– Switzerland missed Matisse
The Beyeler Foundation brought in emblematic pieces to build a retrospective following the artist’s infinite creativity. Comment.
Published today at 11:01 a.m.
“The open window, Collioure”, 1905, a piece where Matisse also works on the materiality of color.
Collection John Hay Whitney, 1998 Succession H. Matisse / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich/Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
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- La F
- ondation Beyeler offers a rare retrospective of Matisse
- until January 26, 2025.
- These exhibitions are aimed at a generation that has not encountered Matisse before.
- He left around 1000 works scattered around the world between museums and private collectors.
Matisse, this son who we saw taking over the family business of selling grain, this being too fragile to do it… who became a pencil-pusher for a notary, we have the impression of seeing him very often as a brilliant painter and as a genius of modernity. It’s not fake! What great museum doesn’t have its Matisse?
The artist who died at the age of 85, four years after representing France at the Venice Biennale where he won the Grand Prix for painting, did he not leave some 1000 works to posterity? It is precisely their dispersion in the institutional world – in Lausanne, the MCBA has an early still life – and that of private collectors which makes it so familiar. And at the same time so sought after.
“Blue nude” part of a series of gouache-painted and cut-out papers.
Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Bâle, Collection Beyeler/Succession H. Matisse / 2024, ProLitteris, Zurich/Robert Bayer
“Matisse exhibitions are rare, his retrospectives, a rarity,” says Sam Keller, proud director of a Beyeler Foundation whose notoriety, means and know-how allow him to offer one, until January 26, 2025 .
The man is not in the habit of embroidering. Even when he emphasizes that one of the foundations of this retrospective, beyond the blockbuster effect, is to give an entire generation the opportunity to finally meet Matisse. The latest dates from 2015 (at Gianadda in Martigny), from 2006 (already at the Fondation Beyeler) but the history of the exhibitions above all remembers the scale of that of the Kunsthaus in Zurich in 1982.
If the exhibition ignores graphic work, Matisse’s sculptures are present in number.
AFP
By constantly returning to this generation that was unable to see Matisse, one might believe that Sam Keller is stirring up elements of language – as we like to say when the speech is political – except that he is right. An exhibition that is built to create an encounter with the public can make a lasting impression. And go see an artist who knew how to create a universe in painting, a man who resisted in the camp of color the monstrosities of his century, a traveling spirit, a sensitive intelligence, a resilient person who rebuilt himself at the same time that he was reinventing art, comes from the sterilely worldly reflex.
Matisse, you have to go to him, go to the shock of his intensity, and the slap comes back with full force. His life lessons and his energies, too. So… yes, Switzerland missed Picasso’s century-long companion – and genius –.
Riehen, Fondation Beyeler, until Jan. 26, daily (10 a.m.-6 p.m.), Wed (10 a.m.-8 p.m.), Fri (10 a.m.-9 p.m.). www.fondationbeyeler.ch
Florence Millioud joined the cultural section in 2011 out of a passion for people of culture, after having covered local politics and economics since 1994. An art historian, she collaborates in the writing of exhibition catalogs and monographic works on artists.More info
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