MASP

Henri Matisse studied at various art academies in Paris, but found his style beginning in 1895 together with a group of painters who became known as les fauves (“the wild beasts” in French), an initially disparaging term that first arose in a negative critical review of their work shown at the 1905 Salon d’Automne. Fauvist painting is characterized by everyday themes, the stylization and simplification of shapes, rupture from the classical perspective, the absence of gradation between hues, and the use of strident colors that do not correspond with reality. Unlike cubism, which explored each object from various points of view, the artist opted for a single, frontal perspective. The Plaster Torso is one of Matisse’s many depictions of nudes, odalisques and interior scenes. In this work the objects in the foreground dialogue with those in the background: the torso on the table has the same pose as the woman in the painting on the wall; the blue-and-white curtain lends continuity to the motif of the flower arrangement; the table, which confers a sense of depth to the setting, is opposed to the chair at the left. Thus, all the elements in the scene seem to fuse into a sinuous movement.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

---

By Luciano Migliaccio
Critics unanimously agree that the painting The Plaster Torso was done in 1919, possibly in Issy-les-Molineaux (Paris). It shows an indoor scene, with historical references to Chardin and, chiefly, to Cézanne’s Still Life with Plaster Statue. The picture contains several iconographic elements: flowers in a vase and on the blue panel hanging on the wall; the female nude represented by the plaster fragment on the table and by a drawing on the wall similar to sculptures made by Matisse himself; and, finally, the furniture. The formal dialogue between tridimensional objects in the foreground and the two-dimensional elements ultimately corresponds to the more complex dialogue established between the concepts of art and nature. According to Schneider, the female torso was modeled after a Hellenic sculpture; in fact, this torso bears similarities with Venus of Milo and other sculptures of that same period. It is known that, following the academic tradition of his time, Matisse copied ancient statues at the Louvre, and that in 1926 he advised his son, Jean, to study Greek figures which he viewed as “rich in form, full-bodied, compact, having cylinders for limbs.” However, although none of the best known Hellenic sculptures feature this body structure, save for Scopas Bacchantes, these types of torso were often created in art schools in the late 19th century. Camesasca remarks on various paintings and drawings containing copies of old plaster works by Van Gogh made at Fernand Cormon’s studio in Montmartre, in 1886-1887. Actually, this apparently ancient piece makes use of the figurative modalities of the contemporary avant-garde. As the author himself noted, Matisse seems to invite the viewer to draw a comparison between classic nude and the sculpture represented by the figure drawn on the wall in similar posture to the kneeling Venus by Doydalsas de Bitínia, known for its numerous copies in Rome. However, Pierre Matisse, the painter’s son, warned that in spite of its appearance, the torso is not from Antiquity, but a mold formed upon a live model the artist had bought. Thus the meaning of the dialogue between life and representation, painting and sculpture, becomes more complex. The relation between the flowers on the table and those on the tapestry represents a variation on the same theme. The characteristics of a stylized flower basket on fabric are similar to those of tridimensional flowers in a vase. Camesasca also noted the correspondence of Matisse’s old sculpture with Giorgio De Chirico’s painting in Incertude du Poète of 1913, while excluding the influence of this Italian artist on the French painter’s work. But, this denial should not be so categorical. In fact, in his metaphysical painting, De Chirico resorts to the juxtaposition of ancient and contemporary elements to create an atmosphere of defamiliarization and enigma. As an example, we could mention De Chirico’s Ariana, of 1916, whose posture with the raised arm, resembling the nude in the painting of the Masp Collection, was revisited by Matisse in The Blue Nude. However, the Classical quotation has differing meanings for the two painters. In De Chirico, it is the memory of an unreachable past laden with personal recollections – after all, the painter himself was born in Greece. In Matisse, on the contrary, the reference is part of a formal discourse on representation itself. The table on which Matisse placed the plaster ironically calls to mind the Cubist notion of space.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

---