“Still Life with Compote and Fruit” (1899)įrom the first spacious gallery, you confront this experimentation with two still life works composed in 1899, when the artist was 30. In displaying canvases created in pairs or a series, the show makes this process, these experiments with paint on canvas, the creative energy of his art. Exhibiting 49 paintings of the hundreds of works Matisse completed during his life, the show illuminates the importance of experimentation and the painterly process in understanding his works. “Matisse: The Search for Pure Painting” explores this question in a slightly different way. “Still Life with Compote, Apples, and Oranges” (1899)
MATISSE FISH BOWL ART PROJECT CANVAS TRIAL
As much as this trial was about modernist aesthetics it was also about a question that has lurked at the edges of modern art for decades: What makes a canvas a painting?
What hovered behind the outrage, what angered the critics and the students, was how Matisse used the canvas.
In this sense the mock trial was more than outrage, but rather a claim to an artistic process anchored to the rigors of academic painting. Preservation often depends so much on destruction. Burning art or books (or even witches) holds this paradox for it is often not about the thing being burned as much as it is about maintaining an idea. If modern art was about “artistic murder” as those Art Institute students so claimed, then their mock trial was its own form of modern performance art with its bonfire jubilation of Matisse’s copied canvases. This revolt against modernism was an acutely violent one, more so than the acerbic words of critics and artists that were hurled at the Armory Show and those cubists and Post-Impressionist works on display. Even for this performance, burning the artist went a bit too far. The canvases were burned to the excitement of the crowd, and then, in a moment of pure Greek tragedy, the executioner stepped forward and the “shivering futurist, overcome by his own conscience, fell dead.” His body was carried to the other side of the Art Institute with onlookers in procession, ending in a humorous funeral where a student read a eulogy, concluding: “You were a living example of death in life you were ignorant and corrupt, an insect that annoyed us, and it is best for you and best for us that you have died.” With this, they planned on burning Matisse in effigy but the police stepped in before the image of the French modernist could be set ablaze. The copies of Matisse’s paintings were so unsettling to the all female jury (an irony in 1913 before women had the right to vote) they caused a collective fainting. The crimes were read to the jury and included “artistic murder, pictorial arson, artistic rapine, total degeneracy of color, criminal misuse of line, general esthetic aberration, and contumacious abuse of title.” (In case you were wondering, contumacious is a “stubborn or willful disobedience to authority” though this “crime” seems the lesser one of the list.) Guards brought in the satirically named artist “Henry Hair Mattress,” his hands manacled as he was pushed in front of the court at the “point of a rusty bayonet,” according to the Chicago Daily Tribune. The prosecution presented the evidence of three canvases - said to be that of the artist but, in fact, rough copies of three Matisse works from the show: “The Blue Nude” (1907), “Le Luxe I” (1907) and “Goldfish” (1912). The trial was a well-staged performance for a crowd of students and patrons held on the south portico of the Institute, its archways providing a proscenium for the theatrics. “Matisse: In Search of True Painting” Through March 17, 2013.
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