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拍品专文
Wanda de Guébriant has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In 1918, nearing the age of fifty and with his reputation as a leader of the avant-garde firmly established, Matisse boldly turned away from his earlier work and set about to find a new artistic direction. Having come close to pure abstraction in a series of austere, monumental canvases painted since the outbreak of the First World War, Matisse was now determined to reconquer some of the ground that he had been forced to give up along the way. He embarked upon this transformation during a five-month trip to Nice in 1917, the first of numerous peregrinations to the seaside resort that he would make over the course of the ensuing decade. By the time that concerns about his daughter Marguerite’s precarious health and the mounting intensity of the German offensive in the north brought him back to his family at Issy-les-Moulineaux in June 1918, the revolution in his artistic vision was well underway.
“I first worked as an Impressionist, directly from nature; I later sought concentration and more intense expression both in line and color,” Matisse explained in 1919, “and then, of course, I had to sacrifice other values to a certain degree, corporeality and spatial depth, the richness of detail. Now I want to combine it all” (quoted in J. Flam, Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 75-76).
The present still-life, depicting a pair of peaches and half-full water glass on a scalloped silver tray, stands Janus-like in the midst of this evolving process. Matisse probably painted this spare and elegant canvas following his return to Paris in mid-1918, before departing again for Nice just after the Armistice in November; the still-life objects were ones that he had used the previous year at Issy in the foreground of Le pot d’étain (Baltimore Museum of Art). The flat, neutral background and the reductive geometry of the cropped compotier at left reveal Matisse’s continuing exploration of the radically abstract tendencies that had preoccupied him before his sojourn at Nice. Other contrasting elements announce the new decorative warmth and realistic elaboration of space that he would pursue after the war. He depicts the silver platter receding naturalistically into depth and lavishes attention on the way that light plays across different materials, reflecting in bold white highlights off metal and glass, lending only a soft sheen to the velvety peaches, with their subtly modulated tones.
“A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colors and forms,” Matisse recalled many years later in an interview with André Verdet. “From this duality issued works that, overcoming my inner constraints, were realized in the union of contrasts” (quoted in ibid., pp. 271-272).
The first owner of the present still-life was the Belgian violinist Armand Parent, who may have received it as a gift from Matisse. Parent had risen to fame in 1883, when he made his debut at just twenty years old as the leader of the Concerts Colonne in Paris. In late 1914, during the first winter of the war, Matisse arranged for Parent to give violin lessons to him and Pierre in exchange for drawings and paintings. The virtuoso musician continued to instruct Pierre, an increasingly reluctant student, until June 1918, when the young man turned eighteen and enlisted in the army.
In 1918, nearing the age of fifty and with his reputation as a leader of the avant-garde firmly established, Matisse boldly turned away from his earlier work and set about to find a new artistic direction. Having come close to pure abstraction in a series of austere, monumental canvases painted since the outbreak of the First World War, Matisse was now determined to reconquer some of the ground that he had been forced to give up along the way. He embarked upon this transformation during a five-month trip to Nice in 1917, the first of numerous peregrinations to the seaside resort that he would make over the course of the ensuing decade. By the time that concerns about his daughter Marguerite’s precarious health and the mounting intensity of the German offensive in the north brought him back to his family at Issy-les-Moulineaux in June 1918, the revolution in his artistic vision was well underway.
“I first worked as an Impressionist, directly from nature; I later sought concentration and more intense expression both in line and color,” Matisse explained in 1919, “and then, of course, I had to sacrifice other values to a certain degree, corporeality and spatial depth, the richness of detail. Now I want to combine it all” (quoted in J. Flam, Matisse on Art, Berkeley, 1995, pp. 75-76).
The present still-life, depicting a pair of peaches and half-full water glass on a scalloped silver tray, stands Janus-like in the midst of this evolving process. Matisse probably painted this spare and elegant canvas following his return to Paris in mid-1918, before departing again for Nice just after the Armistice in November; the still-life objects were ones that he had used the previous year at Issy in the foreground of Le pot d’étain (Baltimore Museum of Art). The flat, neutral background and the reductive geometry of the cropped compotier at left reveal Matisse’s continuing exploration of the radically abstract tendencies that had preoccupied him before his sojourn at Nice. Other contrasting elements announce the new decorative warmth and realistic elaboration of space that he would pursue after the war. He depicts the silver platter receding naturalistically into depth and lavishes attention on the way that light plays across different materials, reflecting in bold white highlights off metal and glass, lending only a soft sheen to the velvety peaches, with their subtly modulated tones.
“A will to rhythmic abstraction was battling with my natural, innate desire for rich, warm, generous colors and forms,” Matisse recalled many years later in an interview with André Verdet. “From this duality issued works that, overcoming my inner constraints, were realized in the union of contrasts” (quoted in ibid., pp. 271-272).
The first owner of the present still-life was the Belgian violinist Armand Parent, who may have received it as a gift from Matisse. Parent had risen to fame in 1883, when he made his debut at just twenty years old as the leader of the Concerts Colonne in Paris. In late 1914, during the first winter of the war, Matisse arranged for Parent to give violin lessons to him and Pierre in exchange for drawings and paintings. The virtuoso musician continued to instruct Pierre, an increasingly reluctant student, until June 1918, when the young man turned eighteen and enlisted in the army.