Tea at Trianon: Matisse and the Decorative Arts

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Matisse and the Decorative Arts

From Meredith Mendelsohn at Architectural Digest:

Matisse was collecting more seriously as early as 1906, when he purchased of a small seated African figure from the Congo from a Paris dealer. But the artist never thought of himself as a collector in the traditional sense. “This may sound like an odd thing for an artist to say, but later in his life he remembered that in his early years of hardship, he detested collections and collectors,” says Matisse scholar and independent curator Ellen McBreen, who co-organized the show with Helen Burnham from the MFA. “His parents were hardworking seed-shop owners, so he was raised with a fundamental distrust for excessive luxury and waste.” It’s not surprising then, how much use he got out of these objects.The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon aptly referred to the wares as Matisse’s “palette of objects,” and just like a painter might grab a different brush or tube of paint, Matisse stored his collection in his studio and pulled out different pieces while working. In some cases this means a direct representation, or using his wares as props. A green blown-glass Andalusian vase, a Tunisian hexagonal table, and a French silver chocolate pot on view in the show reappear in his paintings, given new life with each rendering, while a stunning Egyptian curtain appears in an interior and also clearly inspired the floral shapes of Matisse’s cutouts. Other textiles, meanwhile, were hung in layers like curtains to provide lush, exotic backdrops for his odalisques. (Read more.)