Tag: french art

Art by Ethan Pinch
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Henri Matisse on horseback in Morocco, where he would paint the classic Les Marocains (The Moroccans) in 1916.

Black Sunshine: Matisse in Morocco (Les Marocains, 1916)

Matisse had a miserable time in Morocco. In fact there was rarely a moment in Matisse’s life where he wasn’t miserable. During a 1941 interview he talked about seeing everything (in) “black”; his chronic insomnia, his depression and fear of failure. Common stock when it comes to creative types, but generally not the sort of things most people would associate with Matisse or his paintings. Tellingly, he would later prohibit publication of this interview citing editorial disagreements. It seems that he preferred to be seen as cute and cuddly rather than dark and brooding.

For Matisse, life was a series of disappointing (and occasionally spooky) vacations. Reading his biography puts one in mind of the horror writer MR James, for whom Matisse would make the ideal protagonist—stentorian, standoffish, and constantly menaced by the notion of ‘presence’. What a letdown Tangiers must have been: nothing at all like the hipster fantasy of French literature. He arrived in the city halfway through a month-long rainstorm. Most of the time, he told the poet Gertrude Stein, he stayed in his room. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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Stylized photos of Georges Braque back-to-back in grayscale, bluescale, and a darker version of the same image.

Through A Studio, Darkly: On Late Braque

Georges Braque’s late ‘studio’ work was perhaps the greatest of his career—his grande finale. Painting’s essential exploratory function is brought to bear on these eight or so pictures of the master’s workshop, wherein pictorial tradition and pure creative daring achieve a natural and seemingly spontaneous co-existence.

It would seem that Braque began his studio paintings more or less simultaneously, moving from one painting to another and then back again, perhaps within the space of a few moments. As such, the paintings have a very similar character. The compositions are derived from complexly interlocking outlines, or profiles, sometimes transparent, sometimes opaque. There are vestiges of the early cubist work in the overlapping planes but the outline drawing, which marks contours, separate and subdivide the forms in connection with colour. The lines are often white, brown or black. Each object consists solely of one of these outlines filled in with a single plane of colour—or not filled in, leaving the object transparent. There’s very little evidence of natural modelling. Everything consists of interwoven silhouettes. […]

Art by Ethan Pinch
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Edouard Manet's "Luncheon on the Grass", which depicts figures of technically "incorrect" proportions.

Edouard Manet And The Mystery Of The Crowd

Everything was changing in late 19th century Paris. A series of disastrous wars and failed uprisings had precipitated the forming of a public works commission to rebuild the city. But this rebuilding was nothing on its own. It was meant to be the emblem and agent of a wider economic transformation – the emergence of modern day capitalism and consumerism. Suddenly gone was the old Paris of narrow streets and quartiers. The new Paris of cosmopolitan boulevards cut up into little pieces the city’s pre-existing world of fragile appearances – its traffic of class segregation and urban life. And this awareness of change was to be crucial for the emergence of an artist such as Edouard Manet. The elusiveness of the social world, the precarian nature of being in it, and being of it, are central subjects of the paintings he produced at this time. […]