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Matisse

The familar five leaves of a Virginia creeper vine gowing along a back street in Nice, France.

  The road to the Matisse museum starts very close to the MAMAC (Museum of Art Modern and Art Contemporary) in Nice.  My assumption in looking at the map was that I could park at MAMAC and walk.  It turned out to be about 3 kilometers--Uphill!  Still, along the way I took a lot of pictures and even spoke to a couple of French people (to ask, or oddly to give, directions).  I am resolved to accept whatever discoveries my situation demands.  You don't feel like you are lost if everything you find is interesting and you weren't really sure what you were looking for in the first place.  One happy discovery was this "Virginia Creeper" vine growing along a stairway that served as a shortcut between switchbacks of the steep road.  An unexpected place to find a Virginian. 

Gallo-Roman ruins next to the Matisse Museum in Nice. the remnants of an amphitheatre in crumbling white stonework. In background very closeby are some villas.
   The Matisse museum is located in the part of Nice known as Cimiez.  It is near an old Gallo-Roman amphitheater, a park centered around a grove of olive trees and another museum (archeology).  The long past serves the French as a base from which they seem to organize tentative escapes just as we Americans come for the occasional fits of history-envy. 
Bronze bust of jazz musician Louis Armstrong appears to be watching a group of Frenchman playing Petank infront of the Matisse museum and immediately adjacent to the gallo-roman ruins.
   The park at Cimiez made me feel at home with its busts of jazz musicians and allees named Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespe.  Matisse was, and a good deal of the French in general still are, fond of Jazz music.  He did a number of works on this theme.  There are probably more Jazz festivals in southern France than anywhere outside of New Orleans.
Matisse's villa in Nice with annex and large sign "Matisse" and image of "femme a l'amphore" (woman with amphora) which is a blue field defining the sillouette of a woman holding an amphora on her head.

  Finally, I reached the Matisse museum which is in a Genoese-Italian styled villa and a recently (1993) added annex.  I was lucky that they were having a special presentation of Matisse's sculpture that included some 79 separate works (The receptionist claimed this represented all of his sculpture).  The most informative was his Jeanette series (I - V) where he started with a fairly realistic bust and abstracted it in each of the following versions (through a process that I associate with Brancussi who was famous for this during the decades just previous to Matisse's effort.)  Matisse gradually and deliberately exaggerated and made more primitive his gestures until the final piece of the series is almost a caricature of the original. Matisse's son also followed this series with one marble piece that is even more Brancussi-like in that it erases all of the woman's features and reduces what is left to a series of geometric forms. 
  Matisse spent his final years in Cimiez and is buried in monastery nearby.  The museum contains many personal items from his old age.  I was interested to see some of the artifacts that he had collected and which inspired him such as African statuary, tapestries from India (which looked very much like some of his work), oriental pieces, etceteras.  To me, the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflects the shrinking of the world as travel became more practical.  I would argue that a lot of early efforts in abstraction follow the art of African, Latin American, and Asian traditions.  Even the various efforts at modern realism are often presented as an escape from the self-awareness that is afforded by travel away far enough to see oneself.  Matisse, more than most, embraced these new cultures and their aesthetics so that, like a spice trader, he fed them to the Europeans in a form they could appreciate. 

28 Septembre 2005

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