Matisse's sculpture
type: CreativeWork
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/31074790
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320126550
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320126678
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320127062
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320129281
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320130599
about: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/320133106
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: ART--Sculpture & Installation
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: ART--Subjects & Themes--Human Figure
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: Photography, Erotic--Influence
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: ART--Individual Artists--Monographs
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: Female nude in art
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: ART--Subjects & Themes--Erotica
about: DefinedTerm
  alternate name: Sculpture, African--Influence
abstract: "In 1906, soon after Matisse acquired his first African sculpture, he began the first of his nudes based on erotic and ethnographic photographs. This reading of Matisse's early sculpture examines the artist's appropriations from two seemingly disparate visions of the body: commercial nude photography and African sculpture. Why would Matisse synthesize mechanically made traces of actual flesh with the hand-carved abstractions of Pende, Senufo, Baga, and Baule figural sculptures? In the twentieth century, halftone technology in France changed economics of photographic reproduction. The inexpensive illustrated revues where Matisse found substitutes for living models were full of plates, making the female body available for mass consumption as never before. One of the main appeals of African sculpture to Matisse and others was that it appeared as a productive antithesis to this; it represented an alternative experience and understanding of human sexuality. In this, Matisse's primitivism was as much a system of beliefs projected onto African sculptures and actual African bodies, as a series of visual and conceptual borrowings from them. To support this idea, the book uses primary materials from turn-of-the-century ethnography and comparative anthropology, popular erotica, and the visual culture of French colonialism. It draws connections between artistic debts and the ideological and historical forces informing them, and plots new study in a now-familiar story of early twentieth-century modernist primitivism. This book challenges an established convention about Matisse--a painter who sculpted merely as a "rest"--Proposing how the sculpture's play with period perceptions of race and gender is key to understanding the artist's fascinations with cultural and sexual origins"--
creator: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/310169152
language: eng
work example: https://id.rijksmuseum.nl/301217574

PropertyValue
property ID: NL-AmRIJ
value: 217574