported that people scratched at the canvases in derision. "A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public" was the reaction by the critic Camille Mauclair. Louis Vauxcelles described the work with the historic phrase "Donatello au milieu des fauves!" (Donatello among the wild beasts), referring to a Renaissance-type sculpture that shared the room with them. His comment was printed on 17 October 1905 in Gil Blas, a daily newspaper, and passed into popular usage. Derain himself later called the Fauves' color "sticks of dynamite." The painting that was singled out for attacks was Matisse's Woman with a Hat, a portrait of Madame Matisse. This picture was bought be was bought by Gertrude and Leo Stein, a fact which had a very positive effect on Matisse who was suffering demoralization from the bad reception of his work. Matisse continued his experiments in Collioure, visible in the painting The Open Window and the View of Collioure , also a characteristic work of Fauvism in its raw color and disregard for details. Both of these works of the landscape in the French Mediterranean present a distinct development towards the spontaneous and uninhibited style. Other than André Derain, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy and Maurice Vlaminck were also members of the Fauve movement. However, Matisse’s intimate friends among artists were mostly easygoing minor painters, such as Albert Marquet. Matisse’s temperamental aloneness made him prey to vertiginous depressions. He later recalled a breakdown that he underwent in Spain, in 1910: “My bed shook, and from my throat came a little high-pitched cry that I could not stop.” From the onset of is career women were from one of the cardinal motifs of the artist's production. His Joy of Life (1906) draws us into the world of hallucinatory vividness composed of nymphs set in an idyllic open fields dressed in pure color and sensual outline. Two women lounge in the sunlight while two more chat on the edge of the forest. One crouches to pick some flowers while her companion weaves a chain of them into her hair. A couple embraces each other while another group engages in a lively round-dance in the distance. In this way, Joy of Life depicts woodland nymphs engaging in a celebration of their life, their womanhood, and their sexuality. Due to the recurrent incidence of nude women and intensely sensual interpretation many observers have assumed that as a man Matisse must have been a hedonist. On the contrary, historic examination demonstrates that in reality, he was rather a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns. While Picasso recompensed himself, as he went along, with gratifications of intellectual and erotic play Matisse did not. In an age of ideologies, Matisse dodged all ideas except perhaps one: that art is life by other means. Matisse’s uninhibited celebration of women is often believed to have initiated from Cézanne’s painting Three Bathers (1882) (which he had acquired for himself along with a Van Gogh and a Gauguin). However, Matisse depicts women as nurturing, welcoming, and unlike the forbidding, massive clay-like presence of those of Paul Cézanne. FAME The decline of the Fauvist movement, after 1906, did nothing to deter the rise of Matisse. From 1906 -1917 he lived in Paris and established his home, studio, and school at Hôtel Biron. Among his neighbors is sculptor Auguste Rodin, writer Jean Cocteau, and dancer Isadora Duncan. Many of his finest works were created in this period, when he was an active part of the great gathering of artistic talent in Montparnasse, even though he did not quite fit in with his conservative appearance and strict bourgeois work habits. In fact, the aim of Matisse’s art was something less than revolutionary. In 1908, in a famous statement drawn from “Notes of a Painter,” Matisse declared as his ideal an art “for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Matisse's personal habits were incredibly regular. On a typical day rose early and worked all morning with a second work session after lunch, followed by violin practice, a simple supper (vegetable soup, two hard-boiled eggs, salad and a glass of wine) and an early bedtime. In 1906, he created a series of 12 lithographs, all variations on the theme of a seated nude. He chose to share his graphic work with the public almost immediately. The lithographs were exhibited at the Druet Gallery in Paris the same year that they were produced, and the woodcuts were shown at the Salon des Independants in the spring of 1907. In 1907 Appolinaire, commenting about Matisse in an article published in La Falange, said, "We are not here in the presence of an extravagant or an extremist undertaking: Matisse's art is eminently reasonable." Notwithstanding newly-won fame, Matisse's work continued to encounter vehement criticism and it was difficult for him to provide for his family. His controversial 1907 painting Blue Nude was burned in effigy at the Armory Show in Chicago in 1913. Contrary to the fate of the Impressionists, Matisse and other Fauves were able to exhibit in art galleries. In 1908 Paul Cassirer, the German art dealer and editor who played a significant role in the promotion of the work the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, staged an exhibit of Matisse’s works in Berlin. In the same year the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York organized him one-man show in his tiny Manhattan gallery called 291 which effectively introduced Matisse the powerful American art market. In the first decade of his notoriety as the leader of the Fauves, Matisse was more admired by foreigners than by the French. It was, after all, the Russians and the Americans who acquired significant collections of his early work almost as quickly as it was created. The great Matisses we see in the Paris museums today were mostly acquired after the artist's death in lieu of death duties. It took the French a good deal longer to understand Matisse's greatness-longer, certainly, than the international cadre of aspiring talents that flocked to his classes when he was still one of the most controversial figures in the Paris avant-garde. In the summer of 1907, Matisse and his wife went on a long trip to italy "for work and Pleasure," visiting Venice and Padua, where they admired Giotto's frescos. In Florence the were the guests of the Steins in their villa in Fiesole. From this base matisse visited Arezzo, to study Piero della Francesca, and Siena, attracted by the early Sienese painters, especially, Duccio. PICASSO, GERTRUDE STEIN AND THE CONE SISTERS During the first decade of the 20th century Americans in Paris Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo Stein, Michael Stein and Michael's wife Sarah took keen interest in Matisse's art. In addition, Gertrude Stein's two friends from Baltimore. Clarabel and Etta Cone, became major patrons of Matisse and Picasso, collecting hundreds of their works.The Cone Sisters acquired their first Matisse in 1906 and, during the next four decades, went on to form one of the world's great collections of his art. The Cone Collection not only contains major works from every phase of Matisse's long career but reflects the sisters' special interest in his Nice period, when a new complexity of form and psychology entered the ever intense surface allure of his paintings. In April of 1906 during a gathering at the house of the legendary Gertrude Stein, Matisse was introduced to Pablo Picasso who was 11 years younger. Picasso and Matisse were poles apart aesthetically and their life styles were no less so. Matisse was markedly taller and more polished than the stocky, cocky Catalan, was then ruler of the turbulent Paris avant-garde art scene. The two were said to have always been looking over their shoulders at each other. It is well-known that after their rivalry grew, sides were taken. Picasso later said: "No one has ever looked at Matisse's paintings more carefully than I; and no one has looked at mine more carefully than he." One key difference between their pictorial concepts was that Matisse drew and painted from nature, while Picasso was much more inclined to work from imagination. The subjects painted most frequently by both artists were women and still lives, with Matisse more likely to place his figures in fully realized interiors. Gertrude Stein, who loved stirring things up, wrote, "the feeling between the Picassoites and the Matisse-ites became bitter." Although Matisse dryly noted that "our disputes were always friendly," it should be pointed out that Picasso and his friends threw suction-cupped darts at Matisse's 1906 Portrait of Marguerite (which Picasso had obtained in a trade for his own Pitcher, Bowl and Lemon, from 1907). While the rift between the two artists eventually healed, the one between their supporters remained. ACADEMIE MATISSE IN PARIS & SERGEI SHCHUKIN In 1909, with the Matisse family lived in a former convent on the Boulevard des Invalides, in Paris, where the artist conducted a painting school. His immense notoriety, which had been confirmed in 1905-06 by Joy of Life, a work which seemed to trash every possible norm of pictorial order and painterly finesse.His friends organized and financed the Académie Matisse in Paris, a private and non-commercial school in which Matisse instructed young artists. It operated from 1911 until 1917. Hans Purrmann and Sarah Stein were several of his most loyal students. Although it lasted for only three years (1908-11), and yet, during its brief existence the Académie Matisse became one of the principal crossroads of modern painting for a number of gifted European and American artists. Given the reputation Matisse had acquired as the"wild man" of modernist color, it must have come as a shock to some of his early students that the program of instruction he offered was remarkably conservative. As Jean Heiberg, the first Norwegian to enroll in the Académie, later wrote in a memoir: "The school had, at Matisse's suggestion, acquired a copy of two antique sculptures from the Louvre, Mars and an archaic sculpture, which he often used to demonstrate. Every now and then he got completely rid of the life model and we only drew from the plaster casts, and his critiques then were no less profitable." Among Matisse’s students was Olga Meerson, a Russian Jew who had studied with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich and, already possessed of an elegant style, sought to remake herself under Matisse’s tutelage. Amélie suspected the worst. Perhaps a combination of Amélie’s jealousy and Meerson’s neediness caused a Matisse to end the connection, with bad feeling all around. Meerson moved to Munich, where she married the musician Heinz Pringsheim, a brother-in-law of Thomas Mann. Never having fulfilled her promise as a painter, she committed suicide in Berlin, in 1929. One of Matisse's biographers, with access to much of the artist's correspondence, contends that the artist, after his marriage, rarely, if ever, had sex with models, despite his apparent feelings for many. Two Russian art collectors stood out at the beginning of the 20th century: the cloth merchant Sergei Shchukin (1854–1936) and the textile manufacturer Ivan Morozov (1871–1921). Both acquired modern French art, developed a sensibility for spotting new trends, and publicized them in Russia. In this period, Matisse had initiated his fecund association with the Russian textile magnate and visionary collector, Sergei Shchukin. The artist created one of his major works La Danse specially for Shchukin as part of a two painting commission. Inspired by a circular dance-- perhaps a sardana - performed by fishermen at Collioure, this painting embodies the clash between the sacred and reality. Human hands link together, but they form a divine spirit. Moreover, Matisse all but abandoned perspective The work ’s flatness emphasizes the idea, colors, and material, a notion that made Matisse a model for Modernists. The other painting commissioned was Music, 1909. Shchukin was considered by some almost as a co-producer of some of the artist’s greatest works and was strongly commuted to the French painter’s work. Concerning the violent attacks on his friend, the Russian wrote to the artist: “The public is against you, but the future is yours.” By 1914 Shchukin’s house in Moscow contained thirty-seven Matisses. “He always picked the best,” the artist said. During the political revolution Lenin expropriated Shchukin collection in person but allowed Shchukin to remain, in servants’ quarters, as caretaker and guide. He died in Paris, in 1936. The collection is now in the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums From about 1911 to 1915, Matisse struggled with the ideas of Cubism, an experiment he felt he was "not participating in" because it did not "speak to [his] deeply sensory nature." MOROCCO Like many avant-garde artists in Paris, Matisse was receptive to a broad range of influences. He is one of the first painters to take an interest in various forms of “primitive” art. His art was profoundly influenced by Easter art...

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