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Matisse: Revolutionary Conservative |
| Section: THE ARTS / ART |
| Author: Eric Gibson |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1993 |
| Size: 1,662 Words, 9,888 Characters |
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By now, it seems, everything that can be said about the Museum of Modern Art's magnificent Matisse retrospective has been said.
We know, for example, just what went into organizing such an enormous undertaking and how certain loans were secured. We know that Fate lent a hand in the proceedings by introducing an additional element of excitement just weeks before the exhibition opened in September a major work long thought to have been lost, namely Matisse's study for his original version of the extraordinary mural he painted for the Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia in 1931. (Having finished it, Matisse found his measurements just slightly off. Instead of fudging things, as many an artist would have been tempted to do, he started all over again.)
And from the uniformly adulatory critical response we know that the exhibition has not only been a success, but has sparked a rare unanimity of another kind among the art critics charged with the task of summarizing th...
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...olists' desire to create an art of reverie and escape from the everyday. Matisse succeeds, of course, but as John Elderfield points out in his superlative catalog essay, this is not to say Matisse was at root a nostalgic or reactionary artist. What it means is that even as he reached for the farthest ends of what was possible in the present, he kept faith with what was essential in the past.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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