The arabesque - an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in ancient Islamic art - and its ability to transfigure worlds is at the heart of a Matisse exhibition opening Thursday in the Italian capital.
The show at Scuderie del Quirinale museum will run through June 21, and includes some 100 works by one of the founders of the avant-garde alongside objects, textiles and other artifacts from ancient cultures and civilizations that influenced Matisse's art. Entitled 'Matisse. Arabesque' and co-produced by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo and MondoMostre at a cost of about two million euros, the exhibition features an exceptional selection of works on loan from key public and private collections around the world. "It took years of hard work," said curator Ester Coen of her show, which documents a fundamental process in the evolution of the French master's pictorial language. The arabesque is therefore understood as a thread running through the artist's work, generating lines, marks, colors, and a new kind of space, one that is both reminiscent of remote, exotic and magical places and a concrete rendering of emotions.
There is also the creation of a plastic space as Matisse freed his compositions from formal restraints, such as the need for perspective and realism. "Modern art is an invention, and begins with an impulse from the heart. By its very essence, therefore, it is closer to archaic and primitive art than to Renaissance art," Matisse said in 1952. The exhibition includes works ranging from Turkish ceramics to Moroccan materials and Japanese kimonos to document how the discovery of the cultures of central and northern Africa, China, Japan and the Middle East exterted their manifold influences on Matisse. ù Opposite delicate Japanese drawings in an unexpected juxtaposition is 'Prune Branch, Green Background' (1948) from the Pinacoteca Agnelli, which also loaned 'Ivy in Bloom' and 'Interior with Phonograph'. And while 'Portrait of Yvonne Landsberg' (1914, from the Philadelphia Museum and in Italy for the first time) shows the influence of a fascination with Africa prominent in Paris during his epoch, the masterpieces from the Pushkin and Hermitage museums highlight the esotericism of Islamic cultures. The arabesque appears in representations of the human figure and in Matisse's tree theme in all its variations, as well as in the famous 'Odalisques', all the way to 'Red Fish', a masterpiece that has returned to Italy after many years' absence.
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