Vincent Barré : More than Meets the Eye
Almost twenty five years ago, when the great Henri Matisse retrospective filled New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I took part in a symposium on the artist’s work. The other panelists were the exhibition’s curator, the British art historian John Elderfield; the British sculptor Anthony Caro; and the unclassifiable American artist Frank Stella. Elderfield stressed that Matisse, for all his aesthetic daring and innovation, was never an abstract artist but always based his images on his perceptions and “sensations” – as he himself put it – of his experience, often of the human figure. Matisse’s most radical inventions, we agreed, were not abstractions but, rather, two-dimensional equivalents for his acute awareness of the three-dimensionality and the space of the perceivable world. Stella responded, “After Matisse, the only thing possible is abstraction.”
Vincent Barré : More than Meets the Eye
Almost twenty five years ago, when the great Henri Matisse retrospective filled New York’s Museum of Modern Art, I took part in a symposium on the artist’s work. The other panelists were the exhibition’s curator, the British art historian John Elderfield; the British sculptor Anthony Caro; and the unclassifiable American artist Frank Stella. Elderfield stressed that Matisse, for all his aesthetic daring and innovation, was never an abstract artist but always based his images on his perceptions and “sensations” – as he himself put it – of his experience, often of the human figure. Matisse’s most radical inventions, we agreed, were not abstractions but, rather, two-dimensional equivalents for his acute awareness of the three-dimensionality and the space of the perceivable world. Stella responded, “After Matisse, the only thing possible is abstraction.”