I rode up in the tiny elevator and entered the little gallery. The quiet light was full of a soothing mystic feeling and around the room, and on the square under glass in the middle of the room, I looked at what I now know were Matisse drawings. I was all alone and I stood and absorbed the atmosphere of the place and of the drawings. They had no meaning to me as Art as I then knew Art, but the feeling I got from them still clings to me and always will. It was the feeling of a bigger, deeper, more simple and archaic world… I left feeling I had seen something living, something that would live with me, and that has lived with me.

–– William Zorach, recalling his visit to the Matisse exhibition at the 291 Gallery in 1908 (Camera Work 47, 1914)

Will you please tell Monsieur Matisse the profound impression the exhibition has had upon the painters of this country? I feel it is going to have a very far-reaching effect.

––Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, referring to the 1931 Matisse retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in a letter to his daughter Mme. Duthuit

Henri Matisse Max Weber

Nude in a Wood, 1906Oil on board mounted on panel16 x 12 3/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of George F. Of, 52.150

Apollo in Matisse’s Studio, 1908Oil on canvas23 x 18 in.Gerald Peters Gallery, NYC

Exhibition Overview

The French painter, printmaker, and sculptor Henri Matisse (1869-1954) has been universally acclaimed for decades as a highly influential, cultural icon of the twentieth century. Prominent Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein aptly characterized Matisse, as well as his friend and rival Picasso, as “overwhelming influences on everyone…presences that have to be dealt with.” From February 4-June 18, 2017, The Montclair Art Museum will be presenting Matisse and American Art, the first exhibition to examine this French master’s profound impact upon the development of American modern art from 1907 to the present. Throughout this time, Matisse’s oeuvre has played a greater, more wide-ranging role than we have previously understood for American artists working in both abstract and figurative modes of representation. His art has provided a liberating model for American artists’ varied explorations of vibrant color, strong, fluid lines, and clear compositional structures in their pursuits of self-expression.

As the first to examine the full spectrum of Matisse’s reception in American and its lasting influence on American artists, this exhibition and catalogue will build upon the foundation of several previous projects. These shows and publications focused on Matisse’s impact on postwar and contemporary American foreign artists, notably Franz Meyer’s essay “Matisse und die Amerikaner” in Henri Matisse (Kunsthalle Zurich, 1982), After Matisse (1986, Independent Curators Associated, New York), Ils Ont Regardé Matisse/Une Réception Abstraite, États-Unis/Europe 1948-1968 (Musée Départmental Matisse Le Cateau Cambrésis, 2009), and Bonjour Monsieur Matisse! Rencontre(s), (Musée d’Art modern et d’Art contemporain, de Nice, 2013). In addition, John O’Brian’s book The American Reception of Matisse (University of Chicago Press, 1999) is a useful compilation pertaining to Matisse’s evolving reputation during his lifetime, whereas Éric de Chassey’s La Violence Décorative: Matisse dans l’art Américain (1998) focuses upon Matisse’s influence on American artists of the 1940s and 50s. While these projects have illuminated Matisse’s relationship with postwar artists, this will be the first exhibition to expand Matisse’s impact beyond the typical focus upon the New York School by extending it back to the beginning of the 20th century and forward to the 21st. Furthermore the publications that accompanied these projects are mostly out of print. Therefore, the catalogue accompanying Matisse and American Art will greatly enhance access to comprehensive and in depth information on this fundamental topic.

Beginning in 1908, Matisse developed a large following among American artists, both here and abroad, as a result of their exposure to his work in public exhibitions and in private collections, and as a consequence of his teaching at his own academy in Paris from 1908 to 1911. Furthermore, Matisse had a reciprocal relationship with America: not only did Matisse influence American art, but also America played a decisive role in his own career. Matisse had close ties with American collectors, especially the Stein family, the Cone sisters, and Dr. Barnes. His relationship with Americans only intensified after 1924, when his son Pierre immigrated to America. Pierre Matisse founded his own art gallery, and a branch of the Matisse family made their home here. That American painters of the 1960s through present could continue to draw sustenance from Matisse is testimony not only to his resilience as an artist, but also to those firm and complex ties between Matisse and America, going back to the early years of the twentieth century.

Represented by 19 works in this exhibition, Matisse’s varied oeuvre has offered a variety of options for American artists who were inspired by the formal elements of his work as well as its subjects and expressive aspects. The master of color, line, and composition also provided thematic inspirations as he painted his own world, including his studio and artwork in abstract and figurative modes of representation. Featuring 68 paintings, archival objects, sculpture, prints, and works on paper, "Matisse and American Art" will juxtapose Matisse’s work with 49 works by American artists from 1907 to the present, including Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, Maurice Prendergast, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Motherwell, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Romare Bearden, John Baldessari, Sophie Matisse, Faith Ringgold, and others. Matisse’s transformative impact on their works is revealed not only by their adaptations of his stylistic hallmarks but also through their choice and appropriation of his subject matter—still lifes, landscapes, figurative works, studio interiors, and portraits. The exhibition

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will open with an introductory section evoking a range of responses to the master, from the early 20 th century study after the master by his student Morgan Russell to Faith Ringgold’s late 20th century appropriation entitled Matisse’s Model, with a fictional character based on the artist, Josephine Baker, and other modern young women of color. The exhibition then proceeds with early 20th century explorations of the nude as seen in the work of Matisse’s students Max Weber and Sarah Stein, as well as William Zorach and Maurice Prendergast. These will be juxtaposed with several of Matisse’s seminal works on view in his first solo exhibitions in America at the 291 Gallery in 1908 and the Montross Gallery in 1915. Landscapes and still lifes by Alfred Maurer, Arthur Dove, Stuart Davis, H. Lyman Sayen, and others from 1907 to 1917 reveal American artists’ original and sophisticated adaptations of Matisse’s palette and pictorial structures. The pioneering impact of Matisse’s portraits is exemplified by Marguerite Zorach’s portrait of Matisse’s first collector Leo Stein (1910), as well as Morton Schamberg’s Study of a Girl (1912), exhibited in the landmark Armory Show of 1913.

The next section of the show addresses Matisse’s theme of the window as a metaphor for the dialogue between the interior world of the artist and the external world of reality. Works by Matisse, Arthur B. Carles, Milton Avery, and Hans Hofmann reveal the variety of abstract adaptations of this subject by American artists from 1921 to 1952. Matisse’s shift in reputation from rebel to esteemed master in the 1920s and 30s will be represented by his print The Dance (1935-36), related to the Barnes Foundation mural commission in Merion, Pennsylvania (1930-33), as well as his Pianist and Checker Players (1924), exhibited in his first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in1931. An archival section featuring Matisse on the cover of Time magazine in 1930, as well as various exhibition catalogues and publications, will serve as an orientation to the history of the dissemination of Matisse’s influence.

Robert De Niro, Sr. Henri Matisse

The final sections of the exhibition explore Matisse’s pervasive postwar impact on artists, especially in terms of the bold, simplified profiles and vibrant colors of his cut-outs. This aesthetic will be represented by selections from Matisse’s Jazz portfolio (1947) as well as his Mme. de Pompadour (1951). Works by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis, Judy Pfaff, Romare Bearden, and the illustrator Eric Carle represent the wide-ranging responses to Matisse’s inventive “drawing with scissors.” Matisse’s great-granddaughter Sophie will premier a new collage made in direct response to the recent exhibition Matisse: The Cut-Outs. Matisse’s major influence on Abstract Expressionist and Color-Field painters will be represented by works by Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell , and a striking juxtaposition of his Pianist with Checker Players with Helen Frankenthaler’s vibrant red abstract acrylic on paper, Untitled, 2002, as well as Mark Rothko’s monumental No. 44 (Two Darks in Red), 1955. The large scale and all-over rich red palette reflects Rothko’s deep appreciation of Matisse’s painting The Red Studio (1911) at the Museum of Modern Art, studied by many artists. Also significant in this part of the show

Yellow Odalisque, 1937Oil on canvas21 3/4 x 18 1/8 in.Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection, 1967-30-57

Portrait of Mrs. Z, 1958-1959Oil on canvas38 1/4 x 34 1/4 in.Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph Hirshhorn, 1966 (66.1233)

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are Grace Hartigan’s and Kenneth Noland’s paintings which they titled as homages to Matisse, as well as work by the underappreciated artist Robert De Niro, Sr. The exhibition concludes with the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselman, Andy Warhol, Janet Taylor-Pickett, and John Baldessari who have appropriated and adapted Matisse’s classic themes of the dance, the studio, the nude, portraiture, and the goldfish bowl as varying approaches to his universal art and fame.

The response to this project has been very enthusiastic and we have received commitments of significant loans from various private and public lenders, including the Amon Carter Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, Museum of Modern Art, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, the Estate of Max Weber, the Phillips Collection, the Williams College Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, as well as Matisse specialist Jack Flam. Furthermore, the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation in New York has endorsed the show. As a result, the Foundation will lend Matisse works from the remarkable collection owned by the artist’s son, the modern art dealer Pierre Matisse.

Exhibition Context

In 1908, in New York, Alfred Stieglitz first presented Matisse’s work at the 291 Gallery––an exhibition of drawings, watercolors, lithographs, etchings, and one painting, Nude in a Wood, 1906—and ushered in the first wave of modernism in America. The American public had not previously been exposed to the work of a twentieth-century European modernist, nor of Cézanne, Van Gogh or Gauguin. In the following year, a two-man show of American modernists John Marin and Alfred Maurer appeared at 291, and critics noted the influence of Matisse on both artists. When, in 1912, Stieglitz presented “Younger American Painters” ––Marin, Maurer, Arthur B. Carles, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Steichen and Max Weber, among others––reviewers characterized them as followers of Matisse.

Morgan Russell H. Lyman Sayen

In Paris, from 1908 to 1912, Matisse operated his own school, where he taught a number of American students, including Max Weber, Morgan Russell and Patrick Henry Bruce. Weber who, with Bruce, was a charter member of the school, later recalled:

Matisse’s criticism was generous and very searching, at times very severe and admonishing, but always constructive, enlightening and sympathetic.… In calling our attention to the salient points in the human body, its movements, volume, sculpturesque content and equilibrium, he would refer to the African Negro Sculpture, the great archaic

Etude d’Après Matisse, ca. 1909-11Oil on board13 x 17 ½. in.Private collection

Still Life, ca. 1912 Oil on canvas 21 5/8 x 18 in.Collection of Mrs. Henry M. Reed, Caldwell, NJ

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Greece of the fourth and fifth centuries, B.C., and unfailingly to Cézanne’s architectonic, masonic plasticity.

During the same years, American painters in Paris had direct contact with Matisse at open-house gatherings of the Stein family. At two Stein households––those of Leo and his sister Gertrude and of Michael and his wife Sarah––Americans could meet with artists and writers, engage in spirited discussions, and view their hosts’ magnificent holdings of modern art. Weber considered Leo and Gertrude’s salon to be “an annex to the Matisse class,” vibrant with lively encounters:

[They] graciously received art students, students of philosophy and languages at the Sorbonne, writers, young poets, musicians and scientists. … Lengthy and involved discussions on the most recent developments and trends in art took place, with Leo Stein as moderator and pontiff… Another welcome rendezvous for the young artists was the charming residence of Mr. and Mrs. Mike Stein, whose collection was made up almost entirely of paintings by Matisse.

Leo Stein would later write of his first response to Matisse’s work, when he saw Woman with the Hat at the 1905 Autumn Salon: “Brilliant and powerful, but the nastiest smear of paint I had ever seen.” His ambivalence soon gave way to admiration, and he bought the painting, the first purchase of a Matisse by an American collector. Once introduced to the artist, he found Matisse to be “different from the other painters whom I had met… really intelligent… also witty, and capable of saying exactly what he meant when talking about art.” In 1912 Stieglitz published Gertrude Stein’s “word-portraits” of Matisse and Picasso in his house publication Camera Work. Gertrude Stein depicted Matisse as “a great one” who was “clearly expressing something” and who was “struggling”:

He certainly was clearly expressing something, certainly sometime any one might come to know that of him. Very many did come to know it of him that he was clearly expressing what he was expressing. He was a great one. Any one might come to know that of him. Very many did come to know that of him. … Certainly he was expressing something being struggling. Any one could be certain that he was expressing something being struggling.

The Stein family member closest to Matisse personally––as close to him as Gertrude was to Picasso––was Sarah. Family friend Therese Jelenko remembered that Matisse “always wanted to show what he had done during the week to Mrs. Michael Stein.… He’d come with bundles of pictures under each arm, and Sarah would tell him what she thought of things, sometimes rather bluntly. He’d seem to always listen and always argue about it.”

At the Armory Show of 1913, Matisse was the best represented of younger School-of-Paris artists, with 13 paintings (by comparison, Picasso had 5 paintings in the show and Duchamp, 4). From the perspective of today, Matisse’s entries are notable for their stunningly high quality. The selection included some of his renowned masterpieces, such as Blue Nude (1907, Baltimore Museum), Red Studio (1911, Museum of Modern Art), Le Luxe II (1907, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) , Young Sailor II (1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Madras rouge, (1907, Barnes Foundation). Also featured was Nude in a Wood--the first Matisse painting ever shown in America (at ‘291’ in 1908) and the first work to enter an American collection (lent to the Armory Show by the modernist painter/framemaker George Of).

It takes a great leap of imagination to comprehend the bewildered and outraged reaction that these entries engendered. The academician Kenyon Cox, writing in Scribner’s Magazine, found Matisse’s distortion of form and color to be a deliberate provocation. Cox declared that Matisse chose “the ugliest models, put them into the most grotesque and indecent postures imaginable,” and drew them “in the manner of a savage or a depraved child.”

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Maurice Brazil Prendergast Morton Livingston Schamberg

For many artists, however, such as Maurice Prendergast, Matisse’s work was a revelation. One such artist was the twenty-year-old Stuart Davis. “I was enormously excited by the [Armory] show,” Davis later recalled:

[I] responded particularly to Gauguin, van Gogh and Matisse, because broad generalizations of form and the non-imitative use of color were already practices within my own experience. I also sensed an objective order in these works which I felt was lacking in my own. It gave me the same kind of excitement I got from the numerical precision of… Negro piano players… and I resolved that I would quite definitely have to become a “modern” artist.

It is well known in art-historical lore that Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase was the succès de scandale of the Armory Show. A less-known fact is that a close rival in notoriety to Duchamp’s Nude was Matisse’s Madras rouge, which was reproduced and lampooned in the press with comparable frequency. When the exhibition traveled to Chicago, students at the Art Institute held a mock trial of one “Hennery O’Hair Mattress,” and threatened to burn him in effigy (accounts differ as to whether the burning actually occurred or was halted by the school administration).

Henri Matisse Henri Matisse

Study of a Girl (Fanette Reider), ca. 1912Oil on canvas30 11/16 × 23⅛ in. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, Bequest of Lawrence H. Bloedel, Class of 1923, 77.9.11

Sketchbook 21, 1913Armory Show Sketchbook7 13/16 x 5 3/16 x 5/8 in.)Graphite pencil on blank paper in notebookMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Mrs. Charles Prendergast in honor of Perry T. Rathbone, 1972.1111

Le Grand Bois (The Large Woodcut), 1906 Woodcut 22 7/16 x 18 1/16 in. The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation

The Idol (L’Idole), 1906Transfer lithograph17 5/8 x 9 ½ in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NYGiven in memory of Leo and Nina Stein, 251.1950

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In the wake of the Armory Show, Matisse had acquired a reputation as the leading modernist and as the artist with the most influence on young American painters. Newman Emerson Montross, who had founded the Montross gallery in 1885 and began showing modern art after the Armory Show, saw that the time was ripe for a full-scale Matisse exhibition in New York. The Montross exhibition, held in 1915, included 14 paintings, 11 sculptures, and 49 works on paper. The exhibition included Matisse’s austere paintings of 1914, such as Interior with a Goldfish Bowl (MNAM, Paris), Woman on a High Stool (Museum of Modern Art), and Branch of Lilacs (Metropolitan Museum of Art) which show the impact of Cubism, and Mlle. Yvonne Landsberg (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which reveals the additional influence of Futurism. Among the buyers were John Quinn––soon to hold the most advanced collection of modern art in the world ––and Walter Arensberg, who, with his wife Louise, was amassing a collection of modern art that would rival Quinn’s, while presiding over a salon of artists and writers that would rival Gertrude Stein’s (Gertrude and Leo having parted company in 1913).

In 1916 the critic Willard Huntington Wright organized the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, held at the Anderson Galleries, New York. Among the 17 artists in the exhibition were color abstractionists known as Synchromists, and members of the Stieglitz and Arensberg circles. William Agee has characterized the Forum Exhibition as “a gauge of the state of advanced art in America in the years immediately following the Armory Show.” From this perspective, the exhibition is a useful means of assessing the influence of Matisse on American painting, circa 1916. The Forum participants who were painting in a coloristic Post-Impressionist style, and who thus may be considered the most direct heirs of Matisse, were Ben Benn, Alfred Maurer, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Two of the Forum artists had longstanding relationships with Matisse: Maurer had known Matisse as a member of the Stein circle, and the Synchromist Morgan Russell had been Matisse’s pupil. But with America headed toward war, nationalism was the order of the day, and European influence was de-emphasized, both by exhibition organizers and by members of the press.

The 1920s saw the growth of three great modern art collections in America, all of which accorded Matisse a central place. The collectors were Etta and Claribel Cone in Baltimore, John Quinn in New York, and Dr. Albert Barnes in Merion, Pennsylvania. Whereas Quinn’s collection was dispersed upon his death in 1924, the Cone and Barnes collections remained intact, and would eventually be open to the public. Neither of these, however, was publicly accessible in the 1920s. Supporters of Matisse hoped for a permanent institution that would display and nurture modern art. By decade’s end, these hopes were realized, with the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The 1920s also saw a shift in Matisse’s reputation, from rebel to master. When a Matisse exhibition was held at the De Zayas Gallery in 1920, Hamilton Easter Field, in an editorial in his publication The Arts, characterized the paintings as “classical in their beauty of color and arrangement… [They] recall the art of the great Italian classicists of the sixteenth century… Their appeal is to our sense of pure beauty.”

In the early 1930s, Matisse became a public figure in America, in the course of four visits in four years. Frequently interviewed, he issued informal but carefully worded public statements. In 1930, he was a cover story in Time magazine. In 1933, he entered the fray, differentiating his own work from the politically engaged art of the time. Responding to a controversy involving a mural by Diego Rivera in Rockefeller Center, Matisse criticized “propaganda art.”

While Matisse’s reputation rested in large part on the Nice-period paintings of the twenties, his own work was undergoing a shift in direction. His chief preoccupation was a commission from Dr. Barnes for a mural, Dance, designed in a simplified, monumental style, employing a color scheme influenced by his former pupil Patrick Henry Bruce, and composed with the aid of a cut-paper technique. In 1933, Matisse installed the mural at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, never to return stateside.

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Henri Matisse Patrick Henry Bruce

In 1931 the Museum of Modern Art, under the leadership of Alfred H. Barr, Jr., presented a major Matisse retrospective, the museum’s first exhibition devoted to a single artist. Even while the general public’s interest in Matisse was growing, many American artists were steeped in Social Realism and Regionalism; few felt that Matisse had much of value to say to them. Two exceptions were Milton Avery and Hans Hofmann.

By the late thirties, the situation had begun to change; many American painters had returned to abstraction. The bridge between Matisse and painters later known as abstract expressionists was Hofmann, who, at his school on Eighth Street, instructed his students on the lessons of Matisse (as Matisse, three decades earlier, had taught his students the lessons of Cézanne). In his essay “The Late Thirties in New York,” the art critic Clement Greenberg, noted that the “influence of Matisse” was “pervasive”:

[T]o this influence (as well as to Hofmann), artists as different as Pollock and Rothko were indebted for that loosening up of the painted surface which was to be the most immediate common trait of the new American painting. The same influence was largely responsible, moreover, for the specifically “abstract expressionist” version of the big picture; Matisse’s huge Bathers by a River,… now in the Chicago Art Institute, hung for a long time in the lobby of the Valentine Gallery, where I myself saw it often enough to feel able to copy it by heart.

In 1935, Sarah and Michael Stein returned to California and bought a house in Palo Alto, where they once again held court. Among their guests were Stanford students Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Motherwell. Motherwell later recalled that at the Steins’ he “saw Matisses and they went through me like an arrow and from that moment, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.” Motherwell later incorporated Matisse’s work into his art history classes at Hunter College and pronounced the master to be “incomparably the greatest artist of the century.”

In the late forties Matisse was at once a modern master with a body of canonical work and a contemporary artist turning out works of power and originality, comparable to those of his innovative period 1907-1913. In 1948 the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of painting Henry Clifford organized a huge Matisse retrospective that proved to be a watershed in his American reception. The media transformed this show into Matisse’s American apotheosis, proclaiming that he was the greatest living artist. Howard Devree in his exhibition review in the New York Times expressed the wish that”

La Danse (The Dance), 1935-36Color aquatint in black, gray, rose, and blue Sheet: 11 11/16 x 31 3/4 in.The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation

Still Life #12, 1925-1928Oil and pencil on canvas35 1/8 X 45 3/4 IN. (89.2 X 116.1 CM.)Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972, 72.45

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every young artist in America” might have the opportunity to “learn from the half century of development outspread in the galleries” devoted to Matisse’s work.

Among the revelations of Matisse’s late work were his cut-outs, or gouaches découpées, which had their first public showing at the gallery of (his son) Pierre Matisse in 1949. They were subsequently exhibited at the landmark 1951-1952 retrospective at the Modern, and at a posthumous exhibition at the museum in 1961, “The Last Works of Henri Matisse: Large Cut Gouaches” (which subsequently traveled to Chicago and San Francisco). These works were seen and admired by a new generation of American painters, the hard-edge and color-field painters of the 1960s. Ellsworth Kelly, Lee Krasner, Romare Bearden, and the illustrator Eric Carle were among those who were inspired by Matisse’s cut outs. But it was not only the younger generation who were assimilating these works; see, for example, Letter and His Ecol, 1962) by the veteran American modernist Stuart Davis.

Henri Matisse Stuart Davis

Following Matisse’s death in 1954, several artists such as Grace Hartigan and Mark Rothko painted homages which are moving testaments to his profound impact. The first posthumous Matisse retrospective in America was held in 1966 in Los Angeles (and subsequently traveled to Chicago and Boston). Included in the exhibition were two paintings never before seen in America, both of 1914: View of Notre Dame (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Open Window, Collioure (Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne, Paris). They are austere in composition, restrained in color, and among the most nearly abstract of Matisse’s works until the period of the late cut-outs.

These two paintings made a notable impression on Richard Diebenkorn, who had wavered in recent years between representation and abstraction, and who had long been an admirer of Matisse. In 1967 Diebenkorn returned to abstraction, launching his Ocean Park series, for which Matisse’s paintings of 1914 were a direct inspiration. In 1968, sculptor Philip King asserted that Matisse’s painting is “still very alive, very avant-garde” and predicted that he “could be a rallying point for [art] in the future.” Matisse’s continuing significance for contemporary artists of the 1990s onwards, including Roy Lichtenstein, John Baldessari, and his great-grand-daughter Sophie Matisse, can be seen in their appropriations of his themes and motifs, often through the mediation of reproductions.

The Circus From the Portfolio Jazz, 1947Color stencil print20 Total PrintsHerbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Letter and His Ecol, 1962Oil on canvas24 x 30 ¼ in.Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts1964.2

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Henri Matisse Helen Frankenthaler

Others such as Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler have been inspired primarily by his formal innovations, especially with regard to color as, in Matisse’s words, “a means of liberation.” Upon the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s major Matisse retrospective in 1992, Ellsworth Kelly observed that his “admiration for Matisse continues to grow” after nearly 50 years, “reinforcing my determination to make an art that has a clarity of spirit.”

At every stage in the evolution of American modernism, Matisse has been a force and an inspiration for American artists. Beginning in 1908, Matisse was a formative influence on American art, with his exhibitions at the 291 Gallery in New York and his founding of the Matisse Academy in Paris, with its charter members Max Weber and Patrick Henry Bruce. Matisse’s work was also collected by artists and this phenomenon will be explored in the exhibition catalogue with illustrations of works from the collections of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others.

Henri Matisse Roy Lichtenstein

Collage for Still Life with Reclining Nude, 1997Painted and printed paper on board40 1/8 x 60 ¼ in. Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Collection, NYC

Trois Femmes, 1928graphite on paperSheet: 14 3/4 x 19 3/4 in. (37.5 x 50.2 cm)Estate of Roy Lichtenstein, NYC

Untitled, 2002 Acrylic on paper33 x 40 ½ in. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

Pianist and Checker Players, 1924Oil on canvas29 x 36 3/8 in.National Gallery of Art, Washington,Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon1985.64.25

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In 2009-2010, the Montclair Art Museum, in partnership with The Baltimore Museum of Art, presented the exhibition Cézanne and American Modernism. Matisse himself was a force for the dissemination of Cézanne’s ideas to American artists; Max Weber reported that when Matisse showed his students his own Cézanne, Three Bathers (1879-82, Musée du Petit Palais, Paris), “his silence before it was more evocative and eloquent than words.” This exhibition and its successor at the Montclair Art Museum in 2013, The New Spirit: American Art in The Armory Show (1913) have inspired the Matisse and American Art project.

Research: New Discoveries

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will incorporate primary source materials which illuminate the artists’ specific and diverse thoughts about Matisse as a vehicle of inspiration for their individual aesthetic visions.    Research in the Archives Matisse has yielded many new, little known discoveries pertinent to Matisse’s pervasive impact. In 1927 the dealer Valentine Dudensing wrote to Matisse upon the occasion of his second major show in America that  “the gallery has been full of people since its opening on January 3 and the expression that I have heard the most often is what ‘joie de vivre’ the paintings have; they sing strongly and are alive, that is what one likes the most.” The collector and co-founder of the Museum of Modern Art, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller wrote in a letter to Matisse’s daughter Mme. Duthuit, “Will you please tell Monsieur Matisse the profound impression the exhibition [Matisse retrospective at MoMA in 1931] has had upon the painters of this country.  I feel it is going to have a very far reaching effect.” 

In 1948 Henry Clifford, Curator of the Matisse retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art proclaimed “Your paintings are dominating everything in the United States at this moment.” Max Weber in 1949 wrote a profoundly moving letter about “the privilege, inspiration, and incentive it was for me to be guided by you in that memorable and profitable year at the Couvent des Oiseaux.  Your admonishment as well as your wise counsel had a lasting and steadying influence upon me particularly in those early years of struggle in America – so far away from the exhilarating atmosphere and environment of Paris and the inception and élan of the modern art movement to which you gave such marvelous heroic and pioneering leadership and superb personal contribution.  I was always thrilled whenever and wherever I saw your great art and viewed it with deep intimate appreciation and affection.  May God bless you with renewed strength and ever increasing joy and inspiration in your great work which has enriched the world of art with such unique and transcendent beauty of color and design.”

Furthermore, Matisse himself wrote many vivid, relatively unknown letters to his wife during his travels to America in 1932-33, including his impressions of visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Matisse’s fascination with the unique qualities of color and light (“nouvelle pour moi’) in the American West is a recurrent theme of his correspondence, some of which was written on picture postcards featuring Pueblo Indian culture.

Roy Lichtenstein studio view, Southhampton, NY

Studio view photographed by James De Pasquale, May 2014

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Groundbreaking research in various artist’s estates, foundations, and archives has uncovered new resources—for example, studio views with reproductions of Matisse’s work, especially in the preserved studio of the underappreciated artist Robert De Niro, Sr. who drew constant inspiration from the master and whose paintings were exhibited at the Matisse Museum in 2010. In the archives of the Dedalus Foundation, Robert Motherwell’s studio pin ups of Matisse reproductions feature many thumbtack holes, indicating how often they were likely moved around and appreciated. Books on Matisse in Motherwell’s library feature many underlined passages, especially pertaining to Matisse’s writings. For Motherwell, Mtaisse was “incomparably the greatest artist of the century,” as revealed in a little known letter of January 31, 1966. National and foreign publications on Matisse have been significant for other artists as well, especially Roy Lichtenstein and also Tom Wesselman (whose books feature pages marked for source imagery. The subject of artists collecting Matisse’s art is explored for the first time as well, with, for example, the activities of Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and especially Roy Lichtenstein who swapped examples of his own work for those of the master. Furthermore, Matisse and American Art is providing a welcome opportunity to interview and provide the unique perspectives of living artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, John Baldessari, Judy Pfaff, Faith Ringgold, Janet Taylor-Pickett, and the artist’s great-grand-daughter Sophie Matisse. The inclusion of the work of illustrator Eric Carle extends the scholarship beyond the realm of the fine arts. As Carle recently observed, “we are all influenced by Matisse…, what else can you do but love his work.”

John Baldessari

Eight Soups, 2012Multi-color screenprints John Baldessari and Gemini G.E.L. LLC, Los Angeles

Andy Warhol Janet Taylor-Pickett

Woman in Blue (After Matisse), 1985Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas51 x 42 in. Private collection

Matisse Blue Dress, 2013Mixed media with collage on paper37 x 29 in./38 x 31 in.Collection of Julia L. Lanigan

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Exhibition Schedule

Matisse and American Art will be exclusively featured at the Montclair Art Museum from February 4-June 18, 2017.  The oldest museum in New Jersey, MAM has just celebrated its centennial.  The exhibition will be accompanied by a show of works from the museum’s extensive permanent collection, entitled Inspired by Matisse: Selected Works from the Collection. This exhibition will feature relevant works by Alfred Maurer, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Lee Krasner, Romare Bearden, Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, Friedel Dzubas, Fritz Bultman, Tom Wesselman, and many others.

Exhibition Scholars

The curatorial team for Matisse and American Art comprises the Montclair Art Museum’s Chief Curator Gail Stavitsky, with Dr. John Cauman and Lisa Mintz Messinger, Dr. Cauman, an independent scholar, has written the catalogue essay “Henri Matisse, 1908, 1910, and 1912: New Evidence of Life,” for the exhibition Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries at the National Gallery, Washington, based on his dissertation “Matisse and America, 1905-1933.” Lisa Mintz Messinger, independent art historian and former Associate Curator of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, has served as curator and author for many projects, including Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among the many projects for which Gail Stavitsky has served as primary curator and author are Cézanne and American Modernism and The New Spirit: American Art in the Armory Show, 1913.

The curatorial team organizing Matisse and American Art has consulted with a number of scholars with expertise in these fields. John Elderfield, a leading Matisse scholar and curator of the celebrated Henri Matisse: A Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art (1992), is pleased to offer his enthusiastic support for this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, which he knows will greatly advance scholarship of this important subject.

Exhibition catalogue

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major scholarly publication, Matisse and American Art, which will be fully illustrated, approximately 250 pages long, with the main essay by co-curator John Cauman on Matisse and American art, 1905-1966, and an introduction by Gail Stavitsky, co-curator of the exhibition and Chief Curator of the Montclair Art Museum. Dr. Stavitsky will also write about postwar and contemporary artists’ responses to Matisse. The publication will include an exhibition checklist, an extended chronology by Lisa Mintz Messinger, and biographical entries on the artists, with a focus on the influence of Matisse upon their work and aesthetic visions. The scope of this project will be extended with an essay by William C. Agee, Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College. Widely regarded as the dean of American modernism, Agee will discuss American artists’ responses to Matisse’s Red Studio from the time it was exhibited in the 1913 Armory Show until today, making an argument for Matisse’s primacy in the development of 20th century American art, as he observes that “m ore and more it becomes apparent that Matisse and color were more important here than Picasso and cubism.”   

Furthermore, Dr. Ellen McBreen will write about the presentation, reception, and influence of Matisse’s sculpture in America. Dr. McBreen is Assistant Professor of Art History at Wheaton College and the author of a book on Matisse’s sculpture to be published by Yale University in 2013. Special attention will be given in the catalogue to significant collectors, exhibitions, and publications of Matisse’s work, as vehicles for the dissemination of his influence. Proposed for an appendix of the catalogue are transcriptions and translations of selections from Matisse’s relatively unknown letters to his wife Amélie

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recording his vivid impressions of his travels in America from New York City to Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in 1930. Also under consideration as an appendix due to its relative lack of recent availability is a seminal essay by Clement Greenberg which appeared in an out-of-print catalogue published by Acquavella Galleries in 1973, entitled “Influences of Matisse,” and was reprinted in 2003 in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, edited by Robert C. Morgan.

List of American artists in the exhibition Milton Avery (1893-1965)John Baldessari (b. 1931)Romare Bearden (1914-1988)Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936)Eric Carle (b. 1929) Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952)Stuart Davis (1892-1964)Robert De Niro, Sr. (1922-1993)Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)Arthur Dove (1880-1946)Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928) Grace Hartigan (1922-2008)Hans Hofmann (1880-1966)Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923)Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997)Sophie Matisse (b. 1965)Alfred Maurer (1868-1932)Robert Motherwell (1915-1991)Kenneth Noland (1924-2010)Walter Pach (1883-1958)Judy Pfaff (b. 1946)Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924)Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) Mark Rothko (1903-1970)Morgan Russell (1886-1953)H. Lyman Sayen (1875-1918)Morton Schamberg (1881-1918)Sarah Stein (1870-1953)Janet Taylor Pickett (b. 1948) Andy Warhol (1928-1987)Max Weber (1881-1961)Tom Wesselman (1931-2004)Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968)William Zorach (1887-1966)

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