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Property from a New York collection HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) Arbre en fleur (Mural Scroll, no. 1...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:4,000,000.00 - 6,000,000.00 USD
Property from a New York collection HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) Arbre en fleur (Mural Scroll, no. 1...
Property from a New York collection
HENRI MATISSE
(1869-1954)
Arbre en fleur
(Mural Scroll, no. 1)
signed "H. Matisse" (lower left)
paper painted with gouache color,
cut and pasted on paper board support
20 1/2 x 25 1/2 in. (51.2 x 63.7 cm)
executed in Vence, villa Le Rêve, 1947-1949
Estimate: $4,000,000-6,000,000 <p>Provenance
Katzenbach & Warren, Inc., New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1949)
Stephan Hahn, New York
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above ca. 1960)
By descent from the above to the present owner <p>Literature
Katzenbach & Warren, Inc. with introduction by James Thrall Soby, Mural Scrolls: Calder, Matisse, Matta, Miro, New York, 1949 (folio of large-scale, silk-screen designs/murals issued as editions of 200)
"Mural Scrolls: Calder, Matisse, Matta, Miro," Arts & Architecture, April 1949, pp. 26-28 (illustrated in installation photograph, p. 26)
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Matisse: His Art and His Public, New York, 1951, pp. 279, 549 and 573
Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade and John Hallmark Neff, Henri Matisse: Paper Cut-Outs, exh. cat., The St. Louis Art Museum and The Detroit Institute of Arts, 1977, p. 151, no. 91 (silk screen version illustrated; incorrect measurements of original listed)
John Elderfield, The Cutouts of Henri Matisse, New York, 1978,
p. 98 (illustrated; as a work in progress)
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
The papiers gouaches découpés represent Henri Matisse's last great undertaking and the culmination of his artistic career. With its simplified contours, flat patterning and vivid coloration, Arbre en fleur exemplifies the striking synthesis of the earliest works Matisse created, where he set down flat areas of intense color to create not only pattern and movement, but also tension between figure and ground, such as in Bonheur de vivre, 1905-1906 (Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA), both versions of La danse, 1909-1910 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The State Hermitage Museum, Leningrad) and Baigneuses à la rivière, 1916-1917 (Art Institute of Chicago), and the final cut-outs.
The "paper cut-outs" originated as preparatory maquettes that Matisse constructed for the 1931-1933 murals Danse I and Danse II, commissioned by Albert Barnes for his Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania (fig. 1). Matisse cut shapes directly from prepainted papers that he then used as background forms to separate the dancers' bodies and to create patterns and space between them. In so doing, he was able to reconcile the problems that he was having with color and composition without having to scrape out or repaint areas of the actual canvases. The paper-cuts that Matisse made at this time served as technical devices and were intended to assist with the conceptualization and visualization of the paintings that he was executing; they did not function as the autonomous works that were to become Matisse's main mode of expression during the last years of his life.
It was nearly a decade after the Barnes commission when the artist returned to this method. Infirmed following illness and major surgery in 1941, Matisse lost the ability to paint the large-scale, ambitious oils that he had been producing during the late 1930s such as Le jardin d'hiver [Deux personnages féminins et le chien; Robe bleu et robe résille] of 1937 (Private Collection) and La musique [La guitariste], 1939 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo). He adopted drawing as his main medium of creative output during this period and began again with the "paper cut-outs." The "cut-outs" enabled Matisse to merge his talents as painter, sculptor, and draftsman in a most spontaneous and innovative way. In a letter to a friend, Matisse writes: "What I did before this illness, before this operation always had the feeling of too much effort; before this I always lived with my belt tightened. What I created afterwards represents myself: free and detached" (cited by Dominique Fourcade, "Autre Propos de Matisse," Macula I, 1976, p.114, reprinted in John Elderfield, op. cit., p. 9).
Matisse's first comprehensive project using the papiers gouaches découpés method was for the illustrated book Jazz, commissioned by E. Tériade in 1943 and published in 1947. In his introduction to the text accompanying the energetic illustrations, Matisse states:
"An artist must never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of a style, prisoner of a reputation, prisoner of success, etc. Did not the Goncourt brothers write that Japanese artists of the great period changed their names several times during their lives? This pleases me: they wanted to protect their freedom" (reprinted in ibid.). He also writes: "To cut to the quick in color reminds me of direct cutting in sculpture. This book has been conceived in that spirit" (quoted in Alfred H. Barr, op. cit., p. 274).
The Jazz "cut-outs" were the progenitors of the artist's last great undertaking and style. As they were to be mass-produced as pochoirs in print form, Matisse selected Linel gouaches because they corresponded directly to printer's ink colors, guaranteeing a perfect color match. His studio assistants painted carefully selected sheets of paper with these special pigments. Matisse then cut desired shapes from the hand-painted sheets (fig. 2). John Elderfield describes the first stage of the process: "Taking a sheet of heavy paper - pre-painted with gouache by one of his studio assistants - from a stockpile in his studio, Matisse carved out the image he held in his mind in a few swift, fluid actions. It was the work of a moment, this liberation of the image from the paper: the scissors wide open, carving - never clipping - through the sheet of pure color..." (John Elderfield, op. cit., p. 7). The second part of the creative process entailed pinning the cut pieces of paper to the walls of his studio, which created a paradisical, garden-like world of organic shapes that resembled algae, leaves, seaweed, and coral, shapes recalling patterns that appeared in many of Matisse's earliest works, which floated atop brilliantly colored grounds. When the desired balance of form and color was achieved, the finished composition was glued to some type of support such as paper, canvas, or board. Elderfield continues in his discussion of the process: "Matisse was clearly sensitive to the particularly physical nature of these works: while they were in progress he would leave them lightly pinned to the wall where they would tremble in the slightest breeze.
This pinning of images to the wall began the second of the two processes that produced the cut-outs: the decorative organization of the preformed signs. This was by far a longer and more deliberative process than the first one; it sometimes lasted several months, and even from one year to the next for larger works. Matisse would change the position of the images, adding new ones, at times modifying existing ones, until the desired configuration was reached" (ibid., p. 8).
With Jazz, "cut-outs" became central to Matisse's artistic practice and, in the last period of his career, increasingly occupied his attention to the exclusion of painting. In a 1951 interview with Maria Luz, published in 1952 as an essay in XXe siècle, Matisse speaks about his papiers découpés as "signs" that combine painting and drawing, "From Bonheur de vivre - I was thirty-five then - to this cut-out - I am eight-two - I have not changed...because all this time I have looked for the same things, which I have perhaps realized in different means" (in John Elderfield, Henri Matisse: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, 1992, p. 419). The significance of Arbre en fleur is clear when viewing it in relation to the early paintings and to the final cut-outs. With its contrasts of form and color, it illustrates the achievement of Matisse's realization of these "signs."
Throughout his career, Matisse often discussed his desire to reconcile the conflicts that inherently existed between drawing and color. The paper "cut-outs" provided him the means to explore and resolve this discord. Matisse explained the philosophy behind the "cut-outs" to André Lejard in 1951: "I am now turned toward more immediate, more mat materials, which lead me to look for new ways of expression. The cut-out paper allows me to draw in color. It is a simplification. Instead of drawing an outline and filling in the color - in which case one modified the other - [with scissors] I am drawing directly in color, which will be the more measured as it will not be transposed. This simplification ensures an accuracy in the union of the two means....It is not a starting point but a culmination" (trans. in Jack Cowart, Jack D. Flam, Dominique Fourcade, and John Hallmark Neff, exh. cat., op. cit., p. 17).
By the end of the 1940s, Matisse was using "cut-outs" for various decorative arts projects, including wall hangings, scarf patterns, tapestries, rugs, and the designs for the Dominican chapel at Vence. The color palette and the regularity of the composition of the present work echo those employed in one of the most beautiful stained glass window maquettes created for the Vence chapel, L'arbre de vie, which Matisse described to Bruno Cassonari as "an orchestra of light" (quoted in Jack Cowart, et. al., op.cit., p. 154).
Arbre en fleur served as the maquette for a silk screen commissioned and printed by Katzenbach & Warren, Inc. in 1949 for their Mural Scroll project. Alfred Barr suggests that this papier découpé was likely completed by January 1949, the date Matisse signed a royalty contract with the firm (see Alfred H. Barr, op.cit., p. 279, note 8). It is unclear whether Arbre en fleur was specifically conceived for this purpose. There is a photograph from ca. 1947 taken in Matisse's studio in Vence that shows the central portion of the present work pinned to the artist's wall of papiers gouaches découpés during the working process (see fig. 3). The organic forms and wave-like patterns superimposed on the rectilinear, overlapping yellow, black, and green panels correspond to other works that Matisse was producing in 1946-47.
Matisse, Mirò, Matta, and Calder each submitted designs for the Mural Scroll project and these designs were reproduced in editions of 200 as five by six-and-a-half foot long silk screen murals, which were sold for $360 apiece. Very few editions of the Matisse Mural Scrolls were actually made. Jack Cowart discusses the importance of the "paper cut-out" within Matisse's oeuvre: "He had recognized in his cut-outs a means to something much more comprehensive and fundamental to his aspirations as an artist: a luminous environmental art capable of evoking the calm, untroubled ambience he had always sought to create. The paper cut-outs were not his ultimate method but a beginning" (Jack Cowart, op. cit., p. 33).
Examples of Matisse's Papiers Gouaches Découpés are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. The present work has been in the same family's collection since 1960.
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