Pink Nude Woman by Pablo Matisse

Pink Nude Woman, 2015 (After Henri Matisse, Pink Nude and Pablo Picasso, Head of a Woman.)
Pablo Matisse
Acrylic on canvas

 

Drawing on Picasso’s head of a woman which portrays his wife as a ball of confusion on top of an abstract minefield of breasts, we have the graceful expression within Matisse’s Pink Nude to prop it up. The theme of the piece seems to be sexual ambiguity. For Picasso love was a sexual act. For Matisse love was an inner feeling that made a positive view of the world accessible.

Pink nude woman progression by Pablo Matisse

Here is work in progress of my version of Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman and Henri Matisse’s Pink Nude. Matisse had also documented his pink nude in a progression of black and white photographs. He worked through stages of producing his painting over several months. Picasso painted from his mind’s eye, channeling his subject’s emotional volatility. My process and intention is much different. I hope I’m able to shed new light on the complementary styles of these two great masters, while producing works that are unique and not reducible to either of them, or both together.

Head of a Woman by Pablo Picasso

Head of a woman, 1939

Pablo Picasso

Oil on canvas

I’m not sure if this is a portrait of Dora Maar, the Yugoslav woman who was Picasso’s lover for nine years; or his second wife, Jacqueline, who was his muse for the last nineteen years of his life. As in many of his heads, Picasso presents what seems like a monolithic rendition of his subject that looks like an Easter Island head carved out of stone and poised to cast a spell on the viewer. Her head is precariously perched on a landscape of geometric shapes that emphasize simultaneous viewpoints.
We see her face from different angles, but by dividing the portrait into large irregular, curved shapes that fit together like puzzle pieces, he creates a schizophrenic likeness of his subject. There is more to her than meets the eye!

Pink Nude by Henri Matisse

Pink nude, 1935

Henri Matisse

Oil on canvas

This groundbreaking work by Matisse lead the way for his cut-outs. It is the first painting where he used cut paper to configure the image, and design the composition, before painting it. In the 1930s Matisse began abstracting forms and space, and pushed his paintings further by simplifying, and flattening the picture plane.

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Picasso- Light Graffiti

Picasso– coming up with drawings out of thin air.

DJ Storm's Blog

In 1949, LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso in Vallauris, France. He showed Pablo some photographs of ice skaters with tiny lights affixed to their skates jumping in the dark. Picasso was immediately inspired, these photos were the result.

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CAN YOU SEE THE “PICASSO SCULPTURE” EXHIBIT AT MOMA FROM HERE?

Can’t wait to see this show!

Whither the Book

September 16, 2014, by Jack Dziamba. New Post Goes Up Every Wednesday.

Picasso’s “Woman With Hat,” made of painted sheet metal in the early 1960s, is in “Picasso Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art. Credit 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

PICASSO SCULPTURE AT MOMA

From the MoMA Picasso Sculpture webpage:

“Picasso Sculpture is a sweeping survey of Pablo Picasso’s innovative and influential work in three dimensions. This will be the first such museum exhibition in the United States in nearly half a century.”

The New York Times review by Roberta Smith describes the exhibit by saying,

“The Museum of Modern Art’s staggering “Picasso Sculpture” is [l]arge, ambitious and unavoidably, dizzyingly peripatetic, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Picasso’s Effect on Sculpture

The MoMA webpage states that,

“The exhibition, which features more than 100 sculptures, complemented by selected…

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The Dream in Red by Pablo Matisse

Dream in Red, 2015
Pablo Matisse
Acrylic on canvas original (after H. Matisse and P. Picasso):
20” x 16”
$450.

In the original, Harmony in red, Matisse used a technique deployed by the impressionists to create an illusion of space by giving everything equal importance. In this painting I’m denying the viewer the fun of visual meandering by making Le Reve the focal point of the painting.

Marie-Therese said that when they met Picasso grabbed her by the arm and said, “I’m Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together!”

Little did she know that Picasso had an ambivalence towards the women he loved. Marie-Thérèse, Olga, Françoise, Dora Maar… all sacrificied at the altar of Picasso’s art. “For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats”. Said Picasso.

 

 

The Making of The Dream in Red by Pablo Matisse

Here is work in progress on my painting “The Dream in Red” after Picasso’s Le Reve and Matisse’s Harmony in Red. With so much red it seems hard to believe that the characters and decoration don’t get lost in it. But Matisse was a master of balancing color and pattern. Picasso’s dream girl is not easily lost. I started off with skin tone similar to The Pink Nude and then realized I had to tone it down. I relied on a dark outline where prudent to make any necessary elements pop. – Pablo Matisse

Harmony in Red by Matisse

Harmony in Red, 1908
Matisse
Oil on canvas
180 x 220 cm (The Hermitage, St. Petersburg)

 

The painting Russians call “The red room” is considered by many to be Matisse’s crowning achievement. When introduced in 1908 such a quantity of red had never been seen in European painting before. It features a maid putting fruit on a table in a room draped in red wallpaper. The color and patterns on the decorative tablecloth and the wallpaper are the same, flattening the picture plane. The view outside the window looks like a painting hung on the wall of the same room and hints at an array of organic patterns and serpentine plant forms outside that share the interior’s theme.

 

This “decorative panel” was intended for the dining room in the Moscow mansion of the famous Russian collector Sergey Shchukin. Eventually prerevolutionary art collections that include works by Picasso and Matisse were shut down by Stalin in 1948 as ideologically suspect. The painting emerged from Moscow cellars only after Stalin’s death.

The painting was not always red. Originally named “Harmony in Blue” Matisse painted over it to intensify the feeling of flatness. He was pushing the boundaries of the norm and advancing the avant garde. (The old man was a “bad-ass”) as the kids would say.

It’s been suggested that the dining-room is really a view of the artist inside his studio and that the maid is an alter ego of Matisse himself arranging the table in the same manner that the painter arranges a canvas. Now, if Matisse wore his hair in a bun I would say it was an uncanny likeness. But frankly, I’m not seeing it.