 Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for coming today. It's really nice to see a full auditorium. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm deputy director for research, interpretation and education here at the Barnes, and it is my honor and pleasure to introduce Yvonne Bois today. Yvonne is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is, and this is not an exaggeration, he is one of the most influential scholars of our time. His extensive writings on Matisse Picasso, Pete Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly have reshaped our understanding of these artists and have had a profound impact on the field of modernist studies. I am not going to stand up here and list all of his accomplishments because it would just, I'd be up here forever, but I will let tell you that he, he's an editor at Art Forum, contributing editor at Art Forum, an editor of the Journal October. He has curated or co-curated a number of important exhibitions on Mondrian, on Matisse Picasso. He did a Picasso Harlequin show, and he has written many, many books. And I am only going to mention one of them today because it is directly related to our talk. Yvonne Lambois was the lead author on the Barnes Foundation's three-volume tome on Matisse, Matisse and the Barnes Foundation, which was published in 2015. And his co-authors were Kate Butler, Claudine Grandmont, Barbara Buckley and Jennifer Mas. Barbara is our head of conservation. This was a huge project that began, I want to say 2004. So it was like 11 years of research into the Matisse holdings leading up to the publication of this book. And this was when I personally met Yvonne. I think it was 2004. I was fresh out of grad school. He was this like towering, you know, very intimidating figure in the field. And I mean, he's still towering and intimidating, but I got to know him a little bit. And he's, I found, I was just very pleasantly surprised by how sort of nice and fun and passionate he is. He was very, very fun to look at paintings with. You know, I was not working on the Matisse project, but I was lucky enough to sort of be working at the Barnes at the time, sort of adjacent to that. And so we got to have like the joy of life down in the gallery and look at it together. And he's somebody who really likes looking at objects, like really looking closely and understanding artistic process, which may seem obvious. Like, oh, well, he's an art historian, of course he likes. But trust me, not all art historians are interested in that kind of close looking. So it is just truly my pleasure to welcome you today, Yvonne, to talk about this work in one of the most important works in our collection, Matisse's Dance, and sort of the story of the project and how it came to be. We'll see what else he has to say. Thank you. Oh, it's not the first image. That's the second image. Okay. Well, thank you, Martha, for this introduction. And as usual, I was very anxious to make sure that I will be up to it. But I'm not the towering, I'm kind of your small. In October 1921, the Barnes Foundation received a visit from a long time supporter with some exciting news. Someone had sent him a package in the mail containing important letters and documents that had long been missing from the Barnes archival collections. The mystery package, a box, had been sent to him anonymously with no return address. When the Barnes staff opened the box, they found inside a large batch of correspondence between Albert Barnes and Henri Matisse, most of which was written during the thick of the dance mural project. Martha Lucy called me soon after. Maybe she remembered that when Kate Butler, Claudine, Gramo and I were working on the edition of Matisse's correspondence with Barnes for its inclusion in the third volume of our bulky Matisse and the Barnes Foundation, published in 2015. Maybe she remembered that we had been frustrated by the numerous gaps in this documentation. All the more vexing that both Matisse and Barnes seem to have been rather fussy pack rats, as far as the paper trail is concerned. Fortunately for us, they were also rather fussy writers. And before being finally calligraphed in the case of Matisse or translated and typed in the case of Barnes, a letter had often to go through the preliminary state of at least one draft, sometimes many more. So thanks to those drafts, kept in either man's position and now hosted in their respective archives, we were able to fill many holes in the exchanges, many but not all, for there were several absent letters and telegrams for which no drafts was left and of which we had no other trace and some vague illusion in the response they elicited. Furthermore, various diagrams, templates and blueprints were often mentioned as enclosures in the letters we did have, as well as in the drafts and those had been nowhere to be seen. Needless to say, I was very excited when I heard about the unexpected recovery of this treasure trove. Among other things, I was hoping that it contained the enclosures I just mentioned, and particularly that we will be finally able to fully account for the famous error in measurement that forced Matisse to start anew after more than a year of work on his grand decoration, as he called it. On that specific point, I was rather, I was to be disappointed, but this disappointment was offset by the light cast by the new batch of documents, not only on several obscure aspects of the published correspondence between the artist and his patron, as well as of the Don Saga, but also on various aspects of Matisse's aesthetics. So what I propose today is to highlight certain features of his correspondence, both in that was already published and in the letters which I recently discovered, with a particular emphasis on what concerns the dance. But before that, so that you can understand better what I think is at stake in the discussion between the two men, I feel that I owe you a crash course on my view of where Matisse was at in this career. When he received out of the blue Barnes invitation. At the end of the 20s, Matisse was in deep crisis. Ten years earlier, he had left Paris to settle in Nice, but it is not only Paris that he had left. It is also his previous self, the author of such revolutionary canvases as Bono de Vivre, which has been on the. No, I just press on it. The green. Oh, OK. Canvass, you know, the author of canvass such as Bono de Vivre, a studio with goldfish, a seated reefing, and let's say, still life with gold of 1916, all works that you can see in the galleries above. He had returned to, once in Nice, he had returned to traditional modeling, to local color and even to some extent to monocular perspective, while depicting almost exclusively reclining women of an nude in a richly decorated interior. He painted a lot of these canvases. In the early 20s, he was at the peak of his productivity, and then he got bored. By 1929, he could no longer find anything new to say in the genre, and in 1930, he called it quits. He embarked for Tahiti for a four-month vacation. Contrary to his expectation, the trip did not produce any reboot he craved for. Instead, the spark would be lit during the next trip to the USA this time. That Matisse took almost immediately after his return to France from Tahiti. It is then, on September 27, 1930, that he visited the Barnes Foundation. And that is, its impetuous director commissioned him on the spot to realize a large mural in the grand gallery of the building at Merion. The impact of his visit to Merion on Matisse cannot be underestimated. I don't know, one of the two, but I mean, it was a big impact. He was suddenly confronted anew to the production of what specialists call his experimental years, that is, from 1904 to 1917. Seeing again for the first time major works that had been long left, that had long left the studio, such as, once again, the Bono de Viva. One should add that he had recently received, while in Tahiti, the commission of an illustrated book. He had not yet paid much attention to it, perhaps because it was supposed to be an edition of Jean de la Fontaine's Fables, that is, of a 17th century text. Now, suddenly, the author of Poems to Illustrate was shifted to Stéphane Malarmé, a great love of Matisse's youth, whose conception of poetry as much in common with his conception of art, so much so that many statements written by one could easily have been signed by the other. One must paint not the thing, but the effect it produces. That's by Malarmé, but could have exactly been by Matisse, perfect example. Incidentally, we do not know when the shift from La Fontaine to Malarmé was made and even whose decision it was. I have the fantasy that it came from Matisse himself while he was contemplating his early works at Marion, a double youth bath, so to speak. Now, what does exactly this youth bath consist of? And why did the commission of the dance encourage or rather force Matisse to plunge? This has a lot to do with scale, which had been a core preoccupation of Matisse in his pre-Nease period, that is, from 1904 to 1917. As can be expected, Matisse had been led to focus on the issue via color. I like to quote one of his favorite lines because it is so eloquent in its simplicity. One square centimeter of any blue is not as blue as a square meter of the same blue. Or to put it otherwise, as Matisse himself did countless, in countless statements, the quality of the color depends at least for its saturation and value on the quantity of surface it covers. Its hue is affected by this quality as well, less directly than by interaction of neighboring colors. The fact that colors relations are above all surface quantity relations add many immediate implications for Matisse's art. The most important one perhaps being that the traditional position between color and drawing is abolished. Since any single color can be modulated by a mere change of proportion of surface, any division of the plain surface is in itself a coloristic procedure. I quote Matisse, what counts most with color are relationships. Thanks to them and them alone, a drawing can be intensely colored without that being any need for actual color. In fact, it is my contention that Matisse made the discovery about color while working on a series of black and white woodcuts at the beginning of 1906 and that he set out to verify in the Bologna Vivo. Many fundamental traits of Matisse's pre and post needs that is before 1918 and after the dance. Many fundamental traits of Matisse's pre and post needs art unfold from the quantity-quality equation. First, since the particular accord and the smooth strike by painting or drawing results in a large part from the difference in quantity between surfaces, it is impossible to work on anything without immediately considering the totality of the surface to be covered. This constituted a major point of contention with Paul Cignac's incremental divisionist method with which Matisse broke dramatically when he painted Le Bonheur de Ville. Second, once the quantity-quality equation is admitted, it is impossible to square up any drawing. If you enlarge a composition, the result will be entirely different from the original. This point is made, hammered multiple times in Matisse's writings and interviews, starting with his most famous statement, his notes of a painter from 1908. A artist who wants to transpose a composition from one canvas to another to a larger one must conceive it anew in order to preserve its expression. He must alter its character and not just square it up onto a larger canvas. And there, the allusion to squaring up on us to the use of a cartoon when having to produce a large painting brings me back again for a moment to Bonheur de Ville. For it is while working on this painting that Matisse understood that he didn't need a cartoon. Hypothesis had made longer go, but they were confirmed by Barbara Berkeley and Jennifer Mass in their technical report published in a brick of a book. They show that Matisse has begun using a roulette in the upper part of the canvas, which is a short mark that he was transferring a cartoon, but that he stopped doing it mid-course. In other words, a picture has to be worked as its own definite size, by which, in the words of Barnett Newman, perhaps the only painter who have fully followed Matisse on that score, one will transcend size for the sake of scale. Finally, to go back to the consequence of the quantity-quality equation, since modulation is now a function of surface proportion, traditional modeling is not just redundant, it hampers the outcome. I should also add that this equation signaled the end of color values as distinct and fixed entities. Now any color can perform any given task on a scale of tonalities, black can even be the color of light, as Matisse stated several times. I don't think it is difficult to understand why being confronted to the enormous surface he was asked to paint, Matisse thought immediately about size, which is absolute, and even more about scale, which is relative, and how having suddenly been punched into this used bath, he was naturally drawn to reconnect with his pre-nice pictorial syntax. Seeing again Bonheur-de-Vivre must have played a role in his immediate choice of dance as a subject. All the more, since he had already rethought this central motif on Bonheur-de-Vivre in the dance, in a large format, the dance version that is in the Hermitage. Like any other artist, Matisse began by making small sketches. In the first batch of these sketches, he took a trip down to memory lane, clearly leading to the Moscow dance and through to the Bonheur-de-Vivre, and he continued playing with a number of figures for a few weeks. But soon he realized that he needed to work at true scale, and he rented a garage, more spacious than his current studio, that could accommodate the size of the Merion mural. This actually struck Barnes' pupil, E.T. Dreiber-Bies, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but when in July or August 1931, he was dispatched to Nice in order to report on the progress of the mural. I quote Dreiber-Bies, Matisse appreciated his thorough, he explained that the garage is about the lengths and widths of the large gallery, the point of view is that of the balcony. Repainted walls duplicate the plaster, and a new skylight duplication, the illumination. I should note in passing that Matisse would be just as thorough when working on his Vance Chapel in 1949. He moved to a large apartment in Hotel Regina in Nice, because, not a very cheap move, because the size of its walls corresponded to that of the chapel he was designing. But let's go back to the dance. To make his life easier, Matisse tried at first to compromise with an intermediary state, but this did not work. In his life, he would specifically recall this moment. I quote, when I wanted to make a sketch on three canvases one meter long, I couldn't get it. Finally, I took three canvases of five meters each. The actual dimensions of the panels are set out to, sorry, and one day, armed with a charcoal on the end of a bamboo stick, I set out to draw the whole thing at one go. It was in me like a written that carried me along. I had the surface in my head. As for the small color studies he had made, they were particularly useless. I quote, once the drawing was finished, when I came to put in the color, I had to change all the forms I had envisioned. I had to fill the whole thing and make sure that the whole would remain architectural. As is well known, working directly in painting at the enormous scale of the Meron, that is testing in paint various compositional schemes proved impossible. Two taxing physically. It is one thing to erase, in part, or even in totality, the canvas that is just a few feet high in order to start anew. It is quite, as Mattis would do all his life for smaller canvases, it is quite another thing with a surface that is 11 feet tall and close to 45 feet wide. Thus, the first version of dance, the first painted version of the dance at scale, was abandoned. Or rather, it served as the canvas onto which Mattis would pin his cutouts of colored papers. The device he adopted in order to be able to continually change his design, which happened daily at times, without having to erase or paint anything until all will be definitely set. This first version now called the unfinished dance mural was discovered in a warehouse some 25 years ago, rolled up like an old rug and with thousands of pinholes. As I said, it served as a material support on which Mattis would work out the second version, which, as you will quickly understand, will turn out once finished to be the third. But a note in passing was that this first version. After the preliminary small sketches mentioned earlier, those in which Mattis played with a number of figures, we have almost no extent iconography concerning its progress at scale. All we have left, firstly, is two sets of photographs, thankfully showing the whole composition sketched with charcoal on three large canvases, which Mattis sent to Barnes in April 1931. They were actually the first and only things Barnes had ever saw at the time. And secondly, a gorgeous brush and ink drawing at the definite scale of the legs and torso of a standing figure in a central bay. This striking drawing, now in view in the wonderful Mattis exhibition currently at the museum, the Philadelphia PMA, is alone in its kind, which makes one regret perhaps that Mattis switched to photographic record and paper cutouts as a working process. One dreams of all the marvels he would have left us with as if he had stuck to brush and ink drawings made to scale on paper. The rest of this story is relatively well known, though there could be a missing stage in the documentation. One would assume that Mattis began his work on the second round by making sketches on charcoal directly on the canvas, on the new canvas, before starting to play around with his paper cutouts, since it is indeed how he would later attack the round three. But this sketching stage never existed for this second version. He did not bother to have, and he didn't bother to have photograph taken, or I mean he might have existed, there's no photograph. And given that he took great pains of having every slight modification in the shape and placement of his paper cutouts, dutifully recorded, I tend to think that at this point he skipped the charcoal on canvas stage altogether for the second version. From the late four of 1931 to the end of 1932, we have no less than 15 consecutive photographic records of the paper cutout evolution of the second version of the dance. More than half of them posterior to the catastrophe, which tells us a lot of the way Mattis thought about this art and his responsibility of an artist. What catastrophe? On February 2, 1932, just as Mattis thought his work on the dance was almost completed and at the end around the time, he discovered that he had made an incredible error regarding the measurement of the penantives on which he had relied all along. He had thought they were 50 centimeters wide, in fact they were twice that. His nearly finished second version was unusable as such, it would have had to be cropped, which for Mattis of course was utterly unthinkable. This was a huge blow, and I'll explain later how the mistake came about since a few tidbits contained in the new documents clarify somewhat the issue. He quickly realized that he needed to start a new, to create a third version on a canvas with the proper dimensions. His whole composition had to be rethought in order to cope with this bulkier architectural reality, except for the pink, blue, black, grey palette, which he did not want to modify. That seems strange at first, but it is consistent with the quantity, quality, equation idea. As he wrote about it, the colors which are the same are nonetheless changed, the quantities being different, their quality also changed. The colors are applied in a completely straightforward way so that it is a quantitative relation that produced their quality. Mattis is very, when he has an idea he sticks to it. And I'm like that too. What is particularly interesting though is Mattis' first reaction. He immediately lets Barnes know that he will first finish his second version before attacking the third one. That is, he would bracket for a long as it takes the whole issue having to invent a new composition and fulfill his obligation to Barnes, so as not to lose momentum on a nearly completed version. Which was still, remember, only at the paper cut-out stage. Needless to say, this was a huge gamble given Barnes' increasing impatience. But to Mattis' relief, his patron took the news rather well and to the surprise of anyone who has studied this affair. For three more months, Mattis continued to work on the second version. Then he put it aside, it was still on the paper cut-out stage. He put it aside because he felt it was finished. And he put it aside to attend the Malarm administration while staying in Paris. We do not know exactly when the chapter three of the dance saga began. It is interesting to note that in a very few sketch of paper, on paper devolved to it, it seems to be revisiting the drawings he had made for the first abandoned version. But he clearly concluded that this would not go. It is only in August 1932, quite a lot after the discovery of the era, that back in Nice, Mattis set out to work with a passion on the third dance composition. Sketching directly on canvas with a piece of charcoal at the end of this bamboo stick. He worked at it non-stop until the end of November with a charcoal thing. We have 10 different photographic records of the charcoal on canvas stage, after which he shifted to paper cut technique and we have 22 records written November and March. The paint application made by an assistant was started March 21, 1933, and the whole thing was finished by mid-April. Mattis arrived in Marion with his decoration a month later to supervise its installation institute and he was relieved and fully satisfied by his accomplishment. But though he came back exhausted from his trip to America, he did not take long for him back in his studio in Nice to think about the unfinished business of this then still second version. He took it up again, no doubt submitting his design to the same quasi-daily attention as he had done for the Marion version. He completed in November, 1933, making it fully the third and final version, which was the music of the modern Deville de Paris acquired in 1937. It is now called the Paris Dance Bureau. To quickly sum up the numbering of the dance version, in case you are getting lost like everyone else, for a very long time the Paris version which I have called here the second was deemed the first, and the Barnes version which I called here the third was deemed the second. But we now know that the unfinished version is the first, the Barnes version the second and the Paris the third. So it's like that. One, two, three. Enough contextualization. Now that you have the frame, let us look at what the correspondence between Matisse and Barnes reveal and add what it adds to the narrative. The first striking thing is Matisse's immediate grasp of the difference between an easel painting, even a large one, and what it has to produce, which he calls Pintu architectural. The concept that he forged when speaking of his grand décoration. This was already clear in the draft he had published in of the first letters he sent to, the draft we had published, of the first letter he sent to Barnes upon his return to Nice after his first visit to Merion, but even more eloquent in the version he sent to his patron. After having noted the difficulty of his task, given the oddity of the space he would have to deal with, he thanks Barnes to have thought of him to terminate the architecture of his room. Terminates, it's an architectural procedure, not a painting one. Unfortunately, I cannot elaborate further on this crucial and very, very complex issue of Pintu architectural, but if interested, I encourage you to read Kate Butler's entry on the dance and as well as my longest essay in our big collective book. Another striking figure is how much Matisse is worried about getting the exact dimensions that he has to cover right. He worries about how the templates would be made, he even imagines problems when they are known. At one point he thought that the cornice above the doors would be in the way. He's repeatedly asked for a copy of the architects blueprint for a return of the templates that he had been taken from the wall itself and which he had sent back to Barnes so that wood stretchers would be fabricated. The endless worry of Matisse on one of the two letters. And when he discovers the mistakes, by noticing the difference between the architects blueprint and the templates, as he was thinking of the possible installation of his decoration together with an architectural model in his retrospective at the Gallery Georges Petit, which was scheduled to open in June 1931, is devastated. The long letter he writes to Barnes helps actually understand that the mistake was made. He had obviously seen two bands of paper which were added and folded under the templates alongside the penances. If only your pupil who came in July had alerted you that the measurements had been taken by him and myself was utmost scared you would have told me of the mistake. At that time the consequence would not have been so severe and I could still have modified my composition but now I must start entirely anew. When I first read this, I could not comprehend what Matisse was talking about because the drawing that dried the LBs sent to Barnes seemed to be absolutely correct. That is, the width of the penances are drawn correctly. But once I look closer, I realize that the measurements themselves are wrong. One inch and seven eighths plus 19 for one side and 19 inches and five eighths plus one seven eighths. You can see the drawings very, very bizarrely indicated under the penances. It's very, very weird the way it's put. It would have been much simpler if you had simply made it aligned with two arrows. This very unconventional way of making the measurements just at this point of the penances, everything else is perfectly fine, played a big role in the goof up. I don't see why Barnes would have bothered looking at them with a magnifier to these little numbers and realized that they were wrong. Since the drawing looked perfectly fine. Same for Matisse in a way. Another amazing passage, this one in a draft we had already published, is Matisse's reflection about the sheer athletic effort in working at such a scale. I now believe that Kendall you that I've found a way to install these immense canvases in my studio and to extend my legs and arms for the dimensions of the canvases are superhuman. I took command of their large surface. I've drawn the figure several times and I'm happy to say that I've grasped the whole, the whole just as well as if they were 10 times smaller. Only my physical body has not grown. And then he goes to complain of tiring days and all. This passage was dropped in the final version that Matisse sent to Barnes on night on April 24, 1931. But he kept the part in which he explains why he refused to say anything about the work in progress. I have noticed that anything one might say about the painting being executed is as much energy one devotes from it. And he offers a compensation, the first two sets of photographs that he sends to Barnes. The caption that he makes in his letter is puzzling. Series one, the first contact with the surface. Series two, second approach more architectural, I believe. It has long been noticed by Jack Flamme and many others in his wake that Matisse wanted at all costs to avoid a visit of Barnes to his studio in Nice. The painter was particularly worried that his patron would be irked by the fact that and this up until a month before he arrived in Maryong with the decoration and the wraps, that he was afraid that Barnes would discover that there was no painting properly speaking to him. Matisse had no painting properly speaking to show at that time, it was still in paper cutouts. A large amount of Matisse's letters to Barnes during this entire course of the work on the dance is devoted to various maneuvers to present Barnes from coming and having a peep. It is only in January 1933 that the collector will be allowed in Matisse's studio. And for the great relief of Matisse, Barnes did not bulk in seeing the paper cutouts and he approved of the work in progress. At one particular moment, tricky moment, when Matisse comments upon his discovery of the mistake in the letters called above earlier, he begs Barnes not to come and bring the templates, just send them, just send them. To help that peel go down, because there were so many letters that Barnes would have been, this thing is very weird, constantly. To help the peel go down, Matisse enclose a gouache done just a few days earlier based on the state of the composition at this point. At this point, that's the second version, which has not yet been abandoned, would be abandoned just like one minute later. In short, Matisse used any means at his disposal to avoid an impromptu visit. There are many other gems in this correspondence, sometimes not directly related to the dance, but to the monograph, Barnes was at the time writing on Matisse's art. For example, in a letter sent by the painter on July 32, one finds reminiscence about the copies he had made in his use of 18th century French paintings in Louvre, but also with this comment on how to deal with the unseasonally cold weather in Paris at the time, because he had moved from this for his exhibition. For me, this is totally bearable, because I'm in the light of Malarmé's poetry, which is really much clearer than one usually believes before spending the time it takes to dig into its musical bark. Speaking of Malarmé, a month later Matisse sends to Barnes a photograph of two plates from his illustrated book. Erdogim, to substitute them for the version he already owned and intended to reproduce in his book, I remade them, because I found them not large enough compositionally. Once again, addressing the issue of scale, by the way. Surprisingly, Barnes yielded for one of those, but on the other it seemed it was Matisse who changed his mind, because the plate he reproduced by Barton in his book is the same that is owned by the foundation. So here you have the simpler one is the one Matisse wanted and Barnes reproduced and Barton said yes, I agree in that particular case. There are two last tasty morsels in this correspondence that I would like to mention. The first one is one more proof of Matisse's fastidious attention to the utmost detail. On November 11, 1932, just when his work on the Merriam-Dons is very well advanced, he asks with the help of an explanatory diagram. He writes a very anxious letter and he sends along mocked up tracing papers. He asks with an explanatory diagram that someone indicates which portion of the composition in a lateral base will be hidden from view by the archers for a beholder standing on any of the three balconies on the opposite side of the main gallery. The green arrow, my transposition of Matisse's recommendation of what photographs to take. So the letter was sent in November. Barnes keeping in mind for several weeks, Matisse sent another letter on December 6 asking the same question in a simplified version this time. He is many concerned about the valuable view of a beholder standing in a central balcony, a view on the lateral lays from someone standing in front of a sample. Two days later, he sends Barnes for his response and for the tracing papers, dutifully annotated. Now what is interesting is that Matisse was perfectly right to ask this question, as can be seen in the photograph taken by Martha Lucie yesterday on a smartphone at my request. Something is hidden in those angles. A significant portion of each of the lateral bays are indeed visible for a beholder standing in the balustrade from whatever place in the balustrade. But the strange thing is that Matisse decides in the end not to do anything about this. That is, there is no possible change on the paper cut version of the design after he received information that he had so anxiously waited for. This said, he was probably still a bit anxious about it. As one of the very few photos that were taken of him containing his grand oeuvre installed in situ show him looking at it from the balcony together with Albert Nutty, Barnes conservator. The last little marvel I want to mention is an extraordinary detail, the long letter that Matisse sends to Barnes on August 8, 1932. The longest by far, actually, that he wrote him. It is a typical case of what we call in French, less priviless gallier. Matisse blames himself for not having corrected Barnes during a meeting there in Paris when he said to him that he was conceiving his works through color. And that drawing for him was secondary. Because Barnes in the process of finishing his monograph about him, Matisse feels the urge to rectify this view, which is at first very surprising given Matisse's reputation as a colorist. But it is surprising only if one forgets about the quantity-quality equation mentioned at the outset. He always starts with the drawing he writes. I worked on the decoration for six months by drawing only. I can work for months just with drawing. If you look at my drawing in the shade, you'll see that each part of the paper is delimited as its particular quality, which is to say its particular color. The letter contains many other riches, notably a credo concerning how and why and what if strikes Matisse emotionally enough for him to want to paint it. And how terrified he is each time he begins working on a canvas. A fear that needs to overcome first in drawing before beginning to tackle the venue of color. Another passage of this dance letter gets back to the issue of the architectural drawing and decoration versus easel painting. Matisse is afraid that in the monograph on his art, Bart will not differentiate between the two in his pictorial practice, that he will judge the two according to the same criteria. And particularly that presenting the Merion Muriel as the apex of his art, he will consider him as a mere decorator, a worry that is perhaps not entirely unfounded when you read Bart's book. I've always been in trouble when my color lead people to say that I only conceive my work through color. For color is not sufficient for me. I'm not only a decorator, but also a painter of emotions. I am more profound than a decorator, like Veronese or Tintoretto, all things being equal, of course, humbly. Upon receiving this letter, Bart replied, it would not be too lengthy to write you in detail what I meant by my remarks on color, but I can assure you that you will agree with my idea when you read them upon the completion of the book, which I'll never know if this has been the case. I have my doubts. Shortly after receiving the book, Matisse wrote in late February, early March, 1933, that is, just as he was finishing his work on the Merion Dance, it was just the moment we just simply go from take out the paper cutouts and painting. Matisse writes, I often look at your book and find the reproduction to be very good, but I have not been able to find someone to translate it to me. But I've not lost hope. I'm very proud of this book. The Envision Translation never happened for a great shame, as it would have been precious to read the comments Matisse would have sent to Bart, or if not, the many marginalia Matisse, with which Matisse would have almost certainly adorned his copy. Of course, there are many more things about which we can talk in this correspondence between the two men, but I'd like to say, I think it's appropriate to end with a question mark. What would Matisse have thought of Bart's book? Sure, sure, sure. If you'd like, you can use the podium, Mike, if you would prefer. So we'll take questions from online, but also from the room, of course, so please, who wants to... Okay, I'm going to throw this. Whoa. Cool. I'm glad you mentioned Varanace in your remarks. I was thinking, did the quality-quantity relationship come up in classical architectural pieces like the Sistine Chapel? I never read anything in color theory or in painting. I don't know. I mean, I'm not a specialist for... I'm a specialist for only a very tiny portion of history of art in a very tiny part of the world. But I have never read anything in the series of color of the past that refers to this issue of the quantity. Is it being what determines the quality of color? I never did, except Matisse would repeat that all the time. I mean, every single interview almost, it's just like an obsession of it. Maybe there are some remarks in Albus, in Joseph Albus, where he speaks a little bit about that, but I've never heard any treatises of color from the classical age that we've never... I mean, I'm sorry, I don't know. If anyone... So sorry, if anyone else has any questions, please raise your hand. Also, we're checking if there are any online questions. But again, I can run this box to you. Could you pass this over? Yes, sorry about that. Was the mystery of who sent the letters and where they were found and resolved? Could it have been prosaic or it could have been really cool? It's someone at some point had access to the archive. I mean, in a big book that has been mentioned many times, which is big, bulky, three-volume thing, we published anything we had, including the drafts. And sometimes we only had the draft of one part of a letter or something like that. But we knew that those letters existed because we had the response or we had... So we have no idea. But it's someone who must at some point have access to the archive here. That's all we can say, right? Yeah, absolutely. I was trying to read at the footnotes of... Part of a little mystery and I was there when it went away. And I spent some time looking at all the footnotes, carefully, at all the footnotes of all the scholars, reading these things. Oh, maybe some scholar was a little sticky finger, but no. Taken? No idea. One thing which we had hoped to recover was the famous templates. Because they kept being... And the architects blueprinted, although that probably would not have helped that, but it would have helped understanding the mistake. But the templates were things that were taken with... When Matisse was here for this first visit, that's when it was... No, the second visit, sorry. He came back and they take templates. He sent many letters about how to take templates, which is very easy. It's a little more complicated than normal because it's arched. But you just put paper and you cut it up. And these templates were sent back and forth several times. The gabarris, of course. And we had hoped that they would be... Because they don't have them in Matisse, so they must be here. Runs the Matisse archives in Paris was visiting a few weeks ago and I told him the story of the returned letters and he said, a similar thing happened to us. And I don't remember when it was, but he said that they received a package in the mail. And it was, yeah. So it's, you know... What? Where is the postmark? It's the postmark. There was no postmark. There was no... It was completely impossible to trace. There was no return address. I didn't know the story, but they never told me. That's funny. Maybe the same person. Yeah, I mean, I guess we could, yeah. Any other questions? So, you know, very specific color choices in this piece, which are limited color choices. Any information about contemplating what color to use and how much deliberation was done about what colors specifically he would choose for the piece? He didn't speak much about it. He tried several things, which he didn't like. And he said something about wanting to have something that is very cold and detached. And at some point you say architectural, that's easily, you know... But he said he didn't want something to be... Yeah, he says... I don't know the word exactly, but in the quote, but he said he has to be... Because one of the things that he wanted, he doesn't want the... He had this idea for the architectural... The genre of what he calls architectural painting. He had decided it should be kind of... It should not force your attention. It should not be... In front of an easel painting he says it makes a big difference. You have to go through it. You have to enter the whole world. He doesn't want an architectural painting to do that. He wants it to be almost like Muzak. He's very determined. And he writes many times about it, but he doesn't want his painting to be judged like that. It's two different categories in his mind. So he doesn't want a color which is super saturated. He doesn't want a color that... In the color you have kind of a memory that it is masonry, that it is a wall, things like that. It's not very specific at what color he would choose, but what's specific is not something that cries for attention. And contrasts that are not as violent as many of the other... Thanks for the lecture today, beautiful, wonderful topic. I wonder if you have comments that could be geared toward artists who may be watching as an archivist of telling them, hey, take some care to document what you're doing. Because this came up several times through your lecture. I actually have a very early piece from an artist who's alive and saw him and showed him this picture and he had no idea. He said, wow, I lost these things. And you said some of the pieces that had left his studio. And this idea of in an age where we're recording everything digitally, do you have comments for artists and people who are working through their own process that we can teach them and so on that these kind of... I mean, just keep things. If you keep too many things, there might be problems too, you know, when you have too many documents, sometimes you just... It's hard to make the... Determine what's important and what's... I think which are more important than others. Yeah, but you know, I'm a historian, so we can't work without documentation. So I have the feeling that artists today are, well, especially if they have a gallery, are much more careful in keeping things. Also, artists who have the reputation of being totally messy and are very often to be the best archivist. Picasso was extraordinary archivist. He kept up with everything. Everything. No, Kelly also was the same. Picasso is kind of surprising. He's Bohemian, whatever. You never throw a single piece of paper. I will read a couple of questions from online. First, just a comment. Thank you so much. That was wonderful. I love your discussion of poetry, color, and size, slash scale. And then there are a couple of questions about drawing, sort of if you could talk more about the relationship to the drawings and the painting, and also what do you mean when you speak of a cartoon? Oh, yeah. So it's an artistry term, I should have explained. A cartoon is a big drawing. I mean, not very big at first. You have a drawing, and then you enlarge it by squaring. You make a wider grid, and you enlarge to another grid and then you enlarge a second enlargement to a bigger one, still using the system of the grid. You know, you just multiply by, you copy by squaring up and making a grid, and then copying every little portion of the square in larger grid and so forth and so forth. The cartoon is a final piece of paper which is to scale. Sometimes many, many different papers, because those things, it was mainly for frescoes. Artists needed a cartoon for different reasons than just scale. There's also the way a fresco is made or that, but basically to have something that's too scale and that, but that's also for, the world is very familiar with tapestry. That's what was used also for, we said a cartoon of tapestry. That's what it is, a big drawing of paper that was used for the, so using a cartoon means that you have at some point, you need it at some point to find a way to enlarge something in a kind of almost mechanical manner. And artists have done that all the time when they used to cover a large surface. And Matisse thought about it for, he had used cartoon before, and he thought about it for using it for Bolo de Ville, and he realized, I don't need it. It's not the way I work. Since I have to start to think at full scale, it has to be in my mind. It doesn't make any sense to me to start with a little sketch and enlarge it. So here's another question from online. What is the story behind the discovery of the canvas with the pinhole? I think the rolled up one that you mentioned, where and when and by whom? I don't quite know exactly, I don't quite remember where, but it was the, I don't know who discovered it, it was the, sorry I have a name, Jacqueline Monnier, she was the daughter of Pierre Matisse, the granddaughter of Matisse, daughter of Pierre Matisse. I think it was a warehouse of some family possessions or something like that. It was something, it had been there since Matisse died or something like that. So it was suddenly, yeah, a total surprise. Thank you Ivalin, wonderful, fantastic lecture. It won't surprise you at all that I'm going to ask you about the other grand décorations by Monnier that are sort of hovering all over this and not stylistically because obviously the differences are perfectly clear, but in terms of the making of architectural painting and what Matisse in 1930, what one in 1930 would have known about the complicated history of the orangerie, of the endless back and forth of Monnier's connection to Clémenceau, whether those letters had been published. I think Clémenceau's Monnier book was out by 1930, I believe, and so because there seems to be a cautionary tale here that Matisse and Barnes are partly responding to it because Monnier had kind of waited too long with that, was dead by the time that all those paintings were transferred to the public, so he was not in charge of its actual installation. So I'm just wondering how that episode loomed over all of this. It's a very good question of which I do answer, and I'm sure there is, but I never thought really of it. I mean, you know, Matisse admired Monnier, of course, and he must have read the book of Clémenceau then, I'm pretty sure. But I don't remember any remarks by Matisse on Monnier in particular, on the orangerie. I accept that when... Matisse always wanted to have... to be able to have more, you know, decoration or painting of architectural as a kind of relief from doing easel painting from time to time, he wanted to. And he was very frustrated when the state of Paris and the city of Paris, the state of France and the city of Paris did not commission anything by him for the 1937 International Fair. And that's when he gave it to Paris as a kind of... as a kind of, you know, something like that to the French government. But at that time, he was specifically... then, I think, I would have to find in my notes, but there is, at that time, kind of remainder of the problem with the orangerie thing, because when was the orangerie open, do you remember? 1937. Yeah, so I think... but that's, you know, speaking about one decade later, but it's a very good question. I, you know, I don't have any answer, but it makes perfect sense to me that he would have had this, you know, example and the difficulty of that claim also had to make the thing accepted. I'm sure. I'm sure he thought about it. And I'm sorry not to have an answer because it's a good question. Ah, many hands there. Yeah, when I saw the exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum, I came away thinking, ah, perhaps the experience with the Barnes was influential for him developing his cutouts later on. Yeah, that's the way he started. At first it was only as an experience, not to have to, you know, Matisse, when he made a painting, they often, you need to start anew, so he would erase everything and start again. But, you know, doing that on something which is that big, it's impossible and you can't do it a little bit when it's only at a charcoal stage. But, you know, just having, it's too complicated. So he used the paper cutouts as an experience to go faster. But then he got interested in that and he made a few things, not much. A few things in the, which one of them is in the show, maybe two is in the show, for cover of a book, and a few very beautiful early paper cutouts. But he kept that kind of a bay for another, you know, until jazz, really. So for another 12 years, 13 years. But yeah, it was determined, you know, it was that and something else, which is, but I did not mention it. In fact, it's a little too in the letters, in a very interesting way. The idea of photographic record or the work in progress. Matisse is the first one to have published these kind of things. And there's a thing very amusing in the, in the, and you know, and he speaks about the pedagogical role of publishing these state photographs and bounces going to do. And, you know, Matisse published, published as the work is being done in generals in France and whatever. And he seems like he gets this idea that it is very interesting. And he himself published quite a lot of those things in various journals and all that. And in the letter to Barnes, he says, oh, I just heard that Picasso just is making that with a print. And so he will, you know, he makes a print of each state of a print. And so at the end he has a kind of evolution of the work. And he says, I hope that he did not hear that I was working like that. So I hope it is, we are reunited by some wonderful coincidence. Because, you know, at that time the war, we speak as it was gone. So, but it was interesting. I hope just because you know, thank you for your talk. I wonder, do you have any thoughts on the way the unfinished and the Paris dance mural are displayed at the museum in Paris these days? And also why it takes so long for them to be put on display? Well, like, you know, fresh. Yeah, I don't know. So what was the first part of the question? Any thoughts on the way they are displayed today? Well, it's, I think this is very difficult to find a solution to do that. It was even more, you know, how do you do? I mean, I don't know. I think that if you had a room where they could be one next to each other, that would be a lot better. But I don't think that's the case. I think that if you had a room where they could be one next to each other, that would be a lot better. But I don't think there's that room there. It's huge. So I don't know, it's very strange. You know, it's like a, I don't know, what do you call it? It's like a wave of a sea that comes to you and goes back. It's very strange. They are parallel, exhibited parallel. It's just very strange. It's not really a question. First of all, thank you for this presentation. And now to just come back to the issue of Monet Matisse and the Grande décoration, I was thinking whether this kind of polyptych idea which is almost like a Japanese screen type of thing and the way the imagery moves from the one panel to the next and the colors they have to have a kind of flow whether that part of Monet's Grande décoration affected if Matisse was aware of it, affected his way of images and figures flowing from one of the arches to the next because there is definitely an arabesque that runs to them. I'm using the term in its Delacroix use actually of the arabesque. A kind of continuous irregular shape. In terms of the movement of the figures it's far less in the bounce it's much more contained especially in the central area. It's like there are couples you know the things that show up you know but it's far I would say that Monet wants to produce this kind of oceanic feeling kind of atmosphere in which you are daydreaming or something like that I don't think that Matisse was trying to do something similar on that one but you know there are a lot but you can see that the first version the first idea is going based on the dance of Leningrad the dancers are turning around and the sketch for the first version and then you can see he has illuminated that by putting this stunning figure in the center it's already meeting the idea of a complete arab dance and everyone is doing the same movement then it becomes much more disjointed because they seem to go in various directions without contribution there in the bounce version he has resented I think he still wants to have this escape the figures are going out the famous cropping more doga than Monet for that thing but I think what's very interesting is the way in which the curve in the center in the bounce version the way this creates this bubble and that I think is not money like that part did he hear music? yeah he has quite a few friends here so much Ivalan and thank you all for coming and I'll say that you can see a lot of these letters between Barnes and Matisse that Ivalan was talking about just right outside in the cases including the telegram that Matisse sends to Barnes when he has first realized uh oh I think I made it can you imagine having to send that telegram? yeah can you imagine? yeah