Matisse’s Shockingly Subversive work
Matisse - Le Bonheur de Vivre
From the Weekend Edition of the Wall Street Journal: A Modern Masterpiece
(view a high resolution photo of the painting)
But if his technical procedure was like that of the Renaissance masters, the result was something like the opposite. This nearly 6-by-8-foot canvas was so untraditional — and so subversive — that it effectively challenged the whole notion of what a masterpiece is. Instead of being made with the kind of masterly skill and evident craftsmanship expected of such a large depiction of figures in a landscape, Matisse’s painting was rendered with an aggressive looseness and primitive simplicity that undermined both the grand tradition of pastoral painting and the deeply entrenched notion that art should imitate nature. With its sinuous, undulating forms and brilliant colors, “Le Bonheur de vivre” was understood to be a deliberate challenge to everything that had come before it — the real beginning of 20th-century art. Its chromatic excess and rhythmic intensity shocked the people who first saw it, much as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” would outrage its audience a few years later.
Read the rest at WSJ.com
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