As part of the Biennale of Arts, the Matisse Museum offers a dialogue between the painter David Hockney, the pop artist, and Henri Matisse, the fauvist.
The exhibition is part of a theme: aiming to view Matisse through the eyes of other artists. 70 works by Hockney from the 60s to today, which come from the artist’s collection and the David Hockney Foundation in Los Angeles, confront those of Henri Matisse, which come from the Museum’s Collection and exceptional loans from the Beyeler Foundation and the Picasso Museum.
The unprecedented series titled “Fresh Flowers,” paintings created with an iPad, in Normandy where Hockney has settled, explores all the nuances and transformations of the plant world. He says that light makes color. Noteworthy are the surprising correspondences between the two artists, particularly this continuity of emotions conveyed between the space of the studio and its objects and the outside: landscapes of Nice or Los Angeles. Matisse makes open windows take the look beyond: “the passing boat lives in the same space as familiar objects around me.” The themes of the pool, the window, and the flourishing garden frequently appear in the paintings.
Whether in landscapes inhabited by movement where the artist’s body is partially included, drawings with sketched lines, bright colors, or this desire to render the emotions produced by the real, one can understand the connection between the two painters. We are sensitive to their love for color. “There is the same vocabulary of color that brings them together. For Hockney, it is what emancipates. He abandons the hyper-realism of his beginnings. And for Matisse, too, color is the medium through which his painting will be liberated,” says Claudine Grammont, Director of the Museum and Curator of the exhibition.
Another connection between them is their taste for exploring new technical possibilities. Multiplying the creative act. Thus, the gouache cut-outs imagined by Matisse for the album “Jazz” resonate with the advent of digital technology, which offers new possibilities to Hockney, particularly his iPad creations he has been practicing since its inception. For him, this tool means everything is at his fingertips. It’s like an endless sheet of paper. You just have to draw (and Hockney is a great draftsman), then make the drawing smaller, which is equivalent to adding paper. His genius lies in transforming pictorial technique and creating a whole universe of pictorial signs, marks, graphic, and colored traces.
This visit concludes with Paradise Found in the last room, the joy of painting everything that is pleasant and beautiful as pure hedonists, describing the world as informed observers. “Never stop looking at Nature, it is what allows us to do things always differently,” Hockney will say.
To see or revisit until September 18 at the Matisse Museum, 164 av des Arènes de Cimiez.
