 Bonjour tout le monde, bienvenue à la Fondation de la Banque. Je m'appelle Sylvie Patry et je suis le directeur député pour la collection, l'exhibition et le chef de la Banque. Au risque de ne pas être original, j'aimerais commencer avec les personnes qui ont fait possible ce programme, nos sponsors, of course, Freemans, American Airlines, mais aussi le George, Lucie Charitable et l'Educationale de l'Education, Graham Gund, Tony Ritzenberg, Constance Schmuckler, mais aussi Sheldon Bonavitz, le Yumuri Shimboum en Tokyo, et le Logan Hôtel, le Rittenhouse et le Patron Travel qui a supporté ce programme, sur cette symposium d'aujourd'hui. Je voudrais aussi remercier nos speakers pour leur temps à cette événement et pour partager leur recherche avec nous. Je voudrais remercier les staff de la Banque, comme vous pouvez l'imaginer. Un symposium d'aujourd'hui, c'est vraiment un effort, et le staff a été absolument génial et sérieusement commis à ce programme. Je voudrais remercier vous pour nous joindre aujourd'hui et j'espère que demain. Nous allons entendre nos collègues très grands, qui sont venus ici à la Banque. A l'introduction à ce symposium, je voudrais aussi donner un peu de background. Pourquoi nous sommes venus ici à la Banque aujourd'hui? Comme vous le savez, la mission d'une éducation de la Banque est vraiment de l'art du projet de la foundation, depuis sa création en 1922. La Banque a aussi l'ambition d'établir elle-même comme un programme ouvert pour la recherche. A la Banque, cette priorité est faite par deux départements, le département curateur, je suis en charge, mais aussi l'éducation du département, et la leadership de Marta Lucie, et j'ai aimé travailler avec Marta et sa département très bien dans cette événement. Et le symposium veut signaler notre ambition commune dans ce regard. L'année dernière, la foundation a publié un catalogue résonné de nos holdings de Matisse. Ce catalogue était directé par Yves Alain Bois avec des contributions par Claudine Grameau, Karen Butler, Barbara Buckley, Jennifer Mass et Thomas Primo. Et, comme vous le savez, Matisse est une d'entre nous plus grands artistes de notre collection. Je pense que nous pouvons dire que nos études sur Matisse, et c'est aussi le cas pour Renoir ou Cézanne, peuvent vraiment être interprétées sans considérant la collection de banques. Les banques ont commencé à acheter du travail par Matisse en 1912 par Leo Stein. Je ne sais pas comment... J'utilise ça pour les images ? Oui. Il a commencé en 1912, et il a bouché deux paintings par Leo Stein. Je ne vais pas dire l'histoire de la collection, c'est trop long, et c'est très bien étudié par Claudine Grameau dans le catalogue. Puis, je pense que la prochaine étape dans la construction de la collection était en 1922-1923, quand les banques acquièrent les grandes pièces, comme on pourrait dire, Le Bonheur de Vivre, Le Red Madras, La Leçon de Musique, La Citule Riffin, Les Suits Sisters. Quand la foundation s'ouvre en 1925, la foundation s'ouvre en 1923 par Matisse. En décembre 1930, les banques, les commissions, comme vous le savez, sont des artistes. La décoration était installée en 1933. Matisse a visité les banques trois fois. Les banques de Matisse ont prouvé la vie longue. En 1951, avec sa dernière purchase en 1949, il y a cinq ans avant que les artistes passent de l'autre côté. Comme résultat, la foundation s'ouvre jusqu'à 59 works par Matisse. Le catalogue résonné de cette collection extraordinaire était la première publication extensive de la collection de Matisse depuis la création de la foundation en 1922. Et pour la première fois, il n'y a pas seulement toutes les works étudies dans la salle, mais toutes ces works ont été reproduites en couleur, qui est, pour Matisse, une partie importante de son travail. Ce symposium est, bien sûr, motivé par cette publication, mais aussi par le fait qu'elle a l'impression que ce livre s'amuse, s'amuse dans un contexte de public et de collection privée au cours de l'année passée. Même si Matisse n'a jamais été négulée, je pense que récemment, les exhibitions et les publications ont exploré un nouveau path et des nouveaux méthodes. Des projets ambitieux et des dissertations sur son travail vont arriver à la fin de l'année prochaine. Exhibitions dans Baltimore, Lyon, London et Boston sont en train d'ouvrir différents aspects de Matisse dans son carrière, ainsi que ses contributions à la portraiture moderne, à la sculpture, à la relation de l'Orient et à la culture non-ouestante, à les arts décoratifs, à la procédure et à la procédure créative. Des techniques spécifiques, ainsi que les cartes, les rôles de drawings, les writings, ou les périodes particuliers de sa carrière sont arrivées sous la salle et les projets ont refrayé la rédignation de son travail, longs dominés, je pense, par l'analyse formaliste. C'est pourquoi la Fondation Bounds a demandé des contributaires pour cette nouvelle scolaire de partager ses recherches aujourd'hui et demain et d'examiner avec nous l'impact sur leur vision de Matisse. En allant ensemble, un groupe international d'académies, créateurs, conservateurs de différents backgrounds, de différents pays, de différentes générations, cette symposium aimerait assurer le state de la connaissance de Matisse et, j'espère, pour établir de nouvelles directions pour le futur. Nous avons deux jours de lectures sur les tables de ronde et les tables de ronde seraient la occasion de la Q&A. Chaque speaking est invité à une lecture pour 30 minutes et à la fin de chaque session, nous allons gérer le stage et nous allons prendre des questions du public. Je suis très honnête d'introduire la première session qui s'appelle moments de carrière. Cette session va gérer quatre lectures adressant des moments ou des cours dans la carrière de Matisse. Je vais commencer avec Aleste Wright, dans l'histoire de l'art de l'Université de Oxford de Saint-Jean Collège. Aleste est un spécialiste européen et non-ouestan du modernisme. Entre des artistes et des subjects, il a extensivement travaillé sur Matisse, son livre sur Matisse et le sujet du modernisme a été publié en 2004 mais il a aussi été publié récemment sur Gauguin. Aujourd'hui, la relation entre le bonheur de vivre et le legacy de symbolisme. Aleste va être suivie par Margaret Vert, professeur de l'Université de Delaware. Margaret a étudié de Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Rodon, mais aussi du cinéma français, en 1920. Elle travaille maintenant, je pense, sur Manet. Il y a une question du bonheur de vivre, la question de l'idil, comme on le prononce en français. Merci, et bienvenue à Aleste. Merci, Sylvie, pour l'introduction. Merci aux organisateurs du Symposium. C'est un plaisir d'être ici pour célébrer la publication des catalogues de Yvalin et de la personne que je sais c'est Kate, mais apparemment elle s'appelle Karen Butler. Claudine et les conservateurs sont un super piece of scholarship, vraiment exemplary, et fillé avec les révélations de la première page à la dernière. Les révélations sur la technique, sur le contexte historique, sur le développement de Matisse's work et ainsi de suite. C'est aussi un plaisir d'avoir eu la double treate d'aujourd'hui, second, mais peut-être second en rang, d'écouter Yvalin en parlant de Matisse, ce qui est toujours un grand plaisir, d'avoir regardé Le Bonheur de Veve. C'est une painting que, souvent que l'on a vu, on peut encore réunir de nouvelles insights, on peut encore vous surprimer, parfois si ce n'est pas trop trop de contradiction dans les espèces de l'expect. Yvalin a écrit qu'il faut remercier de l'expansive rythme du système de Matisse. Je pense que c'est correct. Et j'ai mon propre surprise, ou double surprise, quand j'ai vu la painting. C'est-à-dire que, en tout cas, j'ai toujours choisi comme sur toutes les dernières observations, en tant que l'image réunie de Le Bonheur, et, relativement, en parlant de la diversité de l'obligation de l'obligation de ce que l'on voit avant tout. Je veux aujourd'hui penser à ce qui cause cette expérience. Il s'agit de l'expansive rythme et de l'intensité, dans le Le Bonheur de Vieve et dans d'autres Matisse d'une certaine période. Dans un niveau, bien sûr, la question de l'intention de l'intensité de l'obligation est relativement straightforward. Le Matisse du 1905, 1906 et, en plus, c'est brillant. Les couleurs sont généralement saturées. Les pigments sont radiantes. Si l'intention de l'obligation était plus brillante, les bleus de la cabine du centre de l'obligation et aussi dans le côté de la gauche ont dégradé, c'est-à-dire que l'obligation est beaucoup plus faite que l'intention de l'obligation. Je dirais, par contre, que l'effet de la travail de Matisse est quelque chose de plus que l'intention de l'obligation. Certainement, l'audition initiale est quelque chose de plus comme un assault sur l'oeil, quelque chose d'incompréhensible, un acte de violence, même, qui might threaten the viewer with blindness. We'll come back to Le Bonneau de Vieve towards the end of my paper. I want to begin exploring the nature of this optical disturbance by looking at phobism, for it is there that we find for the first time the kind of intensity that troubled the critics. Matisse does with or to the legacy of symbolism and more generally with or to the legacy of post-impressionism. Consider, for example, la japonaises au bord de l'eau, Japanese women by the water, which shows the artist's wife perched on a rock by the sea and dressed in the Japanese robe that gives the work its title. With its small dimensions, apparently rapid execution and incompletely covered ground, it lends itself to an account that views phobism as a continuation of the Impressionnist or Neo-Impressionnist's sketch as a kind of unmediated and direct response to the facts of vision. However, when it was exhibited at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in the room christened by Louis Vosel as the Sal de Feuves, the Room of the Wild Beasts, the critics worried that they saw here not naturalism but a refusal to refer in any stable way to the external world. Their concerns centered on the images remarkable diversity of facture. From the staccato strokes in the upper left corner, to the meandering lines that mark out the pattern of the robe and from the roughly scumbled section of the lower left to the thicker and more fluidly applied areas of paint in the center. Nothing here sits still. Chromatically, the surface of the work is equally contradictory. The contrasts, the red and green in the center of the canvas, for example, appearing alongside more random juxtapositions of color. Any lingering sense of technical cohesion is further undermined by the insistent presence of the white ground and by the visible remnants of a pencil underdrawing. And crucially, as the critics sensed, this unstable pictorial vocabulary begins to undo representation. Consider, for example, the relationship between Madame Matisse's back and the water behind her. In the juxtaposition of Woman and Ocean, a series of what might be termed false identifications operating at the level both of color and of facture confound two objects that ought to remain distinct. Blue and turquoise, evoking pattern and shadow in the robe, slide imperceptibly towards green as they move from figure to watery ground. The short brush strokes on the figure's back abbreviated remnants of the fabric's arabesque design reappear in the surface of the water as the crests of waves or perhaps shadows, even here there is ambiguity. If representation thus falters here, if we are momentarily unsure as to what we are looking at, as to what particular bits of paint might refer to, it is in large part due to the painting's dismantling of the mimetic logic of near impressionism. Witness the way in which la japonaisse stands effectively in inverse relationship to young women with umbrella. A more obedient, pointilliste effort, Matisse painted earlier in the year. In young women, each of the picture's elements coastline, horizon, figure and umbrella is firmly delineated by the precise ink underdrawing before being filled in with color. In la japonaisse, in contraste, the figure disperses into its surroundings as the underdrawing multiplies into a massive repeated, but non coincident lines around, for example, the figure's feet. Note how the left foot confusingly is turquoise like the robe. In young women, the gridded surface orders the image around the horizon and around the vertical line that follows the front of the figure's dress allowing even unpainted areas of the canvas to read as coherent spatial elements. In la japonaisse, again in contraste, spatial relations are less clear. Consideré in isolation, Madame Matisse appears to be viewed straight on. Yet the sharply rising surface of the sea behind the figure, the lack of horizon line, and the rock in the upper right corner each stress the downward angle of our view. And most importantly, where young women make systematic use of complementary contrasts to reproduce the chromatic effects of nature. Green dots in the surface of the sea shifting to blue next to the yellow of the figure's dress, for example. La japonaisse, as we have seen, allows color to blur distinctions between figure and ground, between one object and the next. What we see in la japonaisse is not the wholesale rejection of neo-impressionism, nor of representation. We still identify with relative ease what we see here. It is rather a rendering unstable of the pointillist system. Replacing the consistent factor of young women with free-floated tastes, la japonaisse leaves the signifying codes of neo-impressionism in disarray, severing the logical connections between one mark and the next. A similar disruption of representation of the ability of painting to refer in stable and coherent fashion to the appearance of the external world is to be found in standing figure. Painted a year or so after la japonaisse and now here in the Barnes collection. The paint, as was increasing in Matisse's practice, is applied in somewhat broader areas. The image moves somewhat in the direction of le bonheur de vivre. But there are similar uncertainties at the level of representation. The spatial relationship between figure and ground is indeterminate as all the contours and orientation of the lower part of the robe. Such ambiguities mean that for all that the image, as Karen Butler has rightly noted, allows us to imagine that the figure stands in a sunlit glade, correct? The roughly applied areas of yellow, orange, blue and green sitting flatly on the surface present themselves equally as a refusal of the ability of paint to record the eye's engagement with the world. Now, one way to make sense of what we see here would be to label it as abstraction. And the critics, as we will hear, use this term at times. Matisse, we might suggest, was becoming more interested in paint but we should not push the argument too far in this direction. It would be more accurate to say that these works sit halfway between two kinds of vision. On the one hand, the naturalist eye, all eager regard, scanning the shifting and sunlit surfaces of the world. On the other, the eye of modernist visuality, absorbed in the formal qualities of the painting's own surface. The works bear witness, that is to say, to the dismantling but not the banishment of the tools of representation, which begin to be reduced to a disconnected residue, near shards of a broader mimetic syntax. This quality, I think, this dismantling of near-impressionism has much to do with the critics' sense of optical disturbance, of the kind of assault on the eyes they looked at this kind of painting. I want to park that question just for a moment and look at another kind of dismantling that takes place in phobism. If Les Japonaises put near-impressionism to the sword and being its logic, rendering its representational devices incoherent, much the same can be said of what Matisse's faux portraits did to another variant of post-impressionist painting, namely symbolism. Here the best example is Woman in a Hat. Perhaps the most famous or infamous of the paintings exhibited en Maldefoe. It was quickly singled out as one of the more deranged entries in the exhibition, with the critics resorting repeatedly to a vocabulary of the insane, the aggravating and the violent, presumably at least in part because of the paintings roughly an inconsistently worked surface and its rather brutal indication of form. The figure's left hand, for example, is crudely rendered by a few sparse strokes of a too-dry brush. Whilst Madame Matisse's fan, the sitter is again the artist's wife, is composed of thickly glutinous dabs of paint, whose sticky viscosity contradicts the treatment of the hand that holds it and makes difficult, now on impossible in fact, to picture what the fan might actually have looked like. Over to the right, the scabrous paint layer stammers into incompletion, allowing the schematically penciled indications of the preliminary design to show through. The hat, in turn, while not as thickly painted as the fan, seems equally ill-equipped to convey information about the nature of Madame Matisse's accessories. A dab here, a dab there, adding up to nothing much of anything, an imprecise mass balanced improbably atop her head. The difficulty of identifying all the details of what we see here led the critics to talk not only of violence, but also as I mentioned a moment ago, of the abstract. The anonymous critic for the daily Le Matin, for example, worried that Matisse's paintings were a bit too abstract. The tone is seductive, but the subject remains confused, and the eye remains disquieted. That link, I think, is important. For this critic, at least, the abstract, the difficulty of making sense of what we see here, went hand in hand with the feeling that the painting caused confusion for the eye. He or she was turning out quick reviews for a daily paper, and had neither of the time nor in all likelihood the inclination to expand upon this observation. It was left to other more significant writers to try to tease out the link between the abstract and the violent. Writers such as the painter and art theorist Maurice Denis. In a long article published a month or so after the 1905 Salon d'Autom, Denis noted that while Matisse's paintings were all violently coloured, one feels oneself fully in the domain of abstraction. He then fleshed out this insight in a passage that's worth quoting at some length. Without doubt, this is Denis. Without doubt, as with the most ardent ravings of Van Gogh, something remains of the initial emotion of nature. But what one finds above all is the artificial. Not the literary artificial, as would be the case with an idealist riche for expression. Nor the decorative artificial, such as Turkish and Persian carpet makers have imagined it. No, it is something still more abstract. It is painting outside all contingency, painting in itself the pure act of painting. Denis' invocation of the pure act of painting makes it sound for a moment as though he wishes to propose a strictly formalist account of Matisse's work. But that's not quite what he was driving at. The introduction of the term expression and the name of Van Gogh alongside mention of the artificial and the abstract signals that something else was at stake. Van Gogh was valorised by Denis, though not without some reservations, precisely as a powerfully expressive painter. One who was engaged with his fellow symbolists in what Denis referred to here as the idealist search for expression. And it is against this that Denis positions Matisse's abstraction. Something of the kind of expression that one saw in Van Gogh remains. This is not pure abstraction. It's not a coloured carpet. But the emotion is attenuated. Unpacking exactly what Denis was driving at is not easy. In part because in the rest of his article he co-opts this observation about Matisse for an argument that is very much about Denis' own obsessions. The importance of sensibility was important. But what he gestured towards with his initial insight, linking but also differentiating Matisse and Van Gogh, was our adventure that Matisse's paintings recall certain aspects of the Dutch master's work and more broadly of symbolism. Apparently expressive brushwork, apparently expressive colour. But that it operated according to a very different set of rules. In a Van Gogh, non naturalistic colour and agitated brushwork would have a meaning. To take a rather obvious example in this sub-portrait the swirling brushwork and blue colour range rined with the mournful facial expression to convey the idea of the suffering artist. In Matisse, in contrast, the link between signifiers and signified is at least partly broken. The restless brushwork, the hastily applied patches of colour, the pencil lines scratched into the surface. All of this suggests and certainly would have for an early 20th century audience of faded symbolism that this ought to be an impassioned image. And yet despite these cues there is a notable lack of emotional engagement. The sitter's gaze is somewhat averted and her blank, mask-like countenance reveals little of her interior state. Even the title of the work maintains a stubborn neutrality. It is, I would suggest, this mismatch between the works apparently symboliste devices and a certain blankness or abstraction that bothered Demy and the other critics. In which the same we might note in passing might be sort of another portrait of Matisse's wife this one painted just after the 1905 salon d'automne. This is the green line on the left which co-opts some of Van Gogh's trademark devices most notably the jarring complementaries and the subdued violence of the brushwork but twins them again a marked lack of engagement an emotional distance that is once more underlined by the figure's averted gaze. Symboliste devices, this is to say, are thus emptied at least to some degree of their expressive cargo. The result, however, as Demy sensed, is not pure abstraction. Just as Le Japonais reduced neo-impressionism to a stammered residue but left its representational tools in play here we see not the exclusion of expression but rather it's un mooring from the person of the artist where in Van Gogh colour and form could be understood to make visible the psychic state of the individual. In Matisse, Symboliste's expressive tools appeared disconnected from the artist's affective world fragments of expression floating free within a painting that no longer follows the rules. Such painting in which representational and expressive elements remain in play but fail to produce coherent sense might best be characterised following the literary critic Svetan Todorov as a kind of schizophrenic malfunctioning. I should say immediately this is not a diagnosis of Matisse, there are plenty of critics at the time thought that phobism could only have emerged from madness. Rather what I'm arguing what I want to talk about is how the images produce or do not produce coherent meaning. Todorov sets up a distinction between modernist writing that can be thought of as schizophrenic and that which is paranoid. Symboliste's literature was in Todorov's terms paranoid in that it replaced the world of external reality that which was typically represented in naturalist literature with an imaginary substitute or that could be read as a coherent parallel universe linked to our own by series of legible stable correspondance. Literature produced after the Symboliste period he argues exhibited a tendency towards what he calls the schizophrenic. Rather than creating a consistent picture of an imagined world the text becomes internally contradictory, preventing the reader from organising their elements into a coherent narrative. Everything is thus experienced as fragments as in schizophrenia a condition in which the subject loses his or her ability to synthesise sensation and thought. Van Gogh's portraiture it seems fair to say answers to Todorov's account of the paranoid text. Not again as a diagnosis of the artist himself but as a description of the operation of his work. A series of Symboliste correspondance promote expressive legibility. What he shows does not look quite like the world but it expresses clearly the artist's emotional universe. Fovism in contrast is rather more like the schizophrenic text. The tools of representation and of expression are present but fail to add up to coherent communication. Here you might note that Henri Gide, like Denis a perceptive observer of contemporary painting wrote when faced with women in a hat how far from the lyrical excesses of a Van Gogh before adding art cannot do without syntax. It's the failure of the pictorial science to work together the lack of syntax as Gide had it that renders Fovism incoherent. To say this is to think in terms of how the paintings communicate of how we might characterize them as signifying systems but we can also ask and certainly this was the pressing question for the initial audience what it is like to look at such paintings. The critics talked constantly of stupefaction making sense of Fovism's disarticulated signs. They also talked as we have heard of violence and of the disquieted eye. The two things go together the experience of looking at Fovism I would suggest is akin to what Frederick Jameson, following Lacan has described as the schizophrenic experience an experience of isolated signifiers without sense or temporality that pushes the materiality of the signifier more insistently, more intensely into view. For the schizophrenic this can be highly distressing but it can also be accompanied Jameson suggests by a feeling of euphoric elation. Rather than being processed rather than being folded into a coherent image of the world sense data are experienced as it were raw experienced in all their irreducibly forceful and concentrated presence. Something similar I am suggesting happens with Fovism. Pictorial signifiers that might have suggested expressive or representational content are dispersed across canvases that no longer cohere. A short circuiting of meaning that collapses our attention onto the surface that allows us that forces us to experience the four properties of the image and in particular its color in undiluted intensity. We are not of course any more than Matisse was as he painted mad when we look at Fovism but our senses are better our ability to make sense to understand what our eye beholds is deranged, derailed, diluted. And it's the lingering presence of meaning meaning destabilized but still operating fitfully. Fragments of expression that the eye cannot grasp alongside the consequently unredeemed presence of pigment that made the critics talk of an assault on their eye. And of Le Bonheur de Vivre. Like Fovism, it dismantles its sources under their syntax as Jude would have put it though the sources are both different and more diverse. There may be occasional echoes of the kind of agitated brushwork seen in Famel-Chapeau but the painting as has often been noted for the most part speaks a different set of languages. One of these is the classical. The figure furthest to the left for example recalls Ang's famous La Source whilst the image's theme has been linked to the pastoral tradition. Note that Matisse titled this 1905 painting which predicts a number of Le Bonheur de Vivre's elements pastoral. Alongside the classical the painting also as Margaret Worth, who's about to follow me on the stage, has demonstrated mobilizes but also refuses a pictorial vocabulary drawn from the anarchist utopia of his one-time friend and colleague Paul Signac. This is Signac's The Golden Age is not in the past, it is in the future. Or perhaps this is not the future at all but the distant past. The goats to the right of Matisse's image resemble the prehistoric cave paintings that have been coming to light since the later 19th century in France and Spain. This particular example was announced in 1904. So some of these photographs or black and white photographs have been appearing in the press. Je vous suggest that this is a specific source for Matisse, but these things are in the air. Though the painting's components are somewhat different from those seen in fauvism and though the range of those components is wider the net result is not dissimilar. The diverse stylistic and thematic references collide with and interrupt each other. As Matisse himself though he generally insisted on the unity of his work came close to acknowledging. Le Bonheur de Vivre if he admitted was a painting made from juxtapositions of things conceived independently. Those juxtapositions mean that the pictorial languages that Matisse mobilises do not add up to coherent meaning. The picture's sense remains elusive as the wide range of interpretations in the art historical literature testifies. And again as with the fauv portraits and landscapes that we've considered with the picture's visual signifiers thus floating free as fragments of which the viewer is unable to make sense those signifiers the patches of colour the arabesque contours and so forth are left insistently in view their material qualities experienced as a forcefully inescapable presence in the eye of the beholder. It is this I would suggest that lends the picture its sense of overwhelming intensity. At least in part. But the painting also differs from the works of the preceding year in ways that push the intensity to an even higher pitch. The first of these is the way in which this quality is allied with a theme that for all its indeterminacy itself speaks of euphoria or at the very least of idyllic pleasure. The pastoral and the idea of anarchist utopia both suggest something of this. Perhaps the echoes of a prehistoric past also bespeak an archaic arcadia. And so too does a further source for the painting. When the picture was shown at the 1906 Salon des Andes Pondons, the critics were quick to name Gauguin as a component in the picture's complex genealogy. And I think they were probably right. Where do we come from? What are we going? This is the Gauguin on the right. It's one likely precedent. It's pale gold upper corners and it's a ray of ambiguous human and animal figures set against an expanse of water. It's always seemed to me one of the possible inspirations for Matisse's picture. Mahon no Atua is another. Gauguin's paintings tend, of course, to be rather clearer, rather more univocal in their meaning. Mahon no Atua, for example, uses sensuous color and arabesque contours as rather straightforward symbolist correspondance for the idea of tahiti as tropical idyll. But it is that idea of the idyll that Matisse picks up and reconfigures in Le Bonheur de Vieve. Thus, whereas in the faux portraits, the critic sensed a disjunction between the image's expressive intensity and the blankness of the sitter, now the experience of hallucinatory intensity generated by the painting's shards of meaning and expression is brought into sync with the overall theme of the painting, with the idea that, for all its ambiguities, sits at the heart of the image, namely sensuous pleasure. The second big difference between Le Bonheur de Vieve is the fact that, for all its fractured meanings, for all its diverse sources, the painting is, in the final account, as Ivalin has compellingly argued, tightly suited, possessed of a unity not seen before in Matisse's work. This, as Ivalin again has argued, imposes on the beholder a further form of blindness, an absent-minded peripheral gaze scattered to the edges of the picture an eye that loses its way unable to focus. If, then, as I've been arguing, we are in part asked to look with a schizophrenic eye, with Le Bonheur de Vieve another kind of vision joins the fray. This look revolves around desire, around the feeling of a sensual immersion in the expansive circulation in the taut rhythms of the painting's surface. And it is this, finally, that lends the painting its overwhelming visual force. The idyllic theme, the intensity that follows, as I've been arguing from the painting's dismantling of the symbolist's legacy, each of these is brought together in an image that absorbs a viewer in an encounter from which we cannot step back, which the mind, therefore, cannot grasp, hence, I think, my recurrent difficulty in recalling the work's power. And the can only really be experienced in the flesh, standing before, immersed within the painting's possessive pictorial logic. Thank you. Thank you. I think that Alistair's paper on my own will fit together rather nicely. I want to congratulate the authors of the catalogue. This is too loud. It's okay. It's an amazing achievement and I so enjoyed reading it and I'm also very much looking forward to the next two days to listening to people talk about Matisse in a very intensive way. I think he certainly deserves that and I'm just looking forward to it with pleasure. Thank you also to the organisers of the symposium. It's been a very easy passage and I'll just get started right away here. Oh, they didn't give me the backup. Okay. Well, it's okay. How can we understand Matisse's pictorial poetics in the 1910s? I want to begin to answer that question by looking at his studio interiors. The pictures I'm considering were painted in Paris and Nice between 1914 and about 1921 and I'm particularly interested in connecting the two periods as Dominique Fourcade did long ago when he wrote that in the Matisse, sorry, in the Nice paintings where the product of mental operations started before Matisse settled there. These studios that you see on the screen, on the top Paris, on the bottom Nice are rooms with windows that open onto the city or the sea. In Paris, the pictures were painted in the artist's studio on the K-Semmichaux in 1914 and 1916. In Nice, they were created at the Hotel Beaure-Rivage and the Hotel de la Méditerranée between 1917 and 1921. The first of those hotels was a modest middle-class tourist hotel where he stayed the first year and the second was grander with larger, more elaborately decorated rooms where he stayed for three successive seasons. Matisse was working out a new manner of painting in the mid and later 1910s and this involved the transformation of his earlier approach to the studio interior in pictures like the red studio on the left of 1911 and studio with sculpture of 1912 on the right. The number and legibility of imported repetitions of the artist's own works in these earlier interiors and I think you can see examples of them all over those two images are muted in the later ones although self-reference certainly still plays a part. The later studio interiors are less freighted with quotations of pre-existing works and often present a more provisional studio space and arrangement. This speaks to Matisse's struggles in this period. Most scholars have registered the turmoil and disturbance he experienced during the war and just after. Hilary Spirling has given us a dense account of it. As he worked towards something new in his art and sought a position vis-à-vis his own past work the work of his rivals and the emergent avant-garde. There were also persistent complications of family relations and those with the art market especially once Matisse pursued work in Nice that was seen as more naturalistic. The artist remains a presence in these pictures however if only by implication phantom-like appearance or staged disappearance. So there are connections and contrasts to be drawn between the Paris and Nice studio interiors I'm considering. They all share the box-like interior of the artist's room usually presented with multiple angles of view like a three-sided box whose sides are gently bent outward registering the movement of the artist's head as he takes in the space from different angles. Generally they include windows sometimes with curtains or shutters railings or balconies that offer a view of the Parisian cityscape or the Mediterranean. The outside world makes a brief appearance through these windows with sketchy descriptions of modern life. Traffic and pedestrians in the street or on the promenade are rendered in a shorthand that recalls impressionism and fovism in Paris, Paris and Boulevard from 1873 on the upper left and Derraille's view of Collier from 1905 on the lower left. The Matisse pictures on the right are his interior with goldfish of 1914 painted in Paris at the top and interior with violin case of 1918-1919 painted in Nice at the bottom and those are the two pictures I'm going to concentrate on most. And a detail of those four pictures. At top right the tiny silhouetted figures move with the traffic along the Seine in Paris at the bottom I'm talking about Matisse's pictures on the right at the bottom the schematic strollers are precisely placed between the balistrades and along the top of the railing. These are the bare traces of the external world that will eventually be swept away by the extreme artifice of the Otelisques painted in Nice in pictures where the windows had been expelled. I think we went through we went forward The studio interiors share attention to the everyday furnishings of the artist's room tables and chairs wallpaper, flooring and curtains and often in a way of more charged objects and figures identified with the studio such as models, canvases on the easel brushes and pallets and sketchbooks goldfish bowls, violins in their cases mirrors and the artist himself Matisse's Paris interiors tend toward geometric simplification and condensation of form The Nice pictures respond to the special quality of light of the Mediterranean with an all over luminosity and the objects and figures in them are often more legible and arranged in a more open fluid and expansive space Matisse himself spoke of the importance of the distinct quality of light in each location as essential to his work Let me begin with four important paintings created in the Paris atelier Interior with goldfish on the upper left 1913, you've seen it before goldfish and pallet next to it from 1914 Studio Case à Michel on the bottom on the left 1916 and the painter in a studio on the right bottom 1916-17 These painted rooms began as real spaces the artist's working studio in a rented apartment on the Case à Michel that are transformed by him into spaces of vision, imagination and painterly process They suggest a drama that unfolds as the artist's room becomes strange through simplification, distortion the interplay of objects and figures and the layering of color and space In Paris, Matisse was working in a very familiar place he had had a studio on the Case à Michel for more than a decade earlier in his career Interior with goldfish introduces us to a central motif of his art in the 1910s a residue of his trip to Morocco the goldfish bowl A cylindrical goldfish bowl sits on a tall table in front of a window next to a small plant in a clay pot Through the window is a view across the river where we see parts of the buildings bridge, pedestrians and traffic and the stairs down to the river Matisse spoke of the distinctive light in this room as warmed by the reflection of the sun on the walls opposite The exceedingly long fronds of the tiny budding plant reach out as if through the window into the distant space across the river confusing foreground and background à la saison and suggesting continuity between the artist's room and the city Orange-gold reflections of the goldfish are cast over the couch and its pillows the side of sessions with the model To the right of the table the window grillwork appears as incomplete black tracery Matisse has covered it with solid blue under the table and the thick horizontal of the dark orange railing also rhymes with the color of the fish The picture is disciplined by numerous rectilinear bands of color and the rigorous geometric structure of the tables, railings, window frame and chair that are echoed in the architectonic forms of the buildings across the river Transparent like the goldfish bowl but flatter still, the window and its view are the picture within the picture so common in Matisse's interiors a flat screen hanging between the blue planes of the walls a luminous projection of the world on the edge but this sense of fluid movement from near to far is countered by the way the goldfish bowl on its table is hemmed in on every side and our entry into the central space is blocked by a table and chair in the foreground seen from above This reinforces the idea of the goldfish bowl as an object of contemplation at a distance and also implies the artist and our presence just beyond the limits of the canvas of the chair The shadowed form in the left foreground has been interpreted as a chair or chair back or seat seen from above but there is some ambiguity here it could also be a canvas on the floor or leaning against the back of the chair some previous completed work of the artist or a work to come the chair itself is not incidental chairs serve in Matisse's studio interiors as informal but essential supports for his works in the absence of an easel and a seats from which the artist can contemplate his Matisse and make his painting they are familiar studio objects in the sketch for this painting on the left side of the screen Matisse considered a more open entry into the central space the form next to the table in the foreground looks more clearly like a chair back in a sketch related to the second goldfish picture he produced that year on the right the artist shows himself in a chair contemplating the motif of a square palette in hand the sketch for interior with goldfish places the goldfish bowl and table in front of a narrower window opening that is framed by a long curtain and Matisse includes a picture over the couch, presumably one of his own the legibility of the foreground and these additional elements of decor are eliminated when he decides to concentrate the focus on the goldfish bowl and create a barrier to that central space in the final painting painting the glowing tabletop in the right foreground with its luminous bowl that picks up the greens of the distant pavement has more prominence than in the sketch taking up more than half the width of the painting a number of scholars have eloquently discussed how interior with goldfish suggests the self-contained world and the invisible presence of the artist I want to look at the painting again to push this reading a little bit further examining the goldfish bowl the window frame and wall are seen through its glass and water mediums we see that Matisse pictures the displacement or refraction of light and color as we look through the water in the bowl the lighter blue of the window frame is deflected to the right side of it the deeper blue of the wall to the left is also displaced to the right coloring the left half of the water again confusing inside and outside the wedge of blue under the arch in the distance continues these blue refractions as if transmuted through the bowl the medium of the bowl and the window pane the gray wedge on the surface of the water in the bowl first appears to be a past shadow and I don't know if I have a pointer do I have a pointer there we go right there this is what I'm talking about thank you as we look through the water in the bowl the lighter blue of the window frame is deflected to the right side of it the lighter blue on the left is also displaced to the right coloring the left half of the water so I'm going back a little bit again confusing inside and outside the wedge of blue under the arch in the distance continues these blue refractions as if transmitted through the bowl and the window pane the gray wedge on the surface of the water in the bowl first appears to be a cast shadow but on closer inspection seems to be an exaggerated refraction of the gray black shadow on the wall behind the bowl here it's right there Matisse diagrams these refractions on the stacked ovals of the bowl with wedges of gray and blue on the surface of the water and wedges of blue and gray green inside the oval of the top of the glass cylinder the light and shadow on the bowl is both perceptual stimulated by a particular moment of refracted light and conceptual it also generates far-flung refractions that are cast deep into the pictorial space over by the river Matisse's conceptual treatment of light is also demonstrated by the bowl in the right foreground a soft gray wedge of transparent shadow appears on its right side here through which we can see through to the rim of the bowl so it's a partly transparent shadow and a lighter green shadow appears on the left inside the bowl in between these two shadows is a highlighted wedge of paler green the shadow to the left inside the bowl is a concave quarter moon and registers shadow created by light coming from the left and hitting the edge of the bowl but the gray shadow on the right is created by light that comes from outside the picture implying a body or object outside the frame to the right the artist himself or perhaps his palette like the chair on the left foreground this shadow was another sign of the artist's implicit presence in the studio and signals another confusion of interior and exterior not just the arc of the plant reaching through the window to bridge the distance between studio and world or the blue into the bridge as if refracted from the interior but the sign of the intrusion into the canvas of something that lies outside its borders the round vessel on the table is also a foil for the fishbowl ceramic rather than glass round and shallow rather than cylindrical and tall and the contrast of its green interior with the pervading blue of the picture and its placement on the illuminated table surface make it stand out all the more the interior of the bowl is shadowed by light that comes from the room but not directly from the window the shadow on its right side is cast from outside the picture Leo Stein reported just how difficult the process of making this painting was and how long Matisse worked on it in early 1914 the layering of colors and changes to the canvas have been chronicled in detail several scholars have suggested that this studio interior is a meditation on enclosure, isolation and interiority the windowed room like the goldfish bowl nested within it a room of shadows, silence solitude, the artist's immersion in mental space claustrophobia or alternatively fear of open space its temporality either a moment or an extended duration depending on the interpreter all of this is very suggestive but I'm going to add another layer of interpretation to these I want to propose what I'll call a refractive poetics for this painting light and color pass through the distorting mediums of glass and water of the goldfish bowl and window and are displaced and dispersed nesting spaces bow within room, room within city are imagined as far-flung projections and deflections and intimate reversals of distance and proximity face and back the interiority whether it be spatial, subjective or conceptual inside or displayed by the goldfish bowl and the artist's windowed room is less about enclosure I think than a refractive poetics that in the end does not leave the world outside or the artist's viewer stuck at the threshold this ordinary work-a-day room has been transformed into a truly strange room a strangely impersonal one that resists the presence of the artist Henri Matisse that exists only through his disappearance his refraction through the medium of paint and the durational activity of painting whatever poetics of space vision and art making the painting signifies proceeds from the aesthetics of displacement and distortion through the mediums invoked by the painter the subsequent pictures in the Paris studio series continue to elaborate the artist's disappearance Henri Matisse reduces the artist's studying the motif in the sketch I showed you earlier to the analytic forms of pictorial construction the view through the window in the earlier painting onto the cave, the buildings and the traffic on the street is now reduced to a field of blue that is interrupted by a thick vertical band of black a translation of the window mullion perhaps in the grill work of the railing the window structure has become part of the room the bowl and the painter are now quite close to us but only the rectangularity of the artist's painting is close to us but only the rectangular palette and the ghost of a thumb remain of the painter along with diagonal lines and rectilinear forms that might indicate brushes or arms and legs and geometric forms in the vicinity of the head studio qu'est-ce que Michel imagines the studio situation with a reclining new model rather than a still life as the artist's motif the artist is again strikingly missing from the scene a nude that reveals only a fragment of the body on the couch and raises a mirror image as much as one oriented to the model's pose the nude on the bed is defined in grey black and warm tones her reality not much more convincing than that of the table in front of the window the light rectangles of the illegible works on the wall in the background float on the blue grey plane the zigzag pattern of the floorboards peters out behind the chair the white outlines of the ghostly table and from the window are nearly transparent and the tabletop bends toward the picture plane as if striving to become another picture within the picture like those on the wall and the chair enhancing its unreality the circle within the table's square top is a bright yellow plate at the centre of which is poised a small glass another alluring appeal to the senses like the view through the window and the female nude the glass and the window pane overlap high above the blue river itself a potential reflective surface the association's rich but obscure they suggest different modalities of the transmission and reflection of light and analogies and transformations of glass, window pane, water and mirror I've lost my images and the different kinds of vision and pictorial poetics these make possible Matisse reworked the yellow plate and glass giving them a material chromatic glow the opaque curtain in the corner to the left of the window becomes transparent at its edge to reveal the ghostly half of a picture that seems to merge with it the curtain in the right foreground is a hooded lurking this is the one in the background that's partially transparent and this is the one in the foreground the opaque curtain in the corner the curtain in the right foreground is a hooded lurking spectral presence ready to shut out the view and the light it's black center ominously shadowed or as if cut away the striations indicating the stairs on the K and the distance are repeated on the curtain's surface suggesting transmissions between interior and exterior and intimations of passage from one space to another aligns stirring curtains and movements downstairs with the empty chair set up before the canvas at the center of studio qu'est-ce que Michel Matisse paints himself in absentia the everyday studio set up in mise en scène of artistic creation are organized around that absence signaled to us, however, by the nude on the couch who gazes out at the painter painting and thereby exposes his vanishing act in the artist in the studio most likely the last in the series the artist does appear but now he's a phantom puppet in a straight chair facing off against the model and her double on the easel in the most austere and dreamlike of the Paris studio interiors nothing blocks us from the room except the spatial disorientation Matisse induces with his fields of black and white that conjoin the planes of wall and floor the architectonics of the easel and the painter in his chair are stiffly rectilinear and the swathing of the model in a green robe no arms or hands are articulated suggests a bound captive the flesh tones of the painter make it seem as if he is the nude confronting the clothed model and he is as bound as she is seen in profil perdue the unarticulated bowl of his head is defined by thick black contours that echo the black contours of the window and railing it appears as if the window frame has wrapped itself around his head and the tall easel looms over him here the world outside the window remains distinct inside and outside do not inter penetrate the studio is a protected enclosed space of a strange encounter with a view of a studio that is now a distant other world the window grow works setting the boundary between the two only the decorative arabesques of mirror and window railing reveal the strenuous reduction of forms and confrontation of figures but the exterior world has still been influenced by this austere studio regime even the sketchy black silhouettes of the passers by on the street are put in order lined up in space like the regular railing and window openings on the buildings with light on the window frame succinctly sums up the communication between interior and exterior it's color reflected in the face of the model and her twin on the canvas it's notable that the window mullion is not included in this picture either the angle is such that we are only seeing a small portion of the window or the window is uniquely in this series open yet we also see no curtains, shutters or window panes the actual window structure and transparency do not register and the associations of transparent and reflective surfaces that we saw in studio case and michel are contradicted by the opaque brown surface of the decorative mirror high up on the wall that reflects nothing the tense confrontation of painter model and canvas is relieved only by the decoration on this mirror's frame the box of the room is distorted by bending fields of black and white set side by side the black band on our right locking into the white one on the left making floor and wall continuous and enforcing the inescapability of artistic striving painter and model are moored in the black the painting on the easel and the mirror on the white a conceptual divide you might think between the painter's face off with the model and the product of that engagement the painting on the easel but all three figures appear equally unreal and the model poses in the scene white zones the compact forms of the model and her image on the canvas confront the artist with an uncanny doubling he has to face the mirror is there to remind us of the artifice of picture making and in this view of the studio interior it really does seem to be a strain the presence of the artist seems to excite a degree of abstracting simplification that turns the figures into radical reductions with an anxious and slightly absurd gravity matisse will produce an extended series of studio interiors and niece I'll only have time to talk about one of them in detail in the photo on the left we see him soon after his arrival in a room at the hotel Boulevard with his self-portrait on the chair on the right is the hotel seen from the Esplanade in the first few years he would work in the provisional studios of hotel rooms that looked out over the water anonymous private temporary spaces far from Paris his family and the war and it's aftermath he would move to more permanent apartment more permanent apartment and studio in the fall of 1921 and this led to the increasingly elaborate staging of objects and models in pictures of odor leaks and interiors like these seated odor leaks on the left of 1922 and interior with phonograph of 1924 on the right there is a general mutation in Matisse's work as he turns from construction of the Paris interiors to the all over emanation of light and niece in niece the hotel room studios featured ornate patterned walls floors and ceilings dressing tables upholstered in wood chairs and mirrors decor and somewhat outmoded style that was found not collected afterwards Matisse spoke of the hotel de la Méditerranée calling it fake absurd amazing delicious he mentions its Rococo style with its Italianic ceilings suggesting an almost camp appreciation for these places the ready-made decor of these hotel rooms and the artist status as a stranger in that city seems to have stimulated his reimagining of the artist studio interior and reflections on making art and it inaugurated a new phase of work which I don't think is Matisse falling asleep these provisional studios afforded a different mise en scène there are few personal items no goldfish bulls works by the artist rarely appear nor do reclining nudes or the artist himself although he does paint a self portrait in 1918 as we saw on the photograph and two pictures of the artist at work in the studio with a figure in 1919 there are sketch books and empty chairs to suggest the absent artist or model and occasionally a stray work that might be by Matisse on the wall this is before the niece studio in a congested theater of artifice obsessively arranged but it is still a kind of stage set in which constellations of objects are arranged in this early niece series there are still windows and a fascination with the quality of the light that Matisse would later characterize as silvery the pictures seem to be more relaxed spatially and more improvisational engaged in rhythmic repetitions and variations that suggest the animation of the room this point is higher than in the Paris interiors often floating high up on an imaginary back wall but despite this loosening of the flow of light in space interpreters have still located a sense of anxious solitude sometimes even imprisonment in these Mediterranean rooms in contrast to the Paris studios the windows of French doors are generally open they also shift position as the artist looks through them more directly and at less of an angle shifted from the right side wall closer to the center of the picture multiple layers of curtains and sometimes shutters often frame them interior with vile l'in-case on the top right was painted in Matisse's second season niece in 1918-19 a larger more ornamented space in the Hotel de la Méditerranée than the room with the Hotel Beaure-Rivage you see on the upper left from the previous year the play of contrasting pattern services is striking in these Mediterranean rooms the yellow wallpaper and the red curtain but also the bits of ceiling decoration in the tile floor the floor patterns of the wallpaper and the irregular grid of the floor setup rhythms that give the picture a beating pulse the upholstered chair holds a violin case sign of the artist violinist whom we might imagine playing or painting out of frame while the French doors to the balcony are open at the top the curtain falls over a fixed arched and pedaled window that casts bright outline pedals on to the interior surface of the fabric we see a blue shadow in the center of the window pane on the right it could be a reflection of the green form out the window to the left but it is not visible through the transparency of the curtain although the curtain is transparent above the reddish brown line of the trim at the top of the window is set at a diagonal like all the rectilinear forms in the picture to my mind this is the closest Matisse comes in these niece pictures of interiors to integrating the view out the window in the interior space bringing that light into the room there are of course pictures that he makes of the balcony itself reviews from the balcony but in any case bringing this light into the room there's still more than that more than just light and rhythm in this picture the dressing table is placed near the window an arrangement that doesn't get repeated I believe except in an earlier related picture that shows the table and mirror closer to hand and at a diagonal on the left there the mirror does reflect the room in interior with violin case the black chair, the black sketchbook the black mirror all line up before the open doors we can see the traces where Matisse move the chair over to the right adjusting their relation light streams onto the table and onto the tile floor tiny strollers seen through the stone balistrade are also sketched in black their motion animated by the irregular grid of the spaces between the balusters there's something witty about Matisse's simplification and segmentation of forms in this passage with the squat balusters, the distant strollers and the irregular streams of light that flow across the floor those ropes of light on the floor recall his reminiscence that the light at the hotel came from below like quote footlights in a theater the resonant black forms the chair, the mirror and the black sketchbook explicitly counter the incidental inconsequence of the sketchy black silhouettes of the wandering strollers outside canceling the floor of light that floods the room the mirror refusing its optical reflection surrounded by the syncopated rhythms of the balistrade floor, walls and ceiling these accretions of black bring the room back to ground zero this artist is doubly absent in this room as both musician and artist but the music he does play fills the room via the rhythmic structures of patterned surfaces the black forms especially the mirror and the notebook with their greater density emanating blackness as if it were light I think Matisse would say are pools of concentrated darkness and stillness in a room of implied movement the curtains as they rustle from transparency to opacity the pulsation of the field of irregular patterns of the tiles on the floor or the floral designs on the walls another way of saying it is that the animate breath of light in this room its Mediterranean music is accompanied by the silent depth of the black mirror and the black sketchbook this black as absence is as powerful as the light that enters the room of the artist paints work in the studio was at the center of Matisse's practice and he was clearly compelled to reflect his face and his experience of it he depended on the presence of the model or the motif whether that was an object, a view or a figure and in the first three seasons in Nice experience the liberation of his new environment and in particular it's light one of my favorite statements by Matisse is the one that goes the model is a springboard for me it's the door that I must break down to reach the garden in which I am alone and also happy the paintings of the studio interior in both Paris and Nice are seeking out that garden through a mise en scène of appearance artifice and ultimately disappearance as the poet Mallermey might say quote the almost vibratory disappearance according to the play of the word unquote thank you good morning again so it's my pleasure now to introduce our two next speakers Cécile Dobré first Cécile Dobré is curator of the Centre Pompidou, Musée Nationale d'art moderne while she is in charge of Matisse among many other modern artists Cécile has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions the style collect for instance at the Met and in Paris at the Grand Palais but also Matisse Per Esserie and in search of true painting at the Met today Cécile will highlight Matisse's relationship sur realism and his influence on the 1950s at the occasion of an exhibition she curated last year then we will listen to Claudine Gramon Claudine is an expert on fovisum she has published articles, books and curated exhibitions on the subject and she has been recently appointed director of the Musée Matisse Denise so congratulations and she is about to publish Matisse and she will present this work a multi-year project today so welcome to Cécile and welcome to Claudine, thank you so I am very pleased to take part to this prestigious Matisse meeting where several of my colleagues and friends are present and I would like to warmly thank the Barnes Foundation and in particular Sylvie Patry for their invitation as Sylvie asked me je n'ai pas ma recherche mais c'est plutôt une exhibition qui a été créée par la collection et qui dans ce framework semble pour moi ouvrir différentes lignes de la pensée et peut-être de la recherche Matisse est temps une exhibition concrète d'excuses de la Musée Nationale de la Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou une collection qui s'occupe dans la Janada Foundation en Italie, en Turin et dans l'Université à Oklahoma City où il a juste fermé à la fin de septembre Comme le titre indique il a présenté le travail de Matisse en dialogue avec ses pairs depuis le début du 20e siècle au 50e siècle La figure de Matisse dominait le heart du 20e siècle un artiste prolifique, curieux et social dans sa carrière il était dans le heart du débat qu'ils étaient en place dans la scène artistique durant sa vie il était le leader du four un observateur critique un étudiant et un ami de son prédécesseur Cignac, Renoir, Mayol, Bonard le professeur de l'académie et une génération d'expressionnistes européens Picasso's Rival le pionnier de l'abstractard pour la génération plus jeune d'artistes, en particulier pour les expressionnistes de New York et pour les membres du mouvement de support en France La bale de la correspondance d'artiste préserve, comme l'archive de Matisse en France et évoquée en temps réveille clairement le monde et ses friendships étaient essentiellement liées au heart les lettres qu'il a reçues ou qu'il a évoquées pour ses amis d'artistes notamment Bonard et ses compétences Camois, Marquer, Rouaux, Dorin, ses patrons, publishers, art dealers des directeurs et conservateurs alors que Matisse s'est évoquée de la vie politique et elle a travaillé très hard pour venir à la tête par les pétitions ou par l'artiste actuel comme Gris, Maïole et Laurence en spite de la comparaison avec Picasso qui a été évoquée par Matisse le créateur de la danse est souvent perçu et introduit comme une force unique et isolée comme un maître d'influence semble plutôt évident cette image a rapidement été créée à partir de Matisse la première expérience publique à la fin du siècle et elle est clairement illustrée dans le monde des compétences Picasso Fernand Olivier Matisse était beaucoup plus vieille que Picasso et un homme sérieux et cautuel il n'a jamais vu de l'oeil avec un painter plus jeune que l'autre du nord c'est du sud quand on parle des deux il y avait quelque chose de très bien avec ses outils réguliers et ses billes, le bâtiment il a vraiment l'air un grand homme de l'art il seemed to be hiding behind his thick spectacles and his expression was opaque giving nothing away though he always talked for ages as soon as the conversation moved on to painting he would argue assert, assert and endeavor to persuade he was already 45 and very much his own master and like Picasso was usually rather silent and inhibited in occasions like the Steins Saturdays Matisse shown and impressed people they were the two painters of whom the most was expected Matisse began to paint late in his life but when he did he already appeared to be mature and the ideas he developed about art made him a leader among his fellow disciples in the studios from the time of his debut in the studio of Gustave Moreau Matisse was looked upon as an intellectual and artistic authority the radical force of his painting the surprising novelty of his work at the start of the 30s and to a certain extent the important place he filled together with very few others such as Picasso and Braque in the development of an ideology of modern French art starting from the First World War justify the exceptional aura surrounding him that clearly isolated him from the rest of the artistic context which was nonetheless his own starting from the large collection of works of the Musée Nationale d'Armodère we have chosen to penetrate this ivory tower by showing Matisse's work from the point of view of his friendships and his artistic exchanges with other artists by drawing visual comparisons with the work of some of his contemporaries we can visualise the subtle reciprocal influences their common source and also a sort of spirit of the times that joins Matisse and others and involves periods that had been overlooked until now such as the modernism of the 40s and 50s undoubtedly there is a similar formal expression in the works of Léger, Dufy, Le Corbusier, Matisse or even Picasso that cannot be reduced to certain stylistic features such as a palette of primary colours monumental and decorative stylisation of the drawing the humanist iconography and that especially resonates in the broader political and cultural context this exhibition examinied Matisse's artistic career and was arranged into nine chronological sections divided by specific themes the manly, Matisse figures of the Odalisque for example but also the portrayal of the studio a recurring theme in Matisse's work which in the gloomy years of the Second World War led to the outstanding paintings signed by Brach, Picasso or Bernard and engage an invisible dialogue with the artist who was created in valse the nine sections the morose, fauvism Matisse and Cubism the Nice Years the Painter of Odalisque Matisse and Surrealism the Painting Matisse Studio Modernism the Tonneuron in the 30s Matisse's legacy to abstract art of final years enable us to follow Matisse trajectory together Matisse's debut to the studio of Gustave Moreau in 1897 to 99 until his death when other artists in the 60s were inspired by the colour pepper cut he created in his final years the exhibition the exhibition begins with Matisse's debut and the unswearing friendships he developed with his fellow students in Gustave Moreau's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts Albert Marquet, Charles Camoin Henri Manguin together they made a series of paintings on the same subjects coffee pots views of the scene from the studio models in the studio itself and spent sessions copying paintings at the Louvre all of them united by the lessons taught in Paris's most liberal studio at the time a period spent in Medie Collieu in the summer of 1905 marked the start of the adventure of the Louvre under Matisse's patronage the scandal that arose from the exhibition of paintings featuring pure colours created by Matisse and his friends Manguin, Camoin and Marquet and by André de Rhin and Maurice de Vlamin 1905 marked the birth of the movement non-alphophagism which was also embraced following year that the younger artist Braque and Dufy Matisse was fervently against Braque's choice of cubism in 1908 and his friendship with Picasso would nonetheless admit many years later that cubism comes from Cézanne who said that everything in either a cylinder or a cube that was a time where when we didn't feel restrained by uniforms baldness and innovation where we discovered in the painting of a friend belonged to everybody in September 1914 not having been draft into the army Matisse left for Collieu and found Juan Gris there waiting for him the paintings he made at the time were strongly marked by the ideas that Picasso, Braque and Gris at first began to develop in 1909 1910 Matisse painted windows a recurring theme in his work as well as portraits sorry the nearly abstract canvas French which might at the first sight appear to be unfinished is a composition made using broad swaths of black and blue color along the lines of Gris' work at the same time the stylization of the figures that Matisse realized in the series of sculptors the back or in the large scale painting by a river clearly echoes the research conducted by Henri Laurent after the excitement de la déclaration en 1917 Matisse s'est terminée en Nise offering himself a new start in that region with his temperate climate he met Augustre Noir often visited Meyer's studio and reconnected with his friend Pierre Bonard thanks to the École des Beaux-Arts in Nise he became acquainted with new models such as the Italian Lorette his portraits and intimate compositions of figures multiplied and once again Matisse drew inspiration from his earliest sources that is Impressionnism with an analysis of Renoir and Monet's late paintings those his dialogue with his predecessors Matisse participated in his own way in the return of Classism of the 20s on a part with Durin Picasso at the same time inspired by his stays in Morocco as well as by the work of Delacroix Matisse reinvented the exotic theme of the Odalisque in his own words I quote as for the Odalisque I had seen them in I had seen them in Morocco and this enabled me to add them to my paintings without having to imagine what they looked like once I had got back to France his models were colourful oriental like clothes the setting were filled with accessories flowers and fabrics that created a luxuriant and lustful atmosphere the density of the ornamentation and the color is what characterized the artist's painting in that period something that would remain emblematic of Matisse's hedonist and refined art for a long time it was both a commercial success and an outright fashion a modern orientalist current took shape around Matisse's Odalisque also thanks to the mediation of Roger Beusombe Picasso himself after Matisse's death would confide when Matisse died he left his Odalisque to me as his legacy and this is my idea of the orient thought I had I have never been there end of the quote Matisse considerate his drawing to be a very intimate means of expression he often met drawings to inform his paintings and sculptures should be quick gesture exercise that captures the form and emotion evoked in him by the subject in the early 40s conceived his famous sequence of Evariation sensitively drawn spare works in elegant and shaded line describing simplified forms of female figures or still lifes that he executed almost automatically his hand feeling its way intuitively across the page the spontaneity of these drawings and the dreamy atmosphere of his work can be associated with surrealism with surrealist automatic drawing and the with full contemplative works from the same period by artists such as Picasso, Masson or Miro qui est présenté by his son Pierre Matisse in his gallery in midi Matisse once again foundre noir Mayol Bernard with whom he shared the same idea of color that was used to produce intimate works interior still life portraits transfigured by the golden light of the south I quote the season of the master return of the master's return to painting and of his interiors in vence Matisse again put the window motif at the heart of his work the representation of the studio was a recurring theme among many artists at that time Picasso, Braque, Dufy and Giacometti it was a reflexive and self-referential image of painting which combined the artist trade a private space a place where one could focus despite the madness of the world and lastly a mental space upon the outbreak of the second world war the great figurative artist Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Dufy changed their style it became looser more schematic there was a preference for a palette of primary colors that he called the modernist language of the Le Corbusier and of Mondrian the paintings Matisse produced after the large-scale decoration for the Barnes Foundation revealed the artist's discovery of a new formal economy and today this clearly seems to have been related to the aesthetics of the 50s starting in 47 Matisse invented a new technique wash and paper cutouts which allowed him to cut directly into color he explained I quote rather than drawing the outline and putting colors there one modifying the other I draw directly in color which is even more measured in that it is not composed this simplification guarantees a precision in the union and the two methods to make one the new method organized, originated by Matisse would hand up having a great impact on the work of the artist in the following generation the abstract specialist like Roscoe, San Francis or Shirley Jaff the member of the support surface group like Vincent Bulez Claude Vialla or Jean-Pierre Pince-Pincement Many others Thanks to the dissemination of his work in the United States through his son Pierre the exhibitions of this work in France when he was already a mature artist and the decorative and architectural complex of Vincent Chapel Matisse work fueled the heart of both the 20th century The catalog comprises the vast ontology which extracts from letters, statements and recollections by Matisse as well as by other artists This section is sorted by name and the collection of this kind of in Matisse studies has never been seen before and will no doubt prove to be very useful Reading these exchanges enriches and enlivre l'invents or knowledge of this network of long term friendships In some cases the correspondence covers more than 40 years and thus points out the variations and evolutions that took place over the course of time Matisse writing still is very clear he expresses his opinions on art perspicuously and some of his letters especially the ones he wrote to Bonard and to Roux qui sont très sensibles et qui ont la qualité de quelques traités d'autres, plus intimes et familiales qui sont trouvées à ses amis à Marquet ou à Camois qui révèle une petite Matisse et parfois un plus contente qui nous permet de glisser dans les vies de tous les jours d'artistes Most of the extracts collected have already been published while a few of them were taken directly from the archives Henri Matisse but what is especially interesting about this anthology lies in their collection in the overall view divided into three parts that is afforded to the reader arcing back to the idea of Matisse in his time Matisse and his contemporaries Matisse and his predecessors Matisse and his successors This exhibition which presented a radical overview of modern art in Paris from the first half of the 20th century allowed a series of stimulating visual and sometimes in habitual confrontations and I believe open new direction to be explored such as the modernism of the 40s and 50s or Matisse relationship with surrealism and automatic writing I would like to develop this further here as a conclusion in order to highlight the different possible and perhaps unexpected traits of this question In the early 30s the radical change that took place in Matisse's work was clearly expressed in both the project of the dance commissioned by Albert Parnes and the artist illustration from l'armée poésie In the later works the drawing served as a counterpoint to the text while at the same time remaining independent of it I quote The book needn't be completed with an illustration imitating the contents The painter and the writer must work in parallel without mixing up their roles The drawing has to be a graphic equivalent of the poem These reflections on the line its rigidity and its independence could also be seen in Matisse's painting The color was applied in light-hude backgrounds and lived by the seniors lines of the drawing that was no longer used to delineate but rather perform a score of its own like a dance step around the color The painter expressed his concern with regard to his difficult search for harmony I quote On the one hand my drawing suits me as it expresses the peculiarity of what I feel My painting instead is trapped by my new practice of using backgrounds through which I must express myself fully backgrounds filled with one color and devoid of shading of shapes which must interact with each other to be able to suggest the light the spiritual space Thus were born several of the artist's masterpieces including large reclining nude, the pink nude The 24 photographs that document the gestation phase of this work show the gradual stylization of the figures that little by little reach up as far as the frame of the painting according to a decorative trend that can also be seen in music of 1938 and subsequently in the upper portion of the fireplace made for the Rockefeller apartment in New York in 1939 The refined blue and pink harmony, the subject the linear and stillest drawing of the figure which is oversized in Dream 1935 exhibit an oneric quality that was greatly appreciated at the time The dream theme and the automatism of the drawing or of written writing, sorry closely analyzed by the serialists during the early 20s especially in Breton and support the magnetic fields of 19 and in the serialist manifesto 1924 would in a very short time become the patrimony of all the modern artistic expressions Although Matisse, unlike Picasso never followed the serialist closely, his pictorial and graphic work was praised by Breton who pursued Jacques Doucet, who had to his collection along with Picasso's de Meuselle-D'Avignon, Matisse Goldfish Some art journals published by serialist circles devoted world issues to Matisse In 1946 Cayedard published his most recent drawings accompanied by a text by Christian Zervos with the emblematic title automatisme et espace illusoire and by a poem by Tristan Zara entitled Eumatisse Albert Skira, who had commissioned Matisse to illustrate Malarmé's Poésie dealt with the the artist's work in one of the issues of his elegant journal Minotaur The journal's mission was to reconcile the two sides of surrealism represented by Breton and Bataille respectively Matisse designed the cover of issue number 9, published in October 1946 There is indeed a certain stylistic affinity between the modernist notebooks produced in the in the 40s The paintings made by André Masson between 1924 and 1929 during the time when he embraced Breton's surrealism the automatic drawings the sand paintings but also les soupirots of 1924 stemmed from the same reflection of the organic nature of the line and on the continuity of the figure and the space in which it is inscribed Masson was fascinated by Matisse drawings and often visited the artist who was working on Malarmé's Poésie in 1942 Masson stressed the role of music in Matisse's life I quote After lunch before taking a nap he plays a record on the gramophone Schumann's arabesque A delightful piece of lacework that makes one feel like drawing Masson also noted that Matisse observations of on dance were the equivalent of the sound traced on paper and strangely in resonance with his own paintings I quote again The genius of dance starts from the farthest part of the foot and arrives at the tip of the hand the hand, its drawing in space will be clear cut and devoid of stiffness the hand is the point of arrival of the energy that pervades the entire body the point is itself in itself is nothing other than routine John Miro, a friend of Masson proclaimed by Breton a surrealist artiste par excellence analyzed Matisse's painting Miro's painting 1927 a vibrant blue monochrome and lived by form painted in flat colors and by linear organic signs that appear to fluctuate was openly inspired by works like dance and the dinner table 1910 but it can mostly be traced back to the poetic and dreamlike atmosphere of the early 30s the work aralde the large-scale triptych blue of 1961 Miro met Matisse after the second world war thanks to his agent in New York Pierre Matisse who was the first to exhibit the almost abstract composition French window of at Collure when Matisse began to make dance Fernand Léger was monumental, modernism, sensitive to social issues seemed to be a far cry from his fellow artistes' aesthetics turned down his own figuration in the 30s around 1930 the two artists both intrigued by the world of the circus acrobat and cinema found separate solutions that to a certain extent also converged to the problem of the dynamism of the line and the composition it was through the practice of cinema that the 1944 1924 Ballet Mechanique récuperé une liberté de composition sur l'occasion d'une conférence de la Musée de l'art moderne de New York en 1935 qui a été décrivée en suivant une fois que l'objectif a été détruit nous avons besoin de trouver quelque chose l'objectif et la couleur pure ont fait le rôle de valeur qui a été compensé dans la nouvelle phase la liberté de composition devient infinie il y a une totalité de liberté permettant la composition de l'imagination dans laquelle la fantaisie créative peut émerger et développer Léger thus produced un série de canvasses entre Dekonda & Kies en 1930 où les figures et les objets expérimentés dans les couleurs ont révélé la nuance de l'actualité légère et de la danse bleue en 1930 qui sous-estimait la contraste entre l'évocatif, l'évocatif et l'illusionniste industriel et l'architecture était probablement un nôtre pour Matisse Lorsque Matisse continuait d'explorer l'enquête dans un projet ambitieux qui a été prévenu dans les années de guerre de chaque point de vue Matisse était mal trompée par la guerre et il pourrait ensuite décrire les années de guerre en seconde vie et extrait de la vie pour quelqu'un qui a été ressuscité la séparation de sa famille de la divorce en mars 1939 la difficulté qu'il a obtenue de Paris, de Nice de l'enquête et de la saison en janvier 1941 qui a survécu contre tous les anciens mais qui l'aimait et tous les événements qui ont fait cette crise et la dépression de l'isolation, même plus. En force d'expérimenter beaucoup de la journée en bête pour accomplir une sorte de complétie. Pour une année j'ai fait un effort considérable j'ai parfaité mon bête et c'est comme un blossoming après 50 ans j'ai dû faire le même pour la painting. Matisse, seul dans sa salle immobiliste qui s'occupe d'une discipline de bête en investigant les concepts de virtuosité et de spontanéité l'automatique et le flow contrôlé de la ligne la relation avec le modèle et avec l'espace de la bête. Pour documenter ses propres pensées il a commencé le travail d'un projet d'album ambitieux où la nature systématique était importante Le travail conceptuel Temps et Variations est une collection de 158 drawings et de 17 séries dans laquelle Matisse comparé les drawings avec Charcoal Chadding, le thème avec Lines Drawings, les Variations J'ai dit qu'elles sont faites d'une série de laquelle l'initiel drawing pour chaque série est un charcoal étudiant un moyen d'une série de pensées ou de pensées émergées comme des perfumes de l'original. Par le sens de cette profusion de drawings, Matisse essaye d'emphasiser l'importance de la gestion dans ce qu'il pourrait être défini d'un dessin inspiré qui est rendu inconsciemment d'une dimension spirituelle Il a donné à Rago une explication détaillée du processus. Quand je fais ma variation de pensée sur le papier de ma pensée il y a des aspects analogiques à la gestion d'un homme qui s'occupe dans la mer. Ce que je veux dire c'est qu'il n'y a pas de plan sur cette route. J'ai dit que je n'ai pas de plan sur cette route. En reproduisant le modèle sur les mots qui m'aiment être direct. J'ai guidé seulement par un dessin que j'ai transmis sur la forme plutôt que par l'apparence du point sur lequel j'occupe ma gestion. C'est un point qui, à ce moment, a la même valeur pour moi d'être capable de le voir. Dès que je suis arrivée à la prochaine ligne pour continuer à inventer la route pour suivre. C'est cette route, peut-être, la plus intéressante partie de l'action. J'aime comme un spider qui lance la ligne à la protubérance qui semble plus propitious que d'un autre, qui le notices point par point J'ai souvent comparé ce travail d'un medium ou d'un acrobat dans la ration dynamique de la duration, de la gestion et la variation d'expression de l'ambition pour présenter un dessin ou un dessin qui a le résultat d'un processus. Parce que, d'autre côté, j'ai travaillé dans un projet de continuation de l'angrisme. La suite Volard commissionnée la suite Volard commissionnée dans 30 par la mission du même nom, est une série de 100 prints faites entre le spring de 1933 et 1937. Or, dans les deux Volards l'accident de la mort et l'outbreak de la seconde de cet endroit avec n'importe quel ordre ou un titre inspiré par le thème self-reflexif de l'artiste avant son modèle et par les variations de Balzac's known masterpiece n'a pas appuyé au marché jusqu'à 1950, et avec un grand délai. Good Mattis a été familiar with that suite when he began working on thème et variation in his memoir Brassail suggests that Mattis probably was at least influenced by Picasso's scattered drawings. I quote, the spontaneity, the obscure power of the hand beyond the control of the eyes and even the brain preoccupied Mattis a great deal. He wanted to know what he could do when abandoned to its fate cut off from the body as it were. Perhaps Picasso's exercises played some role in this. The drawings made in about 1943 in the dark or with his eyes closed in which the organ's eyes, nose, ears, lips no longer occupy their usual place where end up the source for the dismantled faces that appeared a few years later. One day in 1939 in his studio on rue des plantes, Mattis did a drawing for me, blindfolded. It was a face drawn with a piece of shark. He executed it with a single line in this very expressive portrait. The eyes, mouth, nose and ears overlapped as in Picasso's distorted faces. Jean-François Chevrier identified this approach to the body as a mental image in perpetual movement in the cultural and political context of the 30s. Determining their hind, an open form of reaction to the totalitarian expressions. This dimension of permanent activity and change constitutes tracing as the writing of the body. Aragon describes the wall of temi variation as definite images of the undefinable. There does not exist for the subconscious and ideal definite image of the body so undefinable contradicts the heroic and deathly fixation produced by fascist arts. Thank you. So I think I think this is my first Mattis symposium and I hope that won't be the last Is that the same for you? I don't know, but for me this is the first. So I'm very impressed of course. I think it's a great idea to organize a Mattis symposium because the research is for me a time of exchange and dialogue between researchers and not only researchers working on their own studio you know. So I think it's an important moment that we are sharing together on Mattis and I thank you and I thank you the Barnes to invite me from France and Sylvie Patry to organize that Mattis symposium at the Barnes have been working at the Barnes as a Melon fellowship it was ten years ago time passes so quick and ten years wow I'm back here after ten years and so happy to be back at the Barnes to meet the people who were working there already ten years ago and the great experience that we had together with Karen Karen Butler Yvalin Bois Barbara Buckley who have been working on this great Mattis collection for almost five years and we were examining the pictures in the galleries there it was a fantastic experience to examine the pictures each by each you know to get closer to the painting and first of all Le bonheur de vivre that for the first time we saw it very not on the wall and not on the stairs but then in front of us just and revealing its mysteries and new things that I remember Yvalin climbing on the on the stairs a quatre pattes to look at the bonheur de vivre so close and everyone was so excited with that it was a real experience that we shared together I think and the book which finally came out is real for me it's un petit small as we say in French of all this research so thank you so I want to to present today the next thing I've been working on after the Barnes experience it's the dictionnaire Mattis so it's a more than 800 pages book have been working on for many years following my fellowship here at the Barnes and which is to be to be published next year hopefully by Robert Lafon in their great encyclopédic collection called Bouclin so some ten years ago I was lucky to visit Dominique for card incredible Mattis library in Paris Dominique who needs no introduction for me infortunatly is not here today spent years passing all the books exhibition and cell catalogues and all the Mattis publication so it was a dream come true for a young researcher because I could always go there and consult difficult to find volumes all in one place all this knowledge appeared to me in the form of yards and yards of shelvings in this way it required a thickness or rather a length I might otherwise never have imagined for the first time I could view this great mass of material in a single glance still it was a bit overwhelming where do I start but my visit also proved to be reassuring a library like that is a researcher companion it spurs her own reading there allowed me to along the mind to roam it was a place I could grab a book just because I like the look of it or because it corresponded to an interest of mine at the time I was also aware that Mattis himself would have approved this intuitive approach to knowledge he had a well-stocked libraries in his studio in Paris and Nice not just the kind of a library of a self-respecting gentleman but one that helped him in his creative work but why did I mention oh sorry it's supposed to be the first one but why did I mention the legendary four card library because a dictionary is a library and vice versa as well as being a catalogue than can be consulted at leisure so one idea central to a dictionary is that of wandering gleaning we consult a dictionary on a precise point we seldom read it cover to cover for example if we want to look up the dates of Mattis occupied the studio on the case à Michel we turn to case à Michel and then we find the answer well in my dictionary we find the answer together but the dictionary can also be read either by the coincidences coincidences of its alphabetical arrangement or by the references at the end of each entry that guide them on their way so if you look if you look at Barnes next door you will meet Barr Man Ray you will bump into Manet well and so on it is this kind of random reading that led the authors of the great Encyclopédie to write and I quote these kinds of collections are best used to furnish a measure of enlightenment to those whom without such an aide wouldn't take the pains to search it out but they can never replace books for those who really want to learn end of quote that is to say that the dictionary remains to borrow Diderot's definition a frivolous enumeration but it is still useful for those who want to go further for me the compilation of the Matisse dictionary allowed considerable freedom not so much in the form of the articles which remain as we shall see relatively systematic in their selection and in the order of the compilation which thankfully did not have to follow the alphabet during what proved to be a lengthy adventure several friends tease me by asking so what letter are you now Claudine even I was one of them in the final analysis I say final because this stage was rich only at the end of a long writing process and after how many classifications and sub-classifications it turns out that the dictionary starts with the word abstraction not a great opening for a book en Matisse I admit and it does conclude with Zulma a great cut out a large cut out from 1950 compiling a dictionary is not like writing a more traditional art history study and so I had to adapt to a particular form that shaped both my approach and my method of writing you have to play the game not fight it these two would have delighted Matisse who once declared je suis conduit je ne conduis pas I am led I do not lead and who enjoyed exploring what they called the demands of the material I too let myself be guided by the demands of the material at least the genre they called a dictionary I found the creation of the dictionary entries to be close to craftsmanship to take up a distinction made by Roland Barth I see myself rather more on the side of the écrivain a n t than the écrivain a i n a writer than rather than an author the term écrivain in French suggesting a parallel with artisan I had as craftsman a dictionary writer can be regarded as a harmless drudge the readers who benefit from the fruit of these labors often voice a kind of compassion for the doubtless writers who devote so much time to what can be a thankless task having nailed my color to the mass I had to prevent myself for succumbing to boredom instead of compiling mechanically I invented creative strategies I had to you can easily stumble across unexpected sources that confirms or on the contrary invalidates your findings for example although the duration of its writing things evolved for books of this size had hundred pages had hundred and sixty-nine entries this evolution is certainly not so writing a dictionary is a cumulative process the data increases as it grows systematically editing the entries however allowed me to shape the rising tide of information by classifying it putting it together was like working on a giant jigsaw puzzle which as it came together resolved into an increasingly clear image that of and remittice of course in general the logic for compiling entries developed organically the process was based on cycles groups of entries pertaining to the same family or theme which the reader can see in the references given for each heading generally these cycles or family of entries were determined by the period for example that of autism but the more complex entries and these tended to come at the end of the process where those dealing with more abstract concepts so what kind of dictionary you have many kinds of dictionaries the Metis dictionary is not a lexicon it contains no definitions it belongs to the category of specialized dictionary like the dictionary of cookery, biology, vegetables well things like that and then to the subcategory historical it deals with art history the Metis dictionary is also a personal or egoist dictionary as they say because it indulges in the odd personal touch inflections that grew in number over the course of compilation if I had to use an adjective in the title of the Metis dictionary and this might be I didn't decide yet practical that is to say a handy reference book proposing a body of knowledge in a synthetic and portable form in English one might call it a Metis and book and why not I like this one the Metis companion the form this dictionary took was from the beginning predetermined by the series in which it is to appear Robert Lafond bouquin collection de blessures compliques works on Oxford India paper and includes in its catalogue 100 also specialized dictionaries one being Redictionnaire Picasso by Pierre Dex the Metis obviously balances the Picasso although it revolves less around entries on works of art which is predominant from the predominant form in the Dex so as you don't know about and its specificity into the dictionary type the next question to come is its place in the Metis bibliography or how the form of the dictionary could contribute something is in this huge bibliography is it one more book while the artist was alive the dominant form of the publication was the monograph a text of variable length followed by the section with reproductions black and white and then from the 40s increasingly in color during the 70s the exhibition catalogue in contestably became the most common form of Metis publication a large number of catalogues appeared during this period which were supported by research with notes on the artworks chronologies, synthetic essays etc I'm thinking particularly d'Archene de Brett's Centenary Exhibition in 1970 and of John Elderfield on the MoMA collection in 1978 these works succeeded in the 80s and 90s by other exhibition catalogues in color increasingly extensive bulky and exacting in approach I refer in particular to the catalogue of the exhibition in Washington the early years in Nice the first to my knowledge to furnish a complete history of the works listed an approach taken up by Dominique Fourcade in the catalogue from the 1977 exhibition of cutouts in Washington and St. Louis and then to the in the catalogue of the 1974 1970 in the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne organized by Dominique Fourcade and Isabelle Monofontaine the vast majority of these catalogues were based on a similar structure or more essays followed by a catalogue of works and sometimes with a detailed chronology More recently we've seen the growth of section containing more technical analysis I'm thinking here of the experimental years for example and the London cutouts catalogues London New York cutouts catalogues Apart from the exhibition catalogues what else do we have in the Matisse Library So there is the biography type Spurling 2 volumes is surely the most valuable book on the artist, well I think There is the essay of scientific character The Alastair Wright book for example One on many others The catalogue raisonné type The catalogue raisonné edited by Claude Dutui The collection of writing and conversations type with Matisse Des écrits propos sur l'art edited by Dominique Fourcade in 1972 Published by Flam in 1973 also the discussion with Fr. Scouturier and Réciguier published in 1993 and more recently still the posthumous publication of the Courtois type script These publications have transformed our vision of Matisse whose written work has acquired importants From then, there existed two ways of gaining access to Matisse one via the text the other via the image which is quite different of course Next in line is editions of the correspondence with Camoing, Marquet, Bonnard or Ver and so on Then the bibliography the cutting box guide to research stays my bible I don't know if she's here A number of observations can be made about this Matisse library Undeniably vast it is dominated by exhibition catalogues treating of specific themes or periods and it comprises few publications of a general nature and no complete work catalog A special case is represented by Pierre Schneider's great monograph of more than 750 pages published in 1984 adopting a thematic structure based on an exceptional body of illustrations with many reproductions taken from the artist's own archives That is at once a seminal text that defends a thesis that Matisse's work is essentially concerned with a sacred and an overview of the entire of To my knowledge the dictionary of Matisse then was presented in terms of form at least It offers thoroughly research content with very few reproductions of his work So that is a real challenge but it is also perhaps a way of swimming against the rising tide that of the image reproductions everywhere So what has been the oops, strange noise occurred, I don't know what So on the method on the form of the entries So the entries are a variable length between 525 thousand size signs for the longest in France we come by signs not by words So the average is 2000 signs per entries upstream a corpus of entries had to be defined under least drawn In this way I established a list based on indexes in various publications in particular bar, Schneider or Spirling for proper names and for CAD for concepts It's not very important but it will Sorry In this way I established a list based on indexes This list subsequently evolved as discovery came to light and whatever seemed inessential excise The entries are a variable length The Matisse dictionary is a single author dictionary in the sense that I laid the groundwork and planned its contents and wrote some three quarters of the book It remains however a collaborative project Since I also invited 25 authors to contribute to it each according to their specialty and inclination Thus entries on sculpture were entrusted to Helene McBreen and the majority of those concerning the cutouts to Anne Couron Yves Alain Bois wrote me a very perspicacious entry on Picasso, John Klein on Matisse decoration linked to this forthcoming publication and so on I also called non-Matisse Name entries are two types of two types names of peoples and places and number 550 Artists are the best represented that group is itself subdivided in several subtypes all masters and contemporaries and among the contemporaries those close to Matisse and the rest I choose to exclude all artists whose career began after the death of Matisse I had to find a limit then came the collectors So Barne, Choukin, Morozov, Queen, Stein etc Americans, Bernemjean Berg, Grün, Bayerleur Galerie George Petit, Galerie Mag Reviews and journals Skydark, Camerawork Minotaur, Poésie 42 verres Mordons, Antoinette, Henriette Art historians and conservators Barr, Berenson Courthion, Dille Dutry, Frye, Greenberg And here again I did not cover writers on Matisse for the last 50 years Authors and publishers to Aragon, Baudelaire, Bergson Renechard, Colette, Malarmé Monterland Nietzsche Publishers such as Théria D'Onservos collaborators like Jaguleff and Mourlo The work entries There are 280 entries on works of art featuring paintings, sculptures cut out as well as books and decorations Relatively small corpus in relation to a pictorial of estimated at some 1500 items A number of paintings without an entry devoted to them do appear in the dictionary either included Another entry as for example Feth de Fleur which is a proper name entry or associated with the place for instance Etreta with the models such as Henriette and so on All the illustrated books and the majority of the large cut out and sculptures have their own entry More specifically each type of entry brought with it a certain number of prerequisites Entries of the work type are based on the commentary on the work model Writing this type of entry required the author to keep his or her eyes peeled The objectivity of the contents if initially demanding what one might call a humble reading of all relevant sources did not prevent the author from considering the subject from a new angle Here I paid particular attention to the genesis and technique of each work This means I attempted to place it in the larger context of its creation with special care taken to systematically juxtaposed paintings and graphic works and sometimes sculpture I think this method contributes a great deal to the comprehension of a given work In accordance with Matisse's logic an artwork cannot be reduced to its final state alone since it is embodied in a multiplicity of successive states If the genetic approach can be evident in the case of the major work such as Barnes Dance or Les Demoiselles à la Rivière it tends to be less common for a more modest picture How for instance can one deal with Le Chapo à Plume of 1990 without referring to Sainte-Cente-des-Sains which is Isabel Maudonfortin is going to talk about I think or how can we talk about the panel La Verdure on which Matisse worked between 1935 and 1943 without having recourse to the photograph of the various states and studios recourse to the artist's correspondence and without relating it to the variants of the NAF and FON Each work is provided with a technical description and its location followed by the most significant even in its history the dates of its creation justified and very rarely revised too dangerous Its various titles to its exhibition history and the publication in which it appears There of course no claim to exhaustiveness nor by a catalogue résonné The intention is rather to decide what has proven to be the most significant in our knowledge of the work For example, for Le Blue New 1907 the choice of references and phasies on the one hand the context of its creation its genesis, its relationship to the larger discourse of primitivism and on the other the pictures American story beginning with M. Queen Cone Providence and its exhibition in New York Lastly, it has proved necessary to incorporate new more cultural approaches that of Alastair Wright for example For the entries on the proper name types The only biographical elements are those with a direct relationship to the life and work of Matisse Sorry, it's the wrong slide Dispense taking tasks Save the readers scrabbling around for information in the indexes of masses of books and catalogues when they have one Aragons book for example Those stuff with information has no index Occasionally, of course new information comes to light In this case, the principal source was the Matisse archive in Sicily Molino where I spent long hours exploring the artist's files patiently digitized by George Matisse and Vanda de Guébrillon and generously placed at the disposal of the researcher I would like to take this opportunity of failing their work and of thanking them for receiving me so often with open arms Not to mention the lengthy conversations with Vanda who knows so many things The Pierre Matisse archives were likewise important as is the correspondence between Pierre and Henri It is essential reading These then are the main primary sources together with countless others scattered about in many publications and archives For the concept entries there are 130 they were foundational to the projects since it was from these that the ideas informing the rest of the dictionary were developed As you might imagine, the corpus of these entries evolved a lot To my knowledge the first thematic index of any consequence was the remarkable one compiled by Dominique Fourcade for the écrit propos sur la a genuine book within a book Its impact was significant Its form produced a type of discourse privileging sequences of concept peppered with quotations For cad index provided a foundation for work on the dictionary but the concept entries were selected in a different manner funding less on what has been said about the works than on the works themselves and their aesthetic imports The notion covered are different in nature Some relate to the material of the work the technique media or support for example ceramic the age of the work frame fresco grattage Does that exist in English? Grattage? Ok wall, stained glass, sculpture and so on Some other relates to the processes state, photography finish, sketch There are also amusing entries just like billard, cigarette cooking, moto telephone telephone numbers I tried to list them I don't know all of them There were also more contextual elements library, collection war, art market, fashion matrices, death radio, reproductions, travel Aesthetic concepts of course, categories such as oriental art, African art Byzantine art, primitive arts movements and trends like cubism nationalism, surrealism The general categories just like still life object landscape These are also generative There are also generative themes since Matisse like to develop his art around iconic concepts related directly to the aesthetic basis of his work such as studio window, goldfish, rugs or rather concerned with the plant world tree or else with the human body This could look quite evident but when you start thinking of writing an entry on window for example and you have to check all the windows in Matisse's art then it start to be different it's such a work it's such a work and it's very rewarding rewarding at the end So there are in addition to the alphabetically arranged entries the dictionary offers readers a number of logical by ways One can move from entry to entry via a system of references placed at the end of each heading so the majority of entries interconnect in this way I was careful to avoid repetition and some information is sometimes split up among several entries It nevertheless offers a particular style of reading intended for anyone who would like to go beyond cherry picking and our consultation in the narrow sense I give just a few significant examples of these pathways here with that diagram it's all in French because the book is in French hopefully that would be in English can dream Just to explain how if you have you start with swarvism and then you can go and grab the Saint-Tropez and then you go to Signac and you know Derain and so on Another example with a proper name I give you ideas of the type of entries a tour à l'ordre d'Alice collection this one collection was quite interesting it's a the wall collection Matisse had it was a great great collector and another example is with Atelier's Studio which is related with this more conceptual this one I had to deal with it at the end of the process So what are the underlying principles even though they may not be obvious at first glance a number of crucial decisions were taken during the editing process though of course they could in no way jeopardize the objectivity of the dictionary contents I started with the observation that overall approaches to Matisse's entire earth I mean those that succeed in treating the artist's modes of production globally across several different historical periods remain few and far between the main reason being that there is yet no catalogue resume of the paintings drawings or cutouts so for each period concern it was imperative to compose a kind of synoptic table of the artist's output the majority of entries for works on the dictionary endeavour to clarify these connections Moreover the compilation of thematic entries brought out a number of recurrences in a nerve that frequently relies on self-referentials processes without though ever repeating itself Secondly I made a point to situate Matisse in his work and his work in historical and cultural context In this respect the branching tree-like structure of the dictionary constituted a useful tool for establishing interconnections if it does reflect the scope of the most recent studies of Matisse A significant proportion of the dictionary is devoted to the history of taste treating of the role of the art market of dealers, collectors private commissions exhibition of reviews and those who produced them as well as reproductions The case reproduction is very interesting The question of the reproduction in the Matisse career is very interesting In addition I show to place Matisse in history in the wider sense it is indeed necessary to make a distinction between the artist's lack of commitment especially in the political sphere and the symbolic important his work acquired during the first half of the 20th century Associated before 1914 with the avant-garde it was thereafter labeled as a representative of bourgeois hedonism a suspicion exacerbated by his moving to Nice The image of Matisse more than the man himself does fluctuate according to the ideological context of the time More specifically some articles in the dictionary offer I believe useful synthesis such as those on the studio collection window return to order Pierre Matisse while other aspects are portrayed in a new light automatism balance war the fourth dimension the middle ages radio, sexuality and surrealism So as a conclusion I think it is possible that everything interesting has already been said about Matisse so many books, so many exhibitions have been devoted to his work and yet compiling this dictionary confirmed for me that the Matisse is far from the point of having revealed all its secrets pioneering work remains to be done I hope that this brief presentation of Matisse dictionary has provided you with a glimpse into the complexities of a project that are hidden behind the idiosyncratic form of the dictionary I am pleased to have been able to complete it and would like to offer my thanks to all those who provided me with support during what was a madcap enterprise and first and foremost all those who agreed to join me on it I hope that it will find a readership and a place in the ever growing Matisse library shelf Thank you What would be the relationship between Matisse's work at the time and what the Nabi painters such as Bona, Villa were accomplishing a couple of years ago I think that the difference between this Madame Matisse and Nabi picture is in spirit of course and maybe the thing is more energetic does that make sense if I use the word energetic and I think Bergson is underneath it's to make the beholder feel that energy through the medium of the painting so it's a kind of something very open and very confusing it's not in this way I think it's quite different the Nabi weren't in this Bergsonian movement you're an energetic question There are questions over there it's a question for Anastor and I'm picking up on the schizophrenia word at least you used and Sylvie also mentioned again I was intrigued because Merleau-Ponty applies a similar notion to Cézanne and of course you mentioned how it continues in the work of Dodorov and Jainson so I I was started wondering whether we are dealing since there is no medical underpinnings to this use whether we are dealing with a critical topos that kind of survives in time within a certain current of critical discourse and if so if this is the case where would you trace its origins? All right thank you The reminder of Merleau-Ponty is a very useful one thank you it's clear that by invoking Todorov I'm plugging Matisse into or trying to make sense of something that I see in Matisse by having recourse to a kind of theory that is much after the fact or someone who's writing much after the fact of when Matisse paints that is painting tradition, particularly in French theory if we want to call it that of writing in those terms I think I might flip the question over in a way and say what about the time that Matisse is painting what is the discourse then and in an earlier iteration of this paper that would have been much too long so things got cut out I would have spoken more about the way in which the critics used the term mad for one and to say that modern painting was mad and this came out of some sort of insanity that was a real cliché by the time that the critics are saying it about Matisse but I think there is if you read carefully the way the critics are using the term and the way that the other kinds of things that they are saying about his painting it's clear that they are trying to use it in a more specific way that has to do with the kind of mobility so the mobility of the mark that I describe in Les Japonais infects the critics as well as they are trying to capture what they think they see here. Madness is one but they talk about the childlike and the barbaric and so forth and quite often within the space of a single sentence so the critics are trying to say something a little more specific the other way I think that we could historicise it is to look at period conceptions of madness the way in which people in the late 19th, early 20th century the way in which psychologists are talking about the mad and they people like qui in France talk very much about a kind of disarticulation of the senses this is the aspect of mental breakdown that they are getting interested in disarticulation of signs an inability to connect signs to see the syntax and they talk also very specifically about how that leads to a kind of perceptual problems not only an inability to make sense but a kind of optical disturbances a sense of pain, a sense of some sort of violence being done to the person who can't make sense of what they're seeing and this is not to say so then we have three things on the table we have Todorov later theory we have contemporary psychologists the term schizophrenia will be coined in 1910 I think I think he's Swiss psychologist Bloiler who knows the work of people like Gianna and Binet so we have more recent literary theory we have contemporary discussions in psychology of madness and we have the critics talking about madness and these things of course can't just be lined up next to each other in any particularly straightforward way one would have to think about all the links that one might make but I think there are there's some sort of continuity between those three fields to try to make sense of I mean Todorov's not talking about Matisse going on in the paintings There is a question So Claudine, you mentioned the sort of common misperception that everything that's worth saying about Matisse has already been said and I wonder since I had a front seat look at the labor of love that it took to produce the dictionary you're perhaps uniquely positioned having synthesized so much of the Matisse literature to produce the dictionary it's a very general question but what do you see as the areas in Matisse research that need to be looked at this is a question for Claudine but for all the speakers This is so wide I can tell anything we could there are various directions that could be explored and to show the show that you organized on the objects is one example I think that we have never studied this object very closely it's not only an object in a picture it's also the way Matisse was using the object as a mental support and the support of the memory for example Ellen Ivanovich est also going to present her research this is a new path it's not only the relationship between Matisse and Primitivism it's also no more about the objects and their provenances what exactly where exactly when exactly about them it just have to to look closer to the all the material and there could be also research I think there are a lot of research to do on the technical side there this is what we have been doing here for the catalog at the Barnes but there is still many, many research to do at the NAMM I hope we would working on the works themselves and explore them and for the cutouts there are so the recent catalog I think it provides many information but that still need to be worked on this are one up on many directions thank you I would like to ask a question about one of the few things you didn't discuss that is if you would say a few words about the far and all the dance that he has in the background could you hear me ? yes the dance in Le Bonheur de Vie so what sort of thing do you have do you have a specific question or do you just want me to say something I'd like you to say a few words about it yes so so there are all sorts of things one could say about it this is a motif I mean other people up here actually might be able to answer the question even better than me Margaret perhaps but it's a motif that has a certain history in the pastoral tradition it's one of those elements in the painting that sends us back in various directions or asks us to think that the painting is going to be about something but then it turns out to be a single thing but then it turns out to be much more complicated it also reiterates Margaret's talk very well about this at least I think you do say this that in the Sceniac which I showed you briefly there's a circle of dances it's very different but I think it's quite possibly then a kind of echo of the Sceniac so it's it's a it's a detail within the painting that one could take it's emblematic actually of the kind of fractured or multiple references that the painting that the painting the painting contains one of the critics when Matisse exhibits this work a guy called Charles Maurice he's kind of a smart guy associated with the symbolists talks about everything here turning in place there's a lack of forward movement in art so we could take the round of dances as a kind of metaphor for that although I don't think really that's what's going on in the painting thanks Margaret, do you want to add something? I think that's what I said about it but yes, that's fine I have a question for Alistair or just maybe a discussion we could have that would not be related to the bonheur de vide is this one? I guess I was very struck in your paper by that moment in which you were sort of saying I mean it's certainly connected to this idea of the schizo Matisse the schizo picture that there was something about the emotion in his pictures that was somehow so fragmented and difficult that people thought I think it was Denis who says that there's something there's no emotion in the picture but we have an artist who certainly very much states very clearly that what he's doing is trying to find a way to put his to transmute his emotions into painting so I'm just wondering about that and wondering if maybe the Berkson I think the Berkson is a good reference point for sort of what's going on in Matisse's painting at that moment and then when I try to look at the interiors and the studio pictures I think we're sort of seeing him find ways to talk about the mental state or consciousness of the artist and how he might picture that but not without I guess I don't see it as sort of becoming what Denis thinks it is Denis is pretty much off on Matisse in my opinion and off on a lot of things and you know his idea of Matisse is kind of going too far in the direction of abstraction or this idea of sort of modernism that's kind of lost its connection to the world I think is wrong and I think that Matisse indeed is always involved in that very complex layered interaction with the model or with light or with perception or optical phenomena and then taking those things into a more conceptual world that is I guess what I'm saying is not only did Denis get it wrong but I think a lot of those critics had it so wrong they didn't have any idea what Matisse was doing so when we bring them into reference with the artist we sort of have to really put scare quotes around them I mean like scary scare quotes to say they don't really understand so anyway, that's just the response Yes, I just in my bad English I just want to perhaps to say that Maurice Denis was I think his critics was was very perspicace because he was the first to stress that he was not on the side of this sort of madness and sort of incoherent expression and he pointed out a sort of conceptual approach but we've of course we've in a way a little bit in a critical way, negative way but he was the first to to stress that he was not he was not a sort of a spontaneous expression or madness expression but a sort of conceptual approach and for me for me it's very I think it was the first to understand the complexity of Matisse I mean it's true that in the 1890s he does this amazing article as a young man which is just incredible de Vieve, that's when his incomprehension set in We just have a quick conversation with Alastair after his talk and I think that the question of Denis and Matisse is a political question because the term abstraction here is used quite as a anticlassic term and it was at that time a big a very important opposition and this the rise of the nationalism in France and Denis was clearly in the nationalist wing and so it was there was a fight between the two artists obviously but the fight not only in the words but within their pictures too because remember that Denis had this great commission by Choukin too and he did band dance and music same theme and Matisse the commission his response was quite different isn't it we could talk for hours on this subject I wonder if, can you are you hearing me? I'm getting a kind of blowback I wonder if any of you know what Matisse may have been reading discussing remembering à l'époque qu'il a faite, c'est clair, je pense, à certains de nous, mon fil de l'anglais, que c'est en fait un réveil d'éthique. Toutes les sens sont représentées, les réveils d'éthique en spring sont orgiastiques, vous avez des amies, et les deux virgents magnifiques qui seraient sacrifiés à les gods sur la montée d'Olympus. Et le vin, les grapes, les grapes-leves sur la laitière, le danse et, bien sûr, un pan avec les pips, tous les sens, et les goûts, pour Picasso, ils auraient été énormes, mais en mythologie, les goûts étaient toujours purement lustres. Tout est représenté comme il serait dans un réveil d'éthique. Et ce qui est intéressant pour moi, c'est la clé que beaucoup de gens, je pense, ne représentent pas. Le figure d'éthique à la gauche n'est pas en dessous, il est planté, qui est la clé à la peinture, en termes de son sujet, planté dans ces réveils d'éthique en spring, avec des espaces pour un harvest dans le fall. Tout s'étend à des réveils d'éthique. Vous savez d'où c'est à l'écran ou vous ne l'aviez pas appris? Je veux parler de ce que vous avez écrit parce que j'ai publié un livre en 2001, et le livre est sur l'île en français en français, à la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle, et il s'étend à beaucoup de choses que vous avez juste dit, les dernières chapitres de Matisse. Vous êtes très correct, en pointant à cette tradition que c'est en parlant, donc c'est magnifique. C'est très plaisir de vous entendre. Sur le même sujet, le golefish n'a pas été mentionné. Je pense que je l'ai oublié par Pierre Schneider que le golefish était un autre tent de retourner à l'âge de Golden Age, et quand Matisse s'est combattue avec Pouvet de Chavon pour la décoration des plantéons, ils étaient tous en train de regarder le Golden Age. Je pense que vous avez pu, Claudine, commenter que les vies critiques se changent chaque année. Vous pouvez commenter sur ce qu'il y a de Pierre Schneider et peut-être aussi de Hillary Sperling. C'est génial. L'une des chapitres de mon livre était de Pouvet, et l'autre, c'est de Séniaque. C'est une histoire de relation. La question de vous était de golefish, c'est ça. Je suis désolé. C'était un calibre de golefish, c'est-à-dire ? Le golefish boule et tout ce qu'il y a de golefish, oui. Oui, Pierre Schneider approche de golefish. Bien sûr, le golefish est clairement lié à son interprétation avec le secréteur. Il est vrai, bien sûr, que le golefish a une relation avec le période moroccanale, parce que la première fois qu'il parlait du golefish, quand il était dans le Tangier, et il a vu l'interprétation. Non, il n'était pas dans l'interprétation. Imaginez quelqu'un comme ça, et qui était restant là et absorbant dans l'interprétation du golefish. Je pense que c'est vraiment... Ce point est vraiment intéressant, parce que le facteur qui s'intéresse est l'absorption, ce genre de state de mind, un mental mind, c'est l'absorption. Je ne sais pas si Pierre Schneider parle de ça. Je ne me souviens pas, parce que c'est... C'est un grand livre où il y a des informations, qui sont cadavres. Mais le golefish est peut-être plus qu'un thème, parce qu'il peut trouver ça dans so many places, in Matisse's pictures. So sometimes it's a little clue. Je pense que c'est aussi un moment de lui en pensant vision et en regardant. À la même time, il est en travaillant through this idea of contemplation, something we could call conceptual or abstraction, or thought anyway, or at least reflexivity. So it's that conjunction of those two things that are going on. And the last representation of the golefish, maybe it's very abstract, but it's a swimming pool. You know that paper cutouts, the swimming pool, which is in New York and MoMA. So this is the idea of being weightless. No weight anymore. And at the end of his career, he was lying in a bed. So the impression of flying. This is a question for Claudine after taking on such a monumental job with creating the dictionary. What were some of the subjects that were most strikingly difficult to limit the scope? So in the process of limiting the scope, some things that you may have excluded or included. So which are the things that were problematic? Did I understand well the question? That's it. Let me think. The ones who were most problematic were, I said it. It's things that seems at first glance very simple just like, let's say, an entry on fenêtre, window. You have the notion that everything has been said on this. And then you think about it and then you realize that no. And then you have to, you know, to grab it in book on Matisse and look for all these windows and try to make a synthesis. First of all, find all the representation of the window. Be humble and just look at the works themselves. And then let them talk for themselves. And then you think and then you read all the commentaries on the window. Everything that has been written on it. And then you have to sum it up. This is really difficult. Some others were, when you have to write, for example, it was difficult and scary to write, for example, and the music, dance and music, which are in St. Petersburg now. And so I decided to go to St. Petersburg just to see the two pictures together because if not, you can't understand them. If you see the music and if you see the dance alone, you don't understand what it is if you don't see the works themselves. So writing about such a work as the music in 25,000 words is not easy. And all that's it. I don't know if I answered your question. I'm sorry. The goldfish again. Could the goldfish be an attribute of Matisse, both of his presence and absence in a similar way to the violin case? The Poisson Rouge. Matisse was a redhead. He looked at the world through thick lenses. I can't claim the originality of this. I think I heard Jack Flam say this. I'm not sure he published it. But I'm wondering if it's a kind of alter ego of the artist like the violin or the violin case in the same way that, say, Van Eyck had a man with a red hat. To me. Okay. I mean, I think in the painting in Nice where there are no goldfish, certainly the violin case is the sign of the artist. And he does, of course, do one of those nice interiors with a violin and then another picture in the nice interior of a violinist in front of the window. So it all gets very layered and resonant. Whether the goldfish represent him, I don't know. I think in my interpretation of those particular pictures I was suggesting that they represent something to do with his looking, with vision, with sort of figuring out how to go from perception to conception. But not fish representing the artist, necessarily. I love, you know, I like the idea of the glasses. I was thinking about that, too. But, you know, yes. I mean, obviously, there's all this reflexivity and self-reference going on when an artist is in the studio and they're sort of imagining that space and what's happening to them in that space as they look at the objects they've assembled or found in that space. So, you know, I think it's important to be able to understand what's happening in that space as they look at the objects they've assembled or found in that space. So, it's, you know, an interesting and layered experience. I did read somewhere that, and I don't remember it was Pierre Schneider or Alfred Barr or someone said that they felt that perhaps the goldfish represented being trapped in the studio. You touched on the studios being almost, in some ways, claustrophobic and that the fishbowl was kind of Matisse in his studio looking out as he looked out windows, but he was trapped within the studio. Yes, and people have even, you know, I sort of listed the different interpretations. There have been many by many, you know, eminent scholars about what those rooms are like and I was trying to sort of shift those readings away from that idea. You know, people have said solitude, imprisonment and, you know, the world of the studio being like the fishbowl. I mean, these are figures of consciousness certainly, but I don't necessarily, especially... Anyway, it's about sort of figuring out what kind of tone you're going to give to those interpretations and how far you make them more literal minded or perhaps I was arguing for a more poetic way of interpreting that. Thank you very much. I think that it's time for a lunch break. And we will gather up to in the auditorium. Thank you.