Matisse Picasso Study Day: Creating and Destroying Histories
22nd June 2002
The rise of the reputations and prices of Matisse and Picasso were made possible by the development of new ways of marketing art. In his talk, Andrew Brighton asks to what extent the character of their work formed by the political economy of their reputations.
Watch the Matisse Picasso Study Day sessions on Tate Channel
Session 1: Matisse, Picasso and Marketing the Modern
Speaker: Andrew Brighton, Senior Curator: Public Events, Tate Modern
The rise of the reputations and prices of Matisse and Picasso were made possible by the development of new ways of marketing art. In his talk, Andrew Brighton asks to what extent the character of their work formed by the political economy of their reputations.
Session 2: Matisse, Picasso and Exhibition Making
Speaker: Sarah Wilson, Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art
In the light of two very different exhibitions - the Royal Academy's Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968 (26 January -19 April 2002) and Tate Modern's Matisse Picasso (11 May - 18 August 2002), Sarah Wilson, curator of the former, discusses the relationship between exhibition history and the fictional recreation of artists' personae and influence.
Further Reading
- Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things, Tate 2004, especially Alexandra Parigoris, 'The Road to Damascus'
- Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, Yale 2000, specially 'Sculpture as Object: Brancusi'.
Session 3: A Fascination with 'Otherness'
Speaker: Niru Ratnam, Lecturer in Art History at The Open University
Both Picasso and Matisse drew upon African art early on in their careers, arguably in order to break, or continue in their break from, conventional western visual languages. Niru Ratnam examines the idea of the cultural 'other', how it has been constructed and how it persists in contemporary art.
Session 4: Matisse and Picasso: Painting the Studio
Speaker: Mike Belshaw, Doncaster College
Mike Belshaw focuses on Matisse and Picasso's studios, specifically their paintings of studios. He discusses the effects of paintings within paintings in such works and the extent to which the spectator's view can also be the artist's.
Session 5: Matisse's Music
Speaker: Chris Riding, artist and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Keele.
Chris Riding considers focus Matisse’s paintings 'The Music Lesson' (1917) and 'The Piano Lesson' (1916) in relation to the formalist theories of Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg.
Further Reading
- G.Perry 'The expanding field: Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series' in J. Gaiger, ed, Frameworks for Modern Art, Yale UP/OU, 2004.
- J.Blocker, Where is Ana Mendieta, Duke University Press, 1999.
Session 6: Gender, Matisse and the Fauves
Speaker: Gill Perry, Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University
Gill Perry explores the relationship between the work of Matisse and the Fauve avant-garde, and that of several women artists working and exhibiting on the fringes of the movement. She focuses on issues of spectatorship and ideas of avant-gardism, and goes on to consider the role of gender in both contemporary and modern perceptions of Fauve practice.