Fondation Beyeler: “Matisse is one of our most cherished exhibitions”

Yes… the impossible is in the exhibition “Matisse, invitation to travel”, hung in several places at the Fondation Beyeler. Without designating them, director Sam Keller surveys four interior scenes, brought together in a room, so similar in the art of creating an overflowing life behind closed doors and so singular in their range of motifs.

Oxygen – in Matisse, we can say color, sovereign, sensitive – circulates in a closed vacuum. Sometimes the windows blend into the decor, sometimes interior and exterior merge. But this painter’s breathing never imitates reality. She never dissociates herself from the presence of the imagination. And never, four years ago, would Sam Keller have dared to dream of bringing together such a quartet to celebrate the art of a child from the North (1869-1954) who found “happiness” in the light.

The miracle was repeated with three versions of “Interior of the goldfish bowl” brought together without falling into the laziness of a simple call for comparison. Or with these “Blue Nude”, star cut-outs of a painter, old, infirm, and forced to reinvent an art in “drawing with scissors”. Everyone dances, punctuating the group dynamics of a work obsessed with expression. We feel their sisterhood sculpted in the gouache sheet, we observe their emancipation from flatness, we even envy them for being so free to get to the essential.

“When we get a piece, we’re super happy. Then comes a second positive response. And even a third, so yes… we quickly become greedy,” Sam Keller openly gloats. There were refusals! This is the game of exhibitions but they also increase the energy of the troops to find something else. To be negotiated. To insist, again.

The “Bathers with the Turtle” – a canvas as synthetic as it is dense, as narrative as it is enigmatic – could bear witness to this. Rarely leaving their setting at the Saint-Louis Art Museum, they boost the magnetic power of the whole and make us forget the reservations expressed by the curators of the last major Matisse retrospective in Switzerland – eighteen years ago in the same place – convinced of having “touched the limits of what is feasible in terms of costs and insurance.”

Do without Russia

This time we are talking about around thirty lenders for around seventy pieces, arriving from the United States and all over Europe. But “The Dance” remained hanging in St. Petersburg as a daring masterpiece of the 20th century.^e century. Like the triumphant “Desserte rouge” by Matisse, tutelary spirit of the core of Fauve artists.

“Of course if there hadn’t been the war, we would have applied for loans,” responds Sam Keller. “But this is a question of integrity, now is not the time for collaboration with Russian state museums. At the beginning, we thought about the difficulty of doing without, but with what we obtained, he whispers, there is really no shortage of these loans to go through and tell the story of nearly six decades of creation.

A revolution in barely ten years

And it starts strong with “La desserte” (1896-1897), this heir to the impressionist lessons that its owners agreed to lend for the first time in thirty years. Opposite, the idea of ​​color, a sensation of light, already sneaks into the sepulchral “Nu au chausier rose” (1900) before lighting up, jubilant in “The terrace in Saint-Tropez” or experimental in the touch divisionist of “Luxury, calm and voluptuousness”, painting produced in the same year, 1904. Without any real follow-up, the desired singularity not being there. Matisse will find it by traveling even further, to the Orient and in the emotional intensity of color.

“Showing the importance and dazzlingness of this development is one of the major reasons for doing a retrospective,” notes its curator, Raphaël Bouvier. Landscapes, women, odalisques, still lifes, all the themes parade through this route which alternates paintings and sculptures to underline the dynamics of a self-fertilizing work.

Moreover, there is always a Matisse diagonally across from another, in mirror or in ambush, proof of the artist’s infinite inspiration as much as a playful, even mischievous, wink from the curator. Like this elongated nudity squinting at another, captured from behind. Or this forest of bronze heads which merge the same gaze at 360 degrees. Or even this sculpted silhouette with displayed mimicry with that of the “Large reclining nude”.

It is one of the icons of the Baltimore Museum of Art and one of the most beautiful shots in the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler. And as with all others, except for travel and insurance costs, no dollars were spent to obtain the loan. The practice may be current in some American institutions, but Sam Keller does not work. “When we let a work travel, it is in the name of sharing it with the public. Money should never be a motive! We don’t ask for it, we don’t pay for it. But we exchange very willingly, that’s what made it possible to release the pieces from Saint-Louis and Baltimore.”

“A copious exhibition”

Being the Beyeler Foundation counts in the success of such a retrospective, the director does not deny it. The name is respected in the museum world, it has its trust and a critical mass of visitors who support it. Beyond that, there would be no other manufacturing secrets other than being able to bring together the necessary means. Sam Keller admits insurance values ​​“around” the 2.5 billion Gauguins hung in 2015 and presents here “one of the three most expensive exhibitions with this same “Gauguin” and “The Young Picasso” of 2019. “We have needed a lot of support, he says. Without them, the exhibition would not be so copious.”

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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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