 So I'm 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 Patrie for their invitation. As Sylvie asked me today, I will not present my current research on Matisse, but rather an exhibition I created from the NAM collection and which within this specific framework seems to me to open up different lines of thought and possibly future research. Matisse in his time, an exhibition conceived exclusively from the Musee Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou collection, take place in Switzerland at the Janada Foundation in Martini in Italy, in Turin, and in the United State at Oklahoma City, where it has just closed at the end of September. As the title indicates, it presented the work of Matisse in dialogue with those of his peers from the beginning of the 20th century to the 50s. The figure of Matisse dominated mid-20th century heart. A prolific, curious, and social artist through heart his career, he was at the very heart of the debates that were taking place on the artistic scene during his lifetime. He was the leader of the fourth, a critical observer of Cubism, a student of and friend of to his predecessors, Syniac, Renoir, Mayol, Bonard, the teacher of an academy and a world generation of European expressionists, Picasso's rival, the pioneer of abstract heart for the younger generation of artists, in particular for New York's abstract expressionists, and for the members of the support-surface movement in France. The bulk of the artist's correspondence preserved as the archives of Matisse in France and gradually published over time clearly reveals how Matisse's social world and his friendships were essentially related to heart. The letters he received or sent were written by or for his many artist friends, especially Bonard and his useful companions, Camus and Marquers, Rouaux, Dorin, his patrons, publishers, art dealers, some museum directors, and conservators. Although Matisse shied away from political life, it did work hard to come to the head either through petitions or by actual funding of artists like Gris, Mayol, and Laurent. In spite of the comparison with Picasso, that is writtenally made when discussing Matisse's heart, the creator of dance is often perceived and introduced as a singular, unique, and isolated force, like a master whose influence seems rather evident. This image quickly took shape starting from Matisse's first public exhibitions to at the turn of the century. And it is clearly illustrated in the words of Picasso's companion, Fernando Olivier. I quote, Matisse was much older than Picasso and a serious and cautious man. He never saw eye to eye with the younger painter. As different from the North Pole is from the South Pole, he would say, when talking about the two of them. There was something very nice about Matisse. With his regular features and his thick golden beard, he really looked like a grand old man of art. He seemed to be hiding through 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 Steinstadt Saturdays, Matisse shone 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 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 visualize 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. Endoptedly, there is a similar formal expression in the works of Leger, Dufy, Le Corbusier, Matisse, or even Picasso that cannot be reduced to certain stylistic features, such as a palette of primary colors, monumental and decorative stylization of the drawing, the humanist iconography, and that especially resonates in the broader political and cultural context. This exhibition examined Matisse's artistic career and was arranged into nine chronological sections divided by specific themes. The mantley, Matisse's 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 painting signed by Braque Picasso or Bonard and engaged in invisible dialogue with the artist who was isolated in vents. The nice sections, the morose, phobism, Matisse and cubism, the nice, the nice years, the painter of Odalisque, Matisse and surrealism, painting, the painting Matisse's studio, modernism, the turnaround in the 30s, Matisse's legacy to abstract art, the final years, enabled us to follow Matisse's trajectory together from his debut to the studio of Gustave Moreau in 1897 to 1999 until his death when other artists in the 60s were inspired by the color paper cut he created in his final years. The exhibition begins with Matisse's debut and the unswering friendships he developed with his fellow students in Gustave Moreau's studio at the École des Beaux-Arts. Albert Marquès, Charles Gamoin, 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 Medi Collieu in the summer of 1905 marked the start of the adventure of the fauve under Matisse's patronage. The scandal that arose from the exhibition of paintings featuring pure colors created by Matisse and his friends, Manguin, Gamoin, and Marquès, and by André Derin and Maurice de Vlamin at the Salon d'Hôtel in 1905, marked the birth of the movement known as fauvism, which was also embraced the 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, I quote, 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, boldness, 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 window Collieu, 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's 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, Bathers by a River, clearly echoes the research conducted by Henri-Laurents. After the excitement of the Parisian years, in 1917, Matisse finally settled in Nice, offering himself a new start. In that region, with his temperate climate, he met Augustre Noir, often visited Maillot's studio and reconnected with his friend Pierre Bonard. Thanks to the École des Beaux-Arts in Nice, he became acquainted with new models, 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 impressionism, with an analysis of Renoir and Monet's late paintings. Through this dialogue with his predecessors, Matisse participated in his own way, in the return of Classism of the 20s, on a part with Durin and 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 colorful, 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 Besombe. 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 considered his drawing to be a very intimate means of expression. He often made drawings to inform his paintings and sculptures, feeling that these drawings should be quick, gestural exercise that captures the form and emotion evoked in him by the subject. In the early 40s, he conceived his famous sequence of variations, 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, Le rêve, 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, who were represented by his son, Pierre Matisse, in his gallery. In midi, Matisse once again found Renoir, Mayol, Bonard, 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, I live my life surrounded by the walls of my studio. It's all this son, Pierre. The 40s were the season 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's 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, Leger, Picasso, Dufy, changed their style. It became looser, more schematic, and there was a preference for a palette of primary colors that echoed 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 methods originated by Matisse would hand up having a great impact on the work of the artist in the following generation. The abstract expressionists like Roscoe, San Francis, or Shirley Jauff, the member of the support-surface group like Vincent Bulez, Claude Vialla, or Jean-Pierre-Pence Pincement, but also Simon Tye and many others. Thanks to the dissemination of his work in the United States through his son, Pierre, the exhibitions of his work in France when he was already a mature artist and the decorative and architectural complex of Vance von Schappel, Matisse's work fueled the heart of both the 20th century. The catalog comprises a vast ontology of 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 enlivenes our 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's writing still is very clear. He expresses his opinions on art perspicuously and some of his letters, especially the ones he wrote to Bonnard and to Rowe, are so reflexive and sensitive they have the quality of few felt treaties. Others, more intimate and familiar, which he wrote to his old friends, to Marquet or to Camoin, reveal a light-hearted Matisse and sometimes a more contankerous one, allowing us to glimpse inside the everyday lives of these artists. Most of the extracts collected here have already been published, while a few of them were taken directly from the archives of 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 fit 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 Alarmée Poésie. In the later works, the drawings 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 rules. The drawing has to be a graphic equivalent of the poem. These reflections on the line, its freedom and its independence could also be seen in Matisse's painting. The color was applied in light-heeled backgrounds and lived by the sinew slides 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. In a letter to Bonard, 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 nudes, the pink hues. The 24 photographs that documents the gestational face of this work show the gradual stylization of the figure that little by little reached up as far as the frame of the painting according to a decorative trend that can also be seen in music of 1948. 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 surrealists during the early 20s, especially in Breton and support the magnetic fields of 19, of 19, and in the surrealist manifesto 1924, would in a very short time become the patrimony of all the modern artistic expressions. Although Matisse, unlike Picasso, never followed the surrealist closely, his pictorial and graphic work was praised by Breton who pursued the Jacques Doucet who had to his collection along with Picasso's De Meuselle-D'Avignon, Matisse Goldfish. Some art journals published by surrealist circles devoted world issues to Matisse. In 1946, Cayedar 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 poetry, dealt with 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 nine published in October, 1946. There is indeed a certain stylistic affinity between the modernist notebooks produced in the 30s. The paintings made by André Masson between 1924 and 1929 during the time when he embraced Breton 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 while he was working on Malarmé's poetry 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's observations of on dance were the equivalent of the silent rest 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 energies that pervades the entire body. The point 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 of 1910. But it can mostly be traced back to the poetic and dreamlike atmosphere of the early 30s. The work aralded 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 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 artist aesthetics turned down his own figuration. Around 1930, the two artists, both intrigued by the world of the circus, accruberats 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 mechanic that Léger recuperated a freedom of composition that on the occasion of the conference of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1935, he described as follows. Once this, I quote, once the subject had been destroyed, we needed to find something else. The object and pure color take on the role of values that compensated. In the new phase, the freedom of composition becomes infinite. There is total freedom permitting composition from the imagination in which creative fantasy can emerge and develop. Léger thus produced a series of canvas among with Dekonda with keys of 1930, where the figures and objects suspended inside the color fields reveal surrealist nuance. Léger's flick-to-reacting and silliest blue dancer of 1930, which underscored the contrast between fragile, evocative drawing and illusionistic industrial architectural form, was likely a note to Matisse. While in Nice, Matisse continued to explore drawing in an ambitious project whose development was witnessed by Aragont during the war years. From every point of view, Matisse was badly traumatized by the war and he would later describe the postwar years as a second life, an extra lease on life allowed to someone who had been resuscitated. The separation from his wife, Amélie Finnellist, by their divorce in March 1939, the difficulty he had getting from Paris to Nice, traveling, and lastly the stomach surgery he underwent in Lyon in January 1941, which he survived against all odds, but which left him weakened and all events that made this troubled and depressing period of isolation even worse. Forced to spend much of the day in bed, Matisse devoted his time to drawing in order to accomplish a sort of completeness. I quote, for a year I have made a very considerable effort. I had perfected my drawing and it is like blossoming after 50 years. I must do the same for painting. Matisse alone in his room immobilized, focused on the discipline of drawing, investigating the concepts of virtuosity and spontaneity, the automatic and controlled flow of the line, the relationship with the model and with the space of the sheet. To document his own thoughts, he began working of an ambitious album project whose systematic nature was worthy of a conceptual work. Temps et variations is a collection of 158 drawings divided into 17 series in which Matisse compared drawings with charcoal shadings, the theme, with line drawings, the variations. I quote, they are made up of a series of which the initial drawing for each series is a charcoal study giving way to a series of pen or pencil drawings emerging like perfumes from the original. By means of this profusion of drawings, featuring vivid, concise lines, Matisse tried to emphasize the importance of the gesture in what could be defined an inspired drawing, one that is made unconsciously endowed with a spiritual dimension. He gave Aragot a detailed explanation of the process. I quote, when I make my variation, the root of my pencil on the sheet of paper is in some respects analogous to the gesture of a man groping in the darkness. What I mean to say is that there is nothing planned about this route. I'm led, I do not lead. In reproducing the model, I go from one point to the object to another, considering each point separately the independent of those two words, which my pen will then be directed. I'm guided only by an inner drive that I translate as it is formed rather than by the exterior appearance of the point on which I focus my guess. It is a point that at that moment has the same value for me as a dim gleaming in the night toward which I must head before being able to see. Once I have arrived, the next light to reach continually inventing the path to follow is this route perhaps the most interesting part of the action. I am like a spider that launches the line to the protuberance that seems more propitious. And then to another one, it notices later, point by point, imposed on the canvas. Mattis often compared his work to that of a medium or an acrobat setting it within the dynamic rationale of the duration, the gestation, and the variation expressing the ambition to present a painting or drawing as the result of a process. Picasso, on the other hand, had for several years been working on a major graphic project that was the continuation of his engrise. The Suite Volard commissioned in 30 by the merchant of the same name is a series of 100 prints made between the spring of 1933 and 1937. A winter Volard's accidental death and the outbreak of the Second World War, this place with neither a specific order nor a title inspired by the self-reflexive theme of the artist before his model and by the variations on Balzac's unknown masterpiece did not appear on the market until 1950 and with great delay. Good Mattis have been familiar with that suite when he began working on theme and variation. In his memoir, Brassail suggests that Mattis probably was at least influenced by Picasso's cataract 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 1933 in the dark hall with his eyes closed in which the organ's eyes, nose, ears, lips no longer occupy their usual place were 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 own an open form of reaction to the totalitarian expressions. And I quote him, this dimension of permanent activity and change constitutes tracing as the writing of the body. Aragon describes the wall of teme variation as definite images of the undefinable. There does not exist for the subconscious and ideal definite image of the body. The indefinable contradicts the heroic and deathly fixation produced by fascist art. Art. Thank you.