 Hello everyone, thank you for the invitation and also thank you for allowing me to speak after Ellen, even though who ever since wanted to give your own said, you must read Ellen's work. And I did right away. Our work has much very much been in dialogue with one another. This photograph of Matisse that I wanted to start with just not on the screen. Here we go. I'm going to start with this photograph of Matisse working in bed on his cutouts, which was taken by Philip Halsman, who came to the Hôtel Aginat and Nice in 1951 with George Saint-Majin, then the art director of Esquire magazine. Of the many rich details about Matisse's working environment that the image captures, one that has always fascinated me is the way that these four figure drawings are hung to correspond with the four calligraphic characters in the Chinese wooden panel just above them. The four lively drawings, a sequence of a model turning in space, provide bodily parallels for the energetically carved glyphs. The relationship between the two above Matisse's bed seems far from haphazard because of the rich back and forth between two systems of representation, suggesting how writing is a form of figuration while visual signs may be read like words in a language. Indeed Matisse often referred to image making as a kind of plastic writing when describing his efforts to find the simplest of signs to condense the essential meaning of a motif. These signs Matisse specified were developed specifically for the work in which they appear. Their meanings were not predetermined, so they changed according to the context in which they are found. The Chinese panel is a 19th century object, a gift from one Chinese official to another. It actually commemorates another earlier act of giving as it's likely a carved version of the original gift, which was most likely a paper scroll, and having it carved into this larger format would have allowed the recipient to display the gift more conspicuously, hung either in a reception hall or above a door. Its main inscription, in fact, is an example of this flexibility of meaning, as it can be read in more than one way, literally as a river to the south seen through transparent curtains, but also because of a homophonic character, pure and virtuous like the southern river. The hausman photograph was an archival origin of sorts for a project I've been developing for the past five years. My research on the African sculpture that Matisse collected beginning in 1906, that's when he began the collecting of my research, had me thinking about other projects and other traditions that Matisse collected throughout his life and the impact those ideas had on his theories of making. The Chinese panel was a birthday gift from his wife Amelie for his 60th, and like many of the objects Matisse lived and worked with, as Ellen's photograph showed us, it moved with Matisse's from residence to residence. Here in the photograph on the bottom, you see the panel in the upper part of the photograph along with several niece period otolisks. For anyone interested in the personal collection, the place to begin is the Museum of Matisse and niece, where this panel is now, along with over 120 of the personal objects donated by the family. I began researching this particular collection with the assumption that the objects were not just decoration for his homes or various studios, but also another means to access many of the design principles in forming his practice. Matisse himself described the diverse collection to his daughter Magarite De Tui in 1943 as his working library, suggesting that he thought of them as resources and perhaps material extensions of his creative process. She just heard more about from Ellen. And other studio photographs would seem to support this idea. Here again in a 1951 photograph taken by Lydia de La Trescaya in 1952, excuse me, in 1951, we find another correspondence, this time between the calligraphic characters and the cutout elements. Earlier states of the simplified graphic forms that would eventually appear in blue nude with green stockings, women and monkeys, parakeet and the mermaid, all from 1952, are attached to the wall surrounding the panel. As if the signs Matisse conceived for nudes, fruit and foliage are extensions of the characters themselves, forming one unified installation. The two vitrines, which Matisse used to display his collection in ever-changing combinations are below, and those vitrines are also now in the collection at the Museum of Matisse and Nice. The Chinese panel must have been a productive source of ideas for his cutouts, especially in the conceptual play with its spatial relations between figure and ground. Matisse said himself that he was drawn to the ambiguous visual exchange between the characters and their wooden background, observing to, for example, how the Chinese panel is actually carved, but you think it's in relief. Describing how at a distance these gilded characters can seen as both carved down into the lacquered wood or raised up from its surface. So these are the kinds of dialogues between Matisse's art and the objects that inspired them, which form the basis of our upcoming exhibition, Matisse in the Studio, which opens at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts this April. My colleagues and co-conspirators for the project are Helen Burnham, who I think is still here, curator of, hi Helen, hi, curator of prints and drawings at the MFA, and Ann Dumas, who's curator at the Royal Academy in London. Our accompanying catalogue, which will be published by Boston MFA Publication, features essays by the curators as well as contributions by Claudine, Ellen, who is here, Marie Therese, Poulvinie de Soudigny, and Suzanne Blier, as well as Jack Flam. Ours, of course, is not the first project to examine the role of these personal objects. Some of you may have seen Une Palette d'Objet, this past summer, organized by Marie Therese, Poulvinie de Soudigny, in Nice, which was accompanied by a catalogue to which Ellen and I both contributed. And of course the much celebrated Matisse, his art and his textiles, exhibition in 2004, which was why the Royal Academy was such an ideal place for our second venue, since we feel that Matisse in the studio expands on many of the themes of that earlier show. Many of you fellow Matisse siennes in the audience today have generously shared your time, advice, expertise, archival material, even your Matisse's with us. Thank you for that. So please forgive me if the following pitch sounds vaguely familiar. If you've heard it from me, Helen, or Ann, or lucky for you, all three of us. But I'd like to do a brief walkthrough of the thematic sections of our exhibition to give you a little bit of a sneak preview. The first section is inspired by this Ellen adult photograph taken when Louis Aragon requested documentation for what he poetically referred to as this palette of objects. And it's an inspiration for a section called Object as an Actor, which will present a tightly focused small selection of objects as players on the stage of Matisse's work. Matisse actually submitted this photograph to Aragon with the inscription on the back, objects which have been used to me, of use to me nearly all my life. We call this section Object as an Actor based on what Matisse said in 1951. I worked all my life before the same objects. The object is an actor. A good actor can have a part in 10 different plays. An object can play a role in 10 different pictures. So in this section, we track those changes and those roles very literally. We introduce viewers to a group of deeply personal objects like this stately silver coffee maker, also known as a chocletiere that Matisse received as a wedding gift. Through small focused groups like this, it's apparent how the objects were points of departure to which Matisse returned again and again. The coffee maker appears in his work in different guises and across decades reinvented afresh in each new setting. 40 years after those two early still lives you just saw, Matisse returned to the subject, but with a slightly different chocolate pot on the collection in Nice and with an entirely different cut paper idiom for working out how objects could, as he said, of an earlier still life, participate in the same intimacy. Claudine's essay for our catalogue analyzes how the material realities of this same coffee pot evolve and works made over that 40 year period. Objects were clearly a source of continuity, a feedback loop in the metaphor we heard in Cameron's talk, and in returning to them she suggests Matisse made manifest the passage of time or durée in his work. Works on paper are key to our exhibition since you can't really explore an artist's working process without them. So in the Boston venue we have about 33 paintings, but we also have 24 drawings, seven prints, almost 10 cutouts. In this marvelous sheet on the left you see the same composition in the ink on paper at right being treated in a serial fashion as Matisse tests out the effects of different watercolor washes over it. The majority of the 36 personal objects in our checklist are coming from the Musée Matisse and Mies, and the museum's team has been gracious working partners in the research and preparations for the project. We do, however, have several objects which are being generously loaned from private collections, as is the case with this fond reliquary that we saw earlier when Ellen showed us it. And we think that this will really significantly expand our sense of the depth and range of Matisse's interests. The second section of the exhibition looks at the development of Matisse's abstract nudes beginning around 1906. First, we're going to convince the non-believers that this quintessentially French artist had a very international outlook. The stylistic purely visual similarities between this deeply experimental 1914 painting and the funk sculpture will provide a way into the question of modernist primitivism in Matisse's early nudes. The elongated torso, ovoid head sitting on a cylinder of a neck are some of the stylistic motifs that Matisse was boring. In Helen's reading of this work in her essay for the catalogue, she describes how the figure is both modern and totemic at the same time, and how the intensity of Matisse's response to the sensorality of his female subject is heightened by the energy of the scratch surface. Throughout the show, we wish to draw in Matisse's tactile engagement with his objects as much as possible. Since this was something he remarked upon, noting how, for example, African sculpture was conceived in terms of their material. But this emphasis on direct visual barings will provide a ground for exploring more conceptual barings. For example, several of the African sculptures in Matisse's collection were pairs, a traditional iconography in several different African traditions, such as the Bamamana and Lega we see on the screen. Once again, we think these little known works from her private collection will be a significant revelation, even for visitors who know Matisse quite well, and we are thrilled to be able to introduce them to audiences. Despite the enormous differences separating these African traditions, the male or female identity of each is not based on some bedrock of anatomical reality, but dependent on understanding the relative difference from its partner. And we see the same principle of fluid or reversible identity in the misleadingly titled sculpture to women, which is based on an ethnographic photograph of two Tuareg models from North Africa. One of the most significant departures Matisse makes from that source was the way that one of its figures, the one on the right in his photograph of a Hirshhorn cast, morphs from male to female depending on your view of it. Matisse in other words, and this is a point that we just heard from Ellen, was not simply turning to African models for new artistic ideas about making objects. He was also using it as a way to rethink social and cultural norms. In the third section, the face, we examine how Matisse approached the portrait, not just to reinvent the genre, but to and to interrogate the received categories of individual subjectivity that were supported by the tradition in which he was trained. We open with Matisse's powerful self-portrait from Copenhagen, a painting that looks almost carved from its painted surface that will resonate with the hieratic power of several sculpted heads in Matisse's collection, including a head of an apostle, most likely James the Grader, a work that would have been appreciated for its quote unquote primitivism in the early 20th century, given that European medieval art was often included in that impossibly broad category constituting the other in opposition to academic tradition. We hope by this point in the exhibition, and maybe in my talk, visitors will have a solid sense of the broad interests and cultural hybridity of Matisse's many objects. In her essay for the catalogue, Suzanne Blier enumerates the many lessons Matisse drew specifically from African masks to rethink the portrait. As an African, she was interested in what Matisse may have understood about the function of the masks in his collection. In a revealing remark he made to a sitter in 1918, Matisse said, ideally a portrait should resemble your ancestors and your descendants. Matisse's portrait of his daughter acquired by Picasso was among other things, a work solidifying their shared interest in African art. In this photograph taken by Picasso of his studio from 1910, we can see how he hung the Marguerite portrait near an elegant punu mask from Gabon, which when worn by men in morning ceremonies, evoke the soul of ancestors. Coming from Paris, along with these two works on the screen, the punu mask will be one of the only objects we have in the show that was not previously owned by Matisse. In our first section of the exhibition, the studio as theater, we begin chronologically with a 1917 painting, Lorette with a cup of coffee from the Art Institute of Chicago. Matisse adorned his new studio with props from the Islamic world, like this guéridon, which is most likely from Tunisia, to help create sensuous sets for his oralisks. At first glance, the objects appear to be exotic trappings, props for his make-believe harem. But their many appearances suggest they played a significant role in Matisse's working process and in his conscious reinterpretation of the Orientalist tradition with which they were associated. One theme emerging in these works is the synergy between figure and object. Decorative patterns from these objects often migrate to provide compositional motifs for the entire surface of the work. Lorette, the model, was able to embody various personas in the countless paintings in which she appears. Here, the mother of pearl inlay pattern on the top of the guéridon complements her gaze and emphasizes her dramatic features. Her eyes, with pupils set in a larger white form, also mimic the swirling coffee. Compare that to how decorative pattern works in this later woman with a veil from 1927, where it does not just provide a counterpoint to the face and body of the model, but structures her very appearance, like a matrix through which we see Henriette d'Aquerrier's body. As Charles-Felix in Nice, Matisse's working space became more like a theater set, continually dressed and redesigned with props and textiles, these ever more elaborate setups provided Matisse with a kaleidoscope of visual effects, rich decorative patterns, chromatic intensities, and the dissolution of clear perspectival space among them. Here in this 1928 paintings, we see all of those effects on display in a composition that features this octagonal chair, which comes either from Algeria or Morocco, and if we go back to the painting, you'll notice that Matisse has transformed the chair by editing out the majority of its painted patterning. The pattern is not recorded as is, but absorbed into the making of the work. Objects like this chair acted as menonyms for the Islamic visual traditions that the structures of his paintings emulated. As other scholars have already argued, beginning most notably with Pierre Schneider, Matisse was drawn to the Islamic world more for its pictorial traditions than as a site of exotic or picturesque locales. The principal concepts he drew from Islamic design were the use of rhythmic arabesque patterns, the rejection of a clear division between figuration and abstraction, and the decentralization of space and suppression of pictorial hierarchies, resulting often in images without a clear primary motif. By 1928, the date of this work on the screen, he had been engaged with these principles of Islamic design for well over a decade. Matisse would tell us in 1935 that, quote, the subject of a picture and its background must have the same value, or to put it more clearly, there is no principal feature, only the pattern is important. His continued focus on the sensual figure of the Odalis, however, tests this claim, but one of the key things to note about the period is the conscious artifice of all of this. Matisse's work from the 1920s has been read rather literally, but the objects may help us to understand how the portability of ideas in a modern world change the expectations surrounding authenticity. This photograph of the model Lisette Clannette sitting in the same chair in front of a hanging IET textile vividly captures this very modern artifice. It reads now almost like a film still from the very cinematic project that is Nice in the 1920s. The final section of our exhibition, Signs, focuses on Matisse's late work in the different ways Matisse sought to unify abstract signs with the empty space around them. It will suggest that Matisse's late work is the culmination of a lifelong endeavor to dismantle the hierarchies of the European tradition by opening it to ideas from beyond its borders. Chinese objects are well represented here, not only the calligraphy panel we saw earlier, but also with objects like this Ming dynasty blue and white glazed vase. In Matisse's remarks about Chinese art and objects, he often repeated a parable about drawing a tree. In a 1942 letter, for example, he wrote, I've been told what Chinese professors tell their students when you draw a tree, have the feeling of growing with it when you begin at the bottom. Inspired by these remarks, we've assembled a small group of works with tree iconography to reveal the mutable nature of Matisse's simplified signs and how they changed relative to their surroundings. Because of the presence of textile traditions in this final section, we're very happy to be able to at least evoke the Vence project with this maquette for a red chasable coming from MoMA as part of the tree group. We hope that it will also suggest another hierarchy, which Matisse's study of other cultures helped him to rethink, and that was the one separating fine art from design. As one of Matisse's last great canvases interior with Egyptian curtain from 1948 will be a finale to our exhibition where we will display it alongside the actual Egyptian curtain, which we saw earlier in Alan's talk coming from a private collection. Jack Flamm has written an essay corresponding to this final section called The Mutability of Objects and Signs. In it, he identifies the painting as the most magisterial embodiment of a system of contrasting signs, a kind of handwriting he sees in many late works that is based on visual contrasts. Here, for example, areas of rhythmic brushstrokes used for one kind of floral form, the radiating palm tree, are played against the brightly colored flat forms, the floral motifs in the Egyptian tentcloth, with an application process that is very similar to Matisse's concurrent work with the paper cutouts. For me, this focus on contrast in this one painting distills the idea of many cultural languages speaking through Matisse's work at once. For visitors who are experiencing Matisse's work for the first time, we hope that the material presence of incredibly vivid objects like this Egyptian curtain will offer them a way into the work. On the most basic level, knowledge of these objects enhances an understanding of working process. But rather than forcing a one to one correspondence, we hope that seeing the actual objects will also allow viewers to focus more on how Matisse took liberties to transform them, in placing them in different pictorial environments that highlighted their different relationships to other things. In our carnage of quick disposable consumption and ephemeral experiences, this model of sustained long-term deeply personal attachment to looking is a relevant one to see firsthand. I'd like to conclude by focusing on just two principle questions that I hope will emerge from Matisse in the studio, both the exhibition and the catalog. And here are some material that we've seen earlier. This is a cuba cloth from Cato, next to the Cartier-Bresson photograph that Ellen showed us. Our exhibition is going to feature examples of these cuba kingdom textile panels from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These textiles were brought to Europe from what was then the Belgian Congo, starting in the early 20th century, an example of the many objects that Matisse was able to collect made available to him by the structures of colonialism. We know that Matisse began acquiring these at least as early as 1920s, since two of his cuba cloths, as we've already heard, appeared in Cayet Da in 1927 and were later lent to the 1935 African Negro Art Exhibition at MoMA in New York. The photograph taken by Cartier-Bresson depicts Matisse with what had by that time become an extensive collection of cuba textiles, shown framing a large and exceptional Samoan bark cloth that Ellen showed us. The black and white photograph displays a mural-like arrangement of the textiles, but has kind of flattened linear forms, reducing the very rich contrasts of black oak and rust raffia palm fibers in the cuba palette into shades of gray. Even modern photographs, like the color one on the left, fail to capture the sensation of plush depth and mobile energy that the direct experience of these panels offer. The lively variability in the combination of motifs and color in this one cuba example is likely the result of an exploratory embroidery process, gradually executed by its maker or makers without a preset design. The resulting irregularity produces a dazzling improvisational quality, preventing us from seeing its concentric lozenges and triangles as static or repetitive. They're also able to project a field of imagined combination beyond the physical limits of the cloth itself. As you can see from this detailed photograph of another cuba textile fragment now in Nice, the raffia palm fibers have this three dimensional almost relief-like quality to them. It's one of the reasons why Matisse installed them throughout his home. They're that same photograph where you can see the long, thin cuba fragments installed in various places along the edges. In this 1935 photograph of the cuba cloths installed at the 1935 MoMA exhibition, you might recognize the Kato textile that we just saw, a second from the left. You have a sense of how these dazzling patterns act on the space in which they appear. In this photograph, the five cloths seem to detach from the wall and exist on their own plane apart from it, parallel to the lens of the camera. In that 1943 letter to his daughter Marguerite, Matisse wrote of the textiles, I'm astonished to realize that although I've seen them often enough, they've never interested me as they do today. I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time, even the simplest of them, and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry. Matisse's admiration for what he saw as this instinctive geometry informs his complex use of patterns in paintings like Red Interior, Still Life on a blue table, which is coming from Dusseldorf, which we're delighted to feature in the exhibition as well. While the cuba textiles are not literally rendered as a still life element, like the glass-paste turquoise vase that appears on the table, a looser version of the zigzag vectors found in many of his cuba cloths cover the majority of the painting surface. Matisse's pattern of black lines breaks out into the view of nature through the open window, interrupting their planar continuity and preventing them from flattening the space of the painting. This effect, as in his cuba textiles, works against the expectations of any ordered consistency that we might associate with repetitive patterns. For example, while the zigzags beneath the palm tree inside the window might be read as recessional lines, suggesting a path to the garden beyond the tree, we can also read those lines as belonging to the expanse of wall and floor outside the window area, where the same pattern instead moves our eye, not back into the space of the room, but off the frame of the canvas. The black lines are multidirectional. In the upper left, they appear to climb up the wall, but in the lower right, a compressed version of the same lines move downwards, helping to situate that floating oval of blue table as resting on the studio floor. Red interior, I think, is a good example of Matisse emulating the variety of depths and visual directions in cuba cloths, also achieved through a minimal number of design elements. Once again, Matisse is not boring anyone recognizable motif from African art, but a theoretical principle for reimagining physical space, for creating a highly subjective version of it. This, of course, did not come to Matisse eureka style all at once in an afternoon contemplating his wall or solely from his engagement with cuba cloths. The methodological issues raised by identifying concrete sources for Matisse's theories of making are very complicated because of the thorough way that Matisse digested and then transformed ideas, often from many different sources in a single work. The questions are further complicated when the traditions on which Matisse relied are non-western. Since Matisse, like so many of his contemporaries, often productively misread what they studied and projected their own assumptions onto them. This reminds us that the relationships we are studying are not confined to the studio, despite our pithy title. A matter of one object talking to another, but a conversation that is part of a wider network of cultural and political forces. In our exhibition, viewers will encounter a eureba-gelade mask alongside a canonical portrait by Matisse. This kind of juxtaposition is not intended to be a celebration of modernist discovery. It's a relevant curatorial challenge to bring up here at the Barnes, where this kind of combination has been happening for quite some time in the ensembles upstairs. As curators and art historians steeped in the specialized training that helps to keep art in fixed cultural categories, I do think we need to keep thinking about what happens when we mix up the formula, when we place west and non-west side by side. For example, the drastic mistake perhaps of conceiving an entire swath of the globe as a non comes into play. In any case, we need to continue thinking of ways to present this key aspect of history so that the global objects that a European artist borrowed from are not just conjured as silent studio witnesses. I'm not sure our installation is going to pull that off, but I do know that the conversation is worth having. Political questions about cultural appropriation are even more obviously posed by the odalisks of Matisse's niece period. We are delighted to be showing this powerful odalisque with green sash from Baltimore alongside the Ottoman region Brasero, or charcoal heater, a familiar object in so many of these works. In the model's presence, the Brasero takes on an almost anthropomorphic quality. Matisse molds the forms of Henriette d'Icalhe to create visual parallels between humans and things so that you can see the sort of skirt of the Brasero emulates the folds of her pantaloons. When I teach works like this to my students at Wheaton, many of my undergraduates immediately point out the dehumanizing aspects of this equation, a reclining available woman is made to appear like an object. We then discuss how Matisse's stated goal was to render the emotional response that objects created in him, which is also why he is animating the object as much as he is objectifying the animate. Look, for example, how the legs of the floating table reach out to caress the body, almost as if an active sympathy with d'Icalhe. There isn't an absence of humanity in the painting, I would suggest. One could argue just the opposite. The idea of dressing up European models in Orientalist garbs also seems a bit outdated to them. And of course, they are not the only ones. Remy Lebrouche recently described this period in very familiar terms as a kind of retreat, in his words, a quote, reconciliation with the Orientalism of the Bazaar. It's true that in terms of quality and availability, many of the North African objects Matisse collected were hardly exceptional. The more humble the status of these objects it seems, the more likely Matisse was able to respond to them. As he told Teriad in 1952, his role model for this approach to objects was Rembrandt, who he sets up in this quote as foil to the 19th century society painter Tiso. Rembrandt produced biblical scenes with cheap goods from a Turkish bazaar, that he said. Yet they conveyed all his emotion. Tiso painted Christ's life based on every conceivable document. He even went to Jerusalem, and yet his work is devoid of life. The objects were reminders of the interior Matisse had seen during his travels to Spain and Morocco during the teens and were stimulants to his imagination, not to recreate the spaces themselves, however, but the feeling of the spaces he had experienced. They were not meant to provide ethnographic realism to his paintings. And in fact, the more theatrical and more unreal they appeared in his knee studios, the better suited they were to demonstrate that the authenticity, which most concerned Matisse, was that of his own emotional response. I'm going to conclude with this beautiful painting that's coming from Cleveland and just to point out that when we continue to read the cultural dynamics of the niece work from the 1920s in a very literal way as a rehash of the past of Otolisk, who exists only to be ogled or as a failed attempt to transport viewers to a mythic North Africa, we lose a sense of the complexity of formal experimentations behind the worlds of false perspectives and misleading masquerades. In this later work, Matisse is even more open about the fictions inherent to his working process. The Otolisk returns, but clearly as a contemporary working model in costume, pausing from her reading to gaze directly at the artist. The gesture is central to the work's inner play between reality and artifice. The model and the object surrounding her dramatize a very specific moment in the posing for a work in progress. Once she has transformed into an illusion, a kind of self-reflective mise en ébime that pays tributes to the other performances of his many earlier Otolisks, she will join the works on the studio wall behind her, including La Verdeur in progress that we saw earlier. One of the many frames within the larger frame of this painting's story. We hope that knowing this bounty of objects in Matisse's studio will help us to appreciate even more what a consummate storyteller he really was. Thank you very much.