Today, I saw an exhibition of the works of Henri Matisse as a sculptor at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I had known about Matisse's paintings for a while, namely because of his friendship with Picasso and the many things they shared. I found it very interesting to observe some of the sculptures that were presented together with some paintings that reproduced exactly the same figure and the same scene; it was almost as if each sculpture had been actually converted into a painting (or viceversa) by some kind of mechanistic procedure, just as you would go from a .bmp file to a .jpg in Photoshop. This dichotomy between plane and space which seemed to interlace so well inside the mind of the artist was, together with the influence of Rodin and Cezanne, the take home messages that I got from my visit to the museum.
Something else which also managed to catch my attention was a series of sculptures called “Nu de dos” (or “The Back” in English), and which consists of four different individual sculptures that Matisse conceived between 1909 and 1930:
I feel that this series is an excellent example of the use of simplicity in the quest for abstraction: marginal details are progressively swept away until only the essential remains. Symbolic features are thus reinforced and the ambient noise reduction results in augmented beauty. Occam’s razor rediscovered as the artist grows up; less becomes more. Quoting the experts at Centre Pompidou:
“Although the series does not seem to have been conceived to be presented as a single entity (the bronze castings were made only after Matisse's death) these four sculptures form a plastic unity. Studies are in agreement that Matisse produced each new phase on the basis of the preceding one, successively re-cutting his plaster moulds. Thus, the breast, the hand and the hair are made increasingly schematised, the lopsidedness of the body is lost for the sake of a central axis which assimilates the figure into an engaged column, and the design fades gradually to merge into the background. Through this series, Matisse progressed towards the figure as being increasingly independent from its model and from any representation. Each piece is a stage on the way to a synthesis and autonomy of form.”
