An art history lecture does not usually group together Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Constantin Brancusi ((1876-1957), yet around the turn of the century the painter and sculptor should be considered within the ideas of the Parisian avant-garde—simplification, the move away from pictorial narrative, and an exploration of concepts. Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907) and Brancusi’s marble Sleeping Muse I (1909-1910) experiment with a subjective experience of the human figure, which we read as gendered female, as memory, dream or inspiration rather than as optical representation of the model.
Matisse’s nude demonstrates his concurrent interest in Africa as a source of inspiration and relates to the development of the Fauve art movement, with which he is associated. This movement gained its name at the Salon de l’Automne in 1905, a modern exhibition with night hours illuminated by the latest in electrical lighting. The radical young “Fauves” or wild beasts, as a critic dubbed them, were grouped together in a small room. Their non-descriptive color and their messy brushwork stood out from like Édouard Vuillard’s Music (1905), celebrated for its inspiration to reverie, or Henri Rousseau, The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope, (c. 1905), with its primitive and imaginative style. Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra not only demonstrates the non-descriptive use of color by Matisse, but also his fascination with and appropriation of African sources.
A corner of the Brancusi Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Constantin Brancusi briefly studied with Auguste Rodin, yet Sleeping Muse I and the Kiss (1916) demonstrate differences with the French teacher and its most noted avant-garde sculptor at the turn of the century. Brancusi’s sculptures move toward extreme abstraction yet retain their origins in nature or the figure. His ideas of how his sculpture should be encountered by the viewer in situ or through photographs relate to the markets for curios, the idea of the ensemble and an interrelationship between different art forms.